Alfie Templeman: ‘Mellow moon feels like a comfort place’

If a string of singles, EPs and last year’s mini album Forever Isn’t Long Enough suggested Alfie Templeman is a prodigious talent, the Bedfordshire teenager’s debut long-player Mellow Moon more than confirms it.
Alfie TemplemanAlfie Templeman
Alfie Templeman

Now 19, the singer-songwriter and producer began releasing music in 2018, but he’s been playing instruments much longer. “I played cello because I quite liked playing Beethoven, I got really into his 6th Symphony when I was a kid, I guess that’s where I learnt music,” he says. “But then I was watching Rush and got really into the drumming of Neil Peart, so that’s what actually kicked it off fully.”

Borrowing his father’s guitars, Templeman also taught himself to play along to Frank Zappa. “I’d try and copy him and fail miserably,” he quips. Having “always written poetry as a kid”, he graduated to songwriting with friends on a laptop around the age of ten. “We made CDs of it and then I just kept doing that until I got better and better at it,” he says.

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Templeman’s greatest songwriting influence is Todd Rundgren, whose music he discovered via a friend at the age of 13. “I decided to listen to one of his early albums, Runt, and just got really into him, he became my favourite musician ever and I got all of his records.”

Finding himself in a “pretty dark place” sheltering during lockdown because of a long-standing lung condition, Templeman discovered writing the lyrics for Mellow Moon helped him make peace with himself. “When I’m in that low mood I always want to do something to get out of it,” he says. “Writing music and recording it was an escape for me, to keep my mind distracted. It definitely played a big part.”

Mental health became a loose theme for the album, Templeman says. “That comes up a lot in terms of the lyrical content and just what’s going on in the record.”

During the songwriting process, Justin Young from The Vaccines became a creative mentor. “He helped me figure out some lyrics and pace the wording,” Templeman says. “It’s nice experimenting with people as well. I did most of the record at home but I got the odd hand with songs now and then.”

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The album’s title derives from Templeman’s mental image of a ‘happy place’. “I realised there’s so much in your mind that’s undiscovered, the same way there’s so much of space that we have no clue about. It can seem like a massive galaxy of things,” he says. “So mellow moon feels like a comfort place, that’s always familiar that you can always see at night. It’s like a little safe haven in my own mind.”

Having racked up 120m streams of his songs, the singer’s next target is the charts. “It’s a crazy thing, it’s just numbers, but it’s a lot of people,” he says.

On June 4 he plays at Live At Leeds in Temple Newsam Park in Leeds. “I’m looking forward to that, I’ve wanted to do it for a while,” he says. Further dates in Yorkshire include Tramlines in Sheffield on July 23 and Bingley Weekender on August 6.

Mellow Moon is out today. alfietempleman.com

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