Damon Wilson of the Temperance Movement (INTERVIEW)

There are some young artists you hear and you shake your head and wonder about the future of rock & roll. But then you hear the Temperance Movement and you know it’s actually in safe hands after all. Having already broke in the UK and Europe with their debut EP Pride, followed by a full-length album composed of the EP and other new songs, the Temperance Movement are finally starting to perk up the ears of music fans on American soil.

Formed in the UK in 2011, what captures you first is the scratchy vocals of singer Phil Campbell and how much heart and soul he puts into the lyrics he has written. Then that dual guitar sound rises up via Luke Potashnick and Paul Sayer. Nick Fyffe sneaks in with some smooth bass lines and before you can blink an eye, drummer Damon Wilson has put the lid on the pot and it’s starting to boil: “Only Friend,” “Take It Back,” “Lovers & Fighters” and “Pride” stomp with a unifying energy that sometimes gets lost in other bands with too many guitar solos and frontmen who hog the spotlight.

Opening for the Rolling Stones in Orlando a few weeks ago on June 12, “There was a definite moment when everything clicked into place and the crowd were with us,” they wrote in their tour diary. Now as more and more Americans discover the Temperance Movement, their star will continue to rise, their mixture of southern rock/British blues inveigling listeners who want more than what radio is giving them. And although they have a new record sitting in the till, they are allowing their eponymous debut to marinate a bit more on the grill for those fans getting their first dose of what the future of rock & roll can look like.

“We can make up a whole load of stuff,” drummer Damon Wilson whispers conspiratorially when I mention we don’t know much about him. “It’ll be our secret.” Until, that is, it hits the headlines. “Yeah, I didn’t think that through, did I,” he confesses with a big laugh. Although we had planned a conversation with Campbell, it is Wilson on the other end of the line, apologizing for his bandmate’s absence due to unexpected circumstances and asking if he’d make for a good substitute, which turned out to be the understatement of the day. With stories to tell and a strong love for the music he is making with the Temperance Movement, who could have asked for a more entertaining, informative and more fun substitute than Damon Wilson.

You guys just opened for the Rolling Stones in Orlando a few days ago. But that wasn’t really your first time. How was this time different?

You know what, it wasn’t that different except for the fact that this time when we hung out with the Stones we kind of got a bit more time and we got to hang with them kind of as a group. The first time we met, we met up with Mick and spent some time in his dressing room and that was lovely. But this time they were kind of all in Keith’s dressing room when we went and said hi. There was just a really good energy there. I think they are in a really happy place at the moment. So it was really nice to get that from them and then going out on stage and trying to warm up seventy thousand people (laughs).

For you as a drummer, what was it like talking with Charlie Watts?

It was great. I’ve been kind of doing my Stones research recently and going back and looking at the Exile On Main Street documentary and reading Keith’s book. It was great to kind of go, “So Charlie,” and just ask him questions direct about the recording of that record and what it was like and the differences it was working in the basement in France to working at Olympic or any of the places that they recorded. And he’s got a different take on it, which is really cool. Some of it he can remember and some of it he can’t. Some of it I kind of knew more than he did (laughs), because you know, I went to look for it and he probably hasn’t bothered to think about it in years. It was great. He’s just a gentleman. I got him at a really good time and he had lots to say, lots to share. And he’s not just a drummer, he’s interested in lots of stuff.

Did you get to do the fanboy thing and take a picture with him?

You know what, I didn’t (laughs). But apart from that, I just wanted to concentrate on having time with him. I don’t know, I’m not really sure he’s the guy I want to kind of ask to take a selfie with (laughs). But I just wanted to talk with him. Next time, I’ll get a selfie (laughs).

What is it really like opening for a band of this magnitude, especially since they have been such a big influence on the Temperance Movement? Do you feel like you have to go bigger in these circumstances or do you stick to what you do?

That’s a cool question. I guess what we try to do, if anything, is just calm the whole thing down. We don’t want to do a show that’s too rushed or too frantic or is trying too hard because we are aware of how big the moment is for ourselves. And we’re not there for ourselves, really. We’re there for them. They’ve hired us to warm up the crowd and we can be there and play for a lot of people but really we’re not there to steal the show. We just want to play some great music and then enjoy the Stones. Probably the best part of opening for the Stones is that you get to see the Stones and not pay for a ticket (laughs). But apart from that, they’re just brilliant. So I think, yeah, we don’t really approach it that differently, if I’m really honest. The music is the music. It’s a great sounding stage. The crew are fantastic so it’s an excellent gig. It’s brilliantly run and everyone’s really polite and friendly.

