WITH a top-ten debut album, props from the likes of Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr, and a series of US tours, Kettering’s Temples have come a long way from the songwriting studio project set up in 2012 by James Bagshaw and Tom Walmsley.

Speaking to The Guide as the band rehearses for their first UK tour in many months, Walmsley says they are excited to play in front of home audiences once more.

“Apart from a couple of summer festivals we haven’t really played much in the UK in the last six months, ” he admits.

“We have no idea what stage we are at in the UK – over the last 12 months we’ve played the US quite a lot.”

It was in the US they made contact with Lance Gordon and Mad Alchemy, who are going to pres- ent a Pink Floyd-style liquid light show to go along- side their heavily psychedelic songs.

“We’re going to refrain from any flying pigs just yet, ” laughs Walmsley.

“For us our live show had always been a bit of an afterthought, we were always focusing on what we were playing.

“We were always quite wary of light shows, but this is very authentic, a beautiful, organic process which looks so fantastic as an extension of what we are doing. It’s all done with oil, lenses and projec- tors.”

Temples grew out of psychedelic rock band The Moons, where Bagshaw and Walmsley previously played together.

They set up their own studio, recording ideas as they wrote them and building songs organically. “It was quite impulsive, ” says Walmsley.

“The songs weren’t ever demoed, we just recorded ideas on top of our first ideas.

“Getting things to sound a certain way often gave us ideas for new songs.

“There is an art to producing records. You can get lost in a record – and a huge part of the band’s make-up is not only the songs, but how they sound and how they come across.”

Listening to Sun Structures, they have achieved not only an authentic 1960s psychedelic atmosphere from the album’s opening sitar-like guitars and vocal harmonies, but married it with hooky cho- ruses and circular riffs that lodge themselves firmly in the brain.

At one point Walmsley admits the band had penned and recorded five songs before they even thought about playing live – requiring them to enlist drummer Samuel Toms and keyboard player Adam Smith to convert debut single Shelter Song into a stage entity.

“The whole of the first album was done back- wards I suppose, ” says Walmsley. “This living, breathing live band wasn’t even an aim of ours. We had this process of having the definitive article in the album, and then distilling it into a live show.”

Now they are looking forward to starting the process all over again.

“This UK tour feels like the last thing we want to do with this record, ” says Walmsley. “We have been back from the US for about two

Concorde 2, Madeira Drive, Brighton, Sunday, November 30