The Temper Trap: Five Artists That Got Me Into Music
Never to soon
Oh wreck less abandon
Like no one
Watching you
Last.fm were at the wonderful Liverpool Sound City last weekend and whilst we were there we were lucky enough to have a chat with Toby Dundas – drummer of acclaimed Australian act The Temper Trap. He revealed to us the five acts that got him into music as an impressionable teenager and then as a musician…
“I was around 13 when grunge was hitting so that was a big influence. ‘Siamese Dream’… when that came out, I dug it so much. I sat in my bedroom a lot and played it really loud. As a drummer I always loved Jimmy Chamberlin. They haven’t done so well over the years personally but it’s still an album I listen to a lot”
Last.fm listeners seem to agree with Toby – Siamese Dream is by far the fan favourite, scrobbled close to 9,000,000 times. Oceania, the band’s ninth album, is scheduled for a release on June 19th.
2. Radiohead
“My favourite band of all time. ‘OK Computer’ had a massive influence on me, as it did a lot of other people! I was 15 or 16 when it came out and again, it blew my mind. It’s one of the first albums I remember sitting there listening to on headphones and thinking how they are making their sounds, and that’s what got me into that side of things. Looking into beat making and more of the sonics rather than the playing of the music.”
Radiohead are the most scrobbled artist of all time on Last.fm, racking up an epic 335,235,299 scrobbles. Songs such as “Karma Police” and “Creep” continually boast over 15,000 unique listeners each every week.
Arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He's like a detuned radio
“My Dad would kill me if I didn’t say this… ‘The Songs Of Leonard Cohen’ is an album he used to play in the car all the time driving around Australia on family trips. When I was young I didn’t really appreciate it but it obviously sunk in, ‘cos I got to an age where I would go through his record collection and listen to that stuff. It really got me into lyrics and yeah, Leonard Cohen is definitely one of my favourite artists. When he started touring again I repaid my Dad by taking him to see him and that was a great moment.”
The legendary folk singer-songwriter released his twelfth studio album, Old Ideas, in January of this year. Scrobbled an impressive 689,393 times already, it is doing a steady job of moving Cohen towards 30,000,000 overall scrobbles. Toby’s childhood favourite The Songs of Leonard Cohen is his most scrobbled album, boasting 2,097,860 of them.
4. DJ Shadow (Endtroducing…)
“I started working one of my first jobs and most of the guys there were older, and one guy was always feeding me music and one of those things was DJ Shadow. Again, I’d never heard anything like that. Hearing the story of how he pieced it all together was really inspiring. But great tunes as well and it’s still an album I listen to a lot.”
A legendary album by a legendary artist, Endtroducing… has been scrobbled close to 7,000,000 times. Released in 1996, fans still scrobble the beats of “Midnight In A Perfect World” in big numbers, with the track being scrobbled by 2,777 unique listeners last week.
5. Goldie (Timeless)
“Listening to DJ Shadow led me onto stuff like this and I became a bit of a drum and bass kid for a few years. I don’t really follow the new artists much. I still listen to it a bit but mostly older stuff. I do like artists like Burial, however. But back in 1998-2002 all I was really listening to was drum and bass. So I would probably have to put Goldie’s album Timeless in there to complete my top 5.”
The English DJ’s album Timeless is his most popular album by some way, scrobbled 282,752 times. Despite not releasing an album since 2009′s Memoirs Of An Afterlife, Goldie is nearing 1,000,000 scrobbles.
The Temper Trap‘s new self-titled album was released this week.
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