When you have crowds like that, cause you’ve played to huge crowds before at festivals, what is the hardest thing about connecting with so many people? Do you even try?

Well, the first thing you got to do is connect with each other. So we make sure that we, no matter how big the stage is, we set up real close to each other cause we want it to feel intimate for ourselves. It’s not going to be intimate at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando but you try by standing up nice and close, you try by making sure that that hour before the show you spend plenty of time together, talk through the music, and then just enjoy it. You know, we want people to have fun. That’s our main rule, no matter if we’re playing to fifteen people in a club or a two-thousand seater or seventy thousand. It’s not that different. If you’re having fun, people will know it and they’ll feel it. We’ve been lucky. We’ve done a lot of shows lately of all sorts of size and when the band’s in a good groove we can kind of trust the people are going to pick up on the fact that we’re having fun.

One of the really good things that I learned from doing stuff with Ray Davies, he still has this ethic, and I think the Stones have it as well, that people paid good money to come and see you so you need to give them that great Friday night out that they paid for, you know what I mean. It’s not a serious thing, this is fun and people pay good money to have fun so you just got to deliver that. That’s all there is to it. It’s pretty simple, really.

You were in Ray’s band for around five years. How is he as a band leader?

Yeah, I was with him for the last five years, five or six years, and he’s great. He’s got a vision and he’s pretty meticulous in rehearsals but when you do a show, he’s a crowd pleaser. He wants to turn the crowd on and he wants people to get a great night out and he’ll look at the set and go, “Look, people don’t want to hear the B-side on my solo album. They want to hear ‘Lola.’ They want the hits, they want me to give them what they want.” He’ll tweak it a bit but someone like that has been a big influence on the way we approach shows. It’s fun, it’s meant to put a smile on people’s faces and get them dancing.

Phil has such a unique voice and the band gels so perfectly with his voice. It’s not like there are two different entities onstage, the singer and the band. For you guys, where do you think the real chemistry lies within your band?

Okay, I haven’t told anyone this secret and you’re going to be the first journalist to hear this. The real answer is that I have no idea (laughs). You know what I think it is? I think if you knew how to do this with musicians and put musicians together to make something special, then you would have something that no one else had in the music industry before. How would you go about putting the Rolling Stones together? How would you put The Beatles together? I don’t know but I do know that you’ve got to start with the desire to make something special together. And I think you need something slightly unusual. So in our band, there’s one or two of us that really, maybe on paper, don’t belong in the band musically, but because of that it’s made it special. There’s a pretty varied background in our band.

So all that mixes together

And you get the Temperance Movement. We got together really to honor great American music. That’s why we got together. And we got together so that we could then, hopefully one day, go to America and play that music. So touring America for us is brilliant. It’s what we started this band to do. All of the music that you hear in our stuff, it’s all stolen from your country (laughs). It’s all there. So how does it work? I don’t know. I begged Phil to let me play drums with him about five years ago when I saw him as a solo artist and he was like, well, he wasn’t too impressed (laughs). He had no idea who I was, if I was stalking him, but he’s a great singer and that desire was there and I know Luke really wanted to do something with him, as did Paul, and Nick we all knew. We knew from the first time we played that it was going to be great. We just had no idea that anyone else would think it’s great. We just assumed that it would just be the five of us that would be in on this little secret. And that was going to be fine.

This record has been out a while. Have you started working on new music?

Yeah, there is a new album being mixed at the moment. We’re really, really happy with it. It’s a progression.

How so? What are you hearing?

The first album was an accident, if I’m really honest. The first album was made when we were just friends doing a gig in a local bar in London once a month. And we just suggested to each other one day, “Why don’t we book some time in the studio.” And four days was all we could find and afford. So we said, “Oh, let’s go, let’s go and do some recording.” And eighteen songs later, we had that album. I mean, we looked back at it and went, “Could this be an album? Could we put out an EP? What could this be?” There was no agenda whatsoever. Didn’t want to please anyone. Had no idea what we really were doing apart from recording music.

The second album, we now have two record companies, a manager, a publisher, we have fans. There’s a completely different expectation and we wanted to bring it a little bit more up to date so we pushed ourselves a bit more.

Are the lyrics still meaningful and focused or are you having more fun with them?

We have fun with every song but yeah, there is a lot of depth there and Phil is almost wholly responsible for that. He writes almost all the lyrics and I think he’s a brilliant lyricist. There is definitely an element of what we’ve been up to in the last two years, I guess, of just being on the road and missing family and missing out on home life and then coming home to home life and how tough that can be, then going away again. There is an element of that. There is definitely some depth.

