How Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker is becoming the hottest creative force in pop right now

From Lady Gaga to Miguel to Rihanna, some of today’s top stars are performing Parker’s songs or getting him to produce their tracks – and he says it was the band’s last album, Currents, that took him where he wanted to be

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Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, who says his most recent album has opened many doors for him in the pop world.

Published: 11:32am, 6 Sep 2016Updated: 11:31am, 6 Sep 2016

Long-haired, guitar-clutching frontman is a job at which Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker has excelled. Yet these days, the 30-year-old musician from Australia is spending more and more of his time in a different role: behind-the-scenes enabler for some of the world’s biggest pop stars.

In May, Mark Ronson (of Uptown Funk fame) posted a photo on Instagram showing Parker in a recording studio with Lady Gaga. The R&B singer Miguel recently recruited Parker to remix his song Waves and appear in the track’s video. And there among the sleek Top 40 hits on Rihanna’s latest, Anti, is her version of New Person, Same Old Mistakes, a spacey funk jam from Tame Impala’s most recent album, Currents.

“It’s kind of always been a secret fantasy of mine, the idea of writing a song and then not having to be the face of it,” Parker says. “To be the guy pulling the strings – it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Based in Perth, Tame Impala – who appeared live in Hong Kong in April this year – serve up trippy but catchy songs that have attracted a devoted following. And now Tame Impala’s leader is looking to flex his skills outside the group.

Parker isn’t the first dude from a rock band to move into songwriting and production. Before he helped set off the teen-pop explosion of the late 1990s, Max Martin played in a hair-metal group called It’s Alive. In the early 2000s, Tim Armstrong of the punk band Rancid began working with Pink.