"In 2017 I had a breakdown. I dealt with that breakdown by buying as much music from 2016 as I possibly could. As a result, I now own over 600 albums that came out in 2016 and I’m convinced it’s the greatest year for music of all time,” proclaims comedian James Acaster at the beginning of his Perfect Sounds podcast. The journey he describes in that introduction has now somehow led him into a new career as a musician. Well, not quite, that career was already there, just on hold.

“My first comedy gig was when I was 21,” he tells me, “and I was still in bands at that point.” Bands with names such as The Wow! Scenario and Capri-Sun Quartet. “My main aim was to be a musician, a drummer,” he confides. “But I would do stand-up gigs once every four months. Not as a serious thing, it was as someone might do a skydive. Like, this is a thrill and that’s it. And then, when the band stopped, it was my way of going solo because I was a drummer so I was like, ‘I don’t feel I can do that on my own.’ So, I just started doing comedy as a placeholder, it wasn’t meant to be my job.”

Not only did it become his job, but Acaster established himself as one of the UK’s most irreverent and loved comics, with two award-winning podcasts (his Off Menu food-and-comedy podcast with Ed Gamble is regularly near the top of the UK podcast charts), a three-part Netflix stand-up special and a number of Sunday Times best-selling books to his name. Then, in February 2020 he found himself recording a comedy pilot for Louis Theroux’s production company. The premise was simple: he was giving up comedy for music, hiring a van to pick up his drum kit (barely touched for 12 years) and a fluorescent alligator suit that he had left round a friend’s house before heading to London to record some drum tracks. Disgusted with his sloppy playing he would then pay Seb Rochford (much-loved London-based jazz drummer) to record more accomplished drumming over the top. The pilot was never finished because of the pandemic, but Acaster and Rochford did record their drum tracks; so with lockdown in place, a new plan was formed.

“I was listening to [the drum tracks] a lot, and enjoying listening to them, in a really self-satisfying way, just listening to my drums and Seb Rochford’s drums together. It was like a teenage dream come true – Seb is my favourite drummer in the world. So, then I was like, ‘Well, I want some bass on this, so I’ll contact Joana Gomila, who’s one of my favourite musicians. She’s a jazz bassist, so I sent her these drum beats and said, ‘just put lots of standard double bass on it, improvise whatever you want and I’ll cut it up and I’ll make skeletons of songs out of it.’ About four weeks later she got back to me going, ‘I didn’t feel like doing bass, I’m just not in that zone at the minute, so myself and Laia Vallès,’ who she was in lockdown with, ‘just spent a weekend improvising synths and vocals over it. So, use it if you want, but no hard feelings if you don’t.’ That set the precedent for how it was going to be, that I could ask people to do a specific thing, but they would just do whatever was in their headspace and send it back.”

Further collaborators were contacted, 40 in total, with many familiar to fans of Perfect Sounds or its accompanying book, such as US-based sitarist Ami Dang, multi-instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos (whose music often explores her Puerto Rican-Cuban heritage), members of experimental pop veterans Deerhoof and Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic. “He’s just amazing. He deserves to be known by everyone,” says Acaster about Bandimic. “He can rap over anything. You give him the hardest, craziest beat that’s in any time signature, and he can just figure it out.” Acaster named the project Temps, a reference to the ‘temporary worker’ status of the collaborators, and the resultant album – referencing the TV pilot’s alligator – Party Gator Purgatory. Musically, the album is kaleidoscopic, anchored by drums, with a no-holds-barred approach to instrumentation. Vocally, it’s split between rapped verses by the likes of Bandimic, Open Mike Eagle and Yoni Wolf – the latter two hugely influential American rappers – and more melodic hooks by Rubinos, confessional pop singer Shamir and conscious folk artist Babar Luck. It’s a style that Acaster jokingly describes as ‘DIY Gorillaz’.

One of the things that I loved about Perfect Sounds – which saw Acaster and a fellow comedian dissect an album from 2016 each episode – is the breadth of the albums discussed, taking in everything from Beyoncé, Radiohead and Laura Mvula to Japanese folk singer Ichiko Aoba, Brazilian samba-punk trio Metá-Metá and Tunisian producer and DJ Ghoula. It was through that project that he discovered Joana Gomila. “She did this amazing album in 2016 called Folk Souvenir,” he remembers. “The whole album starts with a very like almost out-of-tune guitar, really trashy guitar, but it’s a folk album, it’s taking Catalan music, and these traditional songs, and messing around with them in a way that you’re probably not fully supposed to, doing freeform jazz and improvisation over them and mixing in recordings from ethnomusicologists, as well as recordings that she had made growing up of her grandmother’s singing. It becomes this document of Catalan music, and her personal relationship with that music.” 

I ask Acaster when he first got into music outside of the usual Western stranglehold. “When I was 17,” he enthuses. “I got into Toumani Diabaté. I really got into Boulevard de l’Indépendance [credited to Toumani’s Symmetric Orchestra] a lot. I love the group vocals on it and the kora all the way through. That’d go on every mixtape I made people… But it was when I did the 2016 project that I was really trying to listen to as many albums from one year as possible that I discovered a lot more stuff from around the world. And there were many exciting things that were getting overlooked, I think.”

It’s this fan boy enthusiasm for music that made Perfect Sounds such a good podcast and book and that translates to Temps, with Acaster coming over all rhapsodic when he thinks about the heavy involvement of Deerhoof’s John Dieterich, Seb Rochford and Yoni Wolf, in particular, on the album. “I was into them when I was a teenager, and it feels surreal. Especially when you think ‘not only have I made music with all three of them, but there’re songs that all three of them are on.’ I’ve put all three of them on a song together, and that’s just… You just feel happy. It’s a very good feeling.”

Party Gator Purgatory is out now on Bella Union. Listen here.

This article originally appeared in the June 2023 (#188) issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today.