Any clue when that’s going to come out?

I have no idea. The thing is, there are still so many people in America that haven’t caught on to us and we’ve been really lucky a lot of people have started playing “Take It Back” on the radio. I think we owe it to people to kind of pursue a little bit more of this first album and introduce that a little more. There’s plenty of time. We’re okay with that. We’ll introduce the second record real soon. We’re already talking about when we can get into the studio and record the next one (laughs). That’s a bit greedy, isn’t it. You know, we want to have fun and we want to do what pleases us and I think being creative is really, really key for us. If we get a bit stale, we’re not going to have longevity. I can’t wait for you to hear the new record. If you loved the first one, the second one is a terrific follow-up.

You’re from Australia. What was it like growing up there?

I’m from Sydney and I can tell you it was hot. I can tell you it’s a dangerous place. There are a lot of things that can bite you and eat you and sting you. So you’re kind of in a constant state of being overheated and scared for your life. Yeah, heat and fear (laughs). It’s a brilliant place to grow up. It’s outdoors, people are friendly, people are laid back. It’s real similar to the South in America. We love bar-b-que. Men are men (laughs) and not afraid to express that. Yeah, it’s a great place to grow up. But I always felt a little bit like England was my home. I don’t know why that is but I just gravitated towards English music and TV and cinema and all things cultural that were English. When I landed in London, a light went off in my head: This feels like I belong here.

Did you come from a musical family?

You know what, my grandfather played piano and my other grandfather, on my mother’s side, was heavily into theatre. So that whole kind of performance thing and music thing has always run pretty deep.

When did you start playing drums?

I started when I was about thirteen and strangely enough, I wanted to be like my big brother and play guitar but he was the guitar player in the family and five years older than me. I distinctly remember trying to pluck my way through “Lola” on the acoustic guitar one day and my big brother kind of came in and said, “We bought you a drum kit. You’re the drummer of this band and we’ve got gigs in six months’ time and you better learn to play the drums or we’ll beat you up.” (laughs) So I had a gig before I could play drums, which was kind of cool. But I never got to learn how to play “Lola” on guitar.

Who inspires you or impresses you on drums?

Well, it’s a massive list and obviously Charlie is brilliant. I love a drummer called Jim Keltner, who has played with pretty much everyone. Ringo, Bonzo. I guess Levon Helm. Anyone that can really play a song, I think, and that’s how I started really. I kind of sat behind a drum kit for the first time and with headphones on and playing to songs. And that’s all I did really. I used to copy other drummers and for some reason the things that drummers did for songs seemed to speak to me for some reason. It wasn’t the drum solos or the bombastic drum fills. It was just the way the song felt cause the drummer did something. That was always kind of my point of reference, I guess.

When the Temperance Movement came together, what do you think was your biggest break?

I guess when we started getting a little bit of radio play and the band went from playing in front of forty friends in a local pub to playing for seven or eight hundred people in about ten months. And that night, I mean, that night where we sold out a place in London called Koko, we were about to go onstage and our manager came and said, “Listen, Jimmy Page is here and he’d really like to meet you before you go onstage.” That was kind of the best and worst thing he could have said all at the same time because you really don’t want to have to go onstage knowing that Jimmy Page is in the audience (laughs). You’d rather not know.

But I remember looking up and he was in like a balcony seat right above the stage and he stayed the whole night and came and hung with us afterwards. When you get to talk to someone like that after the show, someone that you never imagined that you would meet, and then you’re standing there just talking about guitars and songs and touring and life with someone like Jimmy, who’s a lovely guy, a super lovely guy, it felt like the whole thing had come full circle, I think, for us. And we felt like a door had been opened somehow. That’s the biggest break maybe. Probably opening for the Stones was a bigger break but you’re going to need those bits of luck, cause this is a luck business, it really is. We don’t pretend to think that we invented the wheel. We just work hard and hopefully through that hard work, luck will come.

When you first got hit with the rock & roll bug, and you were listening to all this great music, what hit you first – the sound, the lyrics or the drums?

I knew that rock & roll was cool and I knew it was something I wanted to know more about but I think the thing I distinctly remember was listening to Led Zeppelin’s Song Remains The Same, which is the double live album, and I remember all of a sudden a switch going off and I remember thinking I could really hear each person playing their instrument. And I remember thinking that was really cool, that music was such a unified thing and yet it was individual people doing their own thing inside that. My ears really just started tingling from that point on really. Was it the sound? I guess. You could kind of hear people expressing themselves, which spoke to me.

What is the craziest thing you have ever done onstage?

Oh my God, I wore a wedding dress once for a gig. I don’t know why I did that. It wasn’t with the Temperance Movement. I want to say that it was at a wedding but it wasn’t the bride’s gown. Don’t worry about that (laughs). I just remember sitting in a little dressing room and the whole thing needed a bit of livening up and then someone, I think we had a backing singer, and she was like, “Oh, I’m not sure if I should wear this.” And I said, “If you don’t wear it, I will.” And it kind of started there. But I think that could be the craziest thing I’ve done onstage, which is not actually that crazy if you think about it. But I didn’t have the right footwear on so it didn’t look that great. And I certainly didn’t have the matching bag (laughs)

What is your all-time favorite album and what makes it so special to you?

No, no, no, that’s not fair. That’s tough, really tough. But my favorite all-time record, if I had to choose, it would probably be Revolver. I think that’s a perfect record. It’s a good record and having said that, my first memories of really listening to music was Song Remains The Same and Dark Side Of The Moon. You know what, I’m going to say Song Remains The Same. That was the first so that will always have a special place, even though when I told that to Jimmy he was like, “We didn’t really like that recording. We didn’t play a very good set that night so I’m a bit disappointed that you like that.”

He said that?

Yeah, yeah, he said, “I guess if you like it but we didn’t play a very good show that night and actually if you really want to hear us at our best listen to How The West Was Won.  And that is a hell of a live record but you like what you like.”

Do you think the movie influenced you liking that so much?

I didn’t see the movie till years later and it’s a terrible movie (laughs). It is. It’s just awful. What is there to like about it? It’s weird and all the good bits of the music are not in the film.

Who was the first real rock star you ever met?

Wow, probably James Brown. I was asked to put a band together for an awards show called the UK Music Hall Of Fame and we were going to play for a singer called Joss Stone and another singer, Patti LaBelle. I put a band together and we had all this stuff lined up and were going to do a tribute to Dusty Springfield and it was all looking good and then a week before the show we got the call saying, “Look, there’s going to be all sorts of people there. Prince is going to be presenting James Brown with a Lifetime Achievement Award.” And we were like, wow, that’s great, he’s going to be in the building. And then we get another call four days out saying, “Would you play a song with James Brown? Would you play ‘I Feel Good’ with him?” I was like, uh, yeah (laughs).

I was kind of expecting it not to happen cause he always has his band with him. He doesn’t come to rehearsals but we rehearsed up this song cause I was kind of in charge of putting the whole thing together and I had to sing the song while playing drums. So we rehearse up this song and day of the show turns up, we’re soundchecking and James Brown walks into the building. I wander over and introduce myself to him and say, “Mr Brown, would you like to come and soundcheck this song with us?” And he goes, “Well, I’ll see what you sound like first.”

So I have to go back up to the kit and count the band in and then sing “I Feel Good” as I’m playing drums in front of James Brown, which is unbelievably humiliating for a skinny white boy from Sydney (laughs). It’s just the most bizarre, humiliating moment of my life. But I kind of thought, you know what, fuck it, he’s probably not going to like it. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Let’s just try and give him a great version of his song. So I’m playing and singing and then out of the corner of my eye at the end of the first verse, I see this little guy come shuffling onto the stage and dancing and it’s him and he grabbed the mic and took over and we finished the song with him singing. He was really happy and said, “It sounds great, man.” We rehearsed a bit and then we did the show live that night with him and it was pretty fucking bizarre (laughs). And the last thing he said to me when he came off stage, he said, “Man, you got to keep this band together. You got to get on the road with this band. Keep it tight, get a bus and go on the road. Promise me you’re going to do that.” And I said, yeah, I promise I’ll go on the road with this band in a bus (laughs).

Do you remember what year this was?

Yeah, this is about six months before he died, so this would have been 2006. It’s a ridiculous story though. I still can’t believe it happened.

What does the Temperance Movement have coming up for the summer?

Well, we’re doing a whole bunch of festivals in July in Canada and in the States. We’re going to Sweden. We’re doing the Telluride Festival in Colorado. And then we go up to Canada doing Fredrock in Fredericton, the Ottawa Blues Festival, opening for Deep Purple at Molson Amphitheatre in Toronto. Then we’re back in the UK doing a festival with Gregg Allman, and then we’re back out in October and all those dates are yet to be kind of firmed up.

NOTE: It was just announced that they will be playing the Voodoo Music Experience in New Orleans on November 1.