Tame Impala kickstart the Australian psychedelic explosion It was Tame Impala who kicked the gates open. Before they and their meaty, glam-inspired Elephant jam exploded across the US and the UK in 2012, no one paid much attention to Australian psychedelia and garage rock. Now it seems as if you can't walk down Brisbane's Fortitude Valley or St Kilda in Melbourne or Surry Hills in Sydney on a Saturday night without stumbling across half a dozen bands playing warped-out, deliciously fuzzy, hazy stoner grooves - be they experimental, commercial, reverential, shoegazing. And they're leaving Australia, too, touring and releasing to plaudits in Europe and America. It wasn't like it didn't exist before. Psych rock has long had a foothold in Australia, dating right back to psych pioneers Coloured Balls in the early 1970s and their 15-minute jams. Australian bands have never been as concerned with fashion as their American and British counterparts - the distance between cities, and lack of attention paid to homegrown talent sees to that. Oh, and the cultural cringe: for decades, bands didn't believe they could be as good as those from abroad. So they just got on with it, and played what they liked. "Maybe it's OK for psychedelic music to come back into the spectrum," says Nic Warnock, founder of RIP Society Records, "because we're far enough away from that awful Brian Jonestown Massacre-inspired revivalism that happened eight years ago. All those bands with their poseury floral shirts, bowl haircuts and pointy shoes - cool, smug, useless. I hated them. Warnock has a point. As well as running a label, he fronts two of Australia's most vital underground rock bands: Bed Wettin" Bad Boys with their insolent Replacements-style working-class rock; and the subversive, demented post-Royal Trux duo Ruined Fortune, playing raw rock'n"roll. "Angie [co-singer in Ruined Fortune] and I both love the tradition of rock'n"roll in its rawest form," he says. "I know that in Brisbane, especially, rock'n"roll is considered a daggy thing to be into - you're supposed to be progressive and strange and subversive - but I can't help it. I'm a rock dog. But we want to do more with rock'n"roll than just go through the motions, or use someone else's standards of good. We want to push ourselves a little further, do something a little stranger - and a lot of that is the psychedelic influence. In Australia, deep down, rock bands have always known how to rock. It's just that before the release of Tame Impala's Lonerism in 2012 - and the success of fellow travellers such as Brisbane's John Steel Singers, Blank Realm and the Pitchfork-championed Scott & Charlene's Wedding - folk abroad didn't pay them much heed. Ruined Fortune, one of Australia's most vital underground rock bands. "Psychedelic pop is what we strive for," says Tim Morrissey of John Steel Singers. It's a weird mixture of bands: Todd Rundgren, Coloured Balls ... where do Gong fit into this? Daevid Allen is Australian, so I feel like I want to claim him for this music. There does seem to be more upbeat pop music, here in Brisbane especially. "I don't know if it's the weather, but we do get referred to as "summery" an awful lot." The John Steel Singers - with their buoyant krautrock-influenced groove (described in the Guardian as "sun-dappled psychedelia") - Blank Realm and Tame Impala are the tip of the iceberg. So long as your definition of psychedelia is not limited to music that sounds like a slavish recreation of 1967, there's Brisbane's cool, retro electronic duo Primitive Motion, the brilliantly relentless and single-minded Fabulous Diamonds, the sparkle and gem of interrelated post-shoegazing (and post-psychedelia) Sydney bands Songs and Bushwalking. "Psych is Jefferson Airplane, all those 60s bands," says Ela Stiles, bass player with Songs and Bushwalking. The guitar sound is a big part for me - long jams and repetitive bass lines, some reverb, some intense guitar sounds and delay. John Steel Singers from Brisbane. Stiles recently released her first solo record, Ela Stiles, a two-sided affair. The first half is full of beautiful short a cappella songs that evoke memories of 60s folk singers like Shirley Collins, while the second half (Drone Transitions) is just one song that lasts 10 minutes and is as trippy and psych as anything even Sonic Boom has produced. "I take influence from singers like Grace Slick," she says. Golden Dawn, United States of America, Susan Christie ... some might call it folk, but it's psych to me. Then there are the younger bands such as Martyr Privates who have just released their self-titled debut album (promoted as a cross between Big Star and Spacemen 3). There's psychedelic punk label Cool Death Records and Brisbane's laidback underground venue (and cassette label) Real Bad Music, the fabulous post-shoegaze of Melbourne pioneers the all-female Beaches, the trippy Greg Boring with their weird and wonderful array of homemade instruments, the reverential psych pop Dreamtime, Krakatau with their Soft Machine vibe, Naked on the Vague, Scraps, the highly prolific King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Muura, xNOBBQx and many, many more. It's an embarrassment of riches, just waiting to be discovered. Whatever the reason, wherever the focus, the languid, trippy, slacker psyche once so beloved of 60s bands Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd currently holds sway in 2014 Australia. Maybe it is the relative isolation of the country and its principal cities: away from the harsh glare and demands of fashion, independently minded rock bands are free to develop at their own pace. A similar phenomenon happened in Seattle in the late 80s, culminating in grunge, and in Detroit in the mid-90s, resulting in the rise of the White Stripes. And the same names keep reccurring as cited influences: Blue Cheer, the Sonics, the Jesus and Mary Chain. It's part of a pattern that also incorporates the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, says Guy Blackman, founder of the Chapter Music label: "Shoegaze came out of that mid- to late-80s UK psych pop revival: Spaceman 3 and Primal Scream and the Pastels. They were all listening to the same psychedelic rock records and dropping a lot of acid, or whatever it was Bobby Gillespie was doing. Shoegaze is as much a part of this new wave of psych pop as actual psychedelic music. This being Australia, the edge comes from the music, not the lyrics. There's no sarcastic spitting out of words here: most everything is fuzzed over, warming, staggered. This music taps into a strong tradition that lies not only in the 60s psychedelic explosion, 70s Japanese psych and shoegaze, but also in the approach of early 80s British DIY pop pioneers Television Personalities. And you can see contemporaries in the other countries - in the Black Angels and thee Open Sex from the US, and Hookworms in the UK. "That quintessential stoner hippie jam band music has been in existence for the last 20 years or so," says Blackman. In 2014, we're not experiencing a full-blown revival yet, but it's on the verge. It's at a tipping point. Maybe there's now an attitude in Australia that it's OK to play Australian music for Australian listeners, an attitude that didn't exist 10 years ago. The idea you could have an international career as a musician, it's come back in a more subdued form. Bands are being written about on Pitchfork and Stereogum and the big American websites. You're not going to make a million dollars, but Blank Realm and Scott & Charlene's Wedding have proven that you can get international recognition. Even better for the health of Australian music is that this time, even as the rest of the world recognises the bands, there's no need for them to emigrate to London to build their reputations, as the Go-Betweens, the Birthday Party and others had to in the 80s. This time around, the great Australian music boom is staying defiantly Australian. John Steel Singers - State Of Unrest Sunny Queensland krautrock played with vim and vigour. It's like the summer's never going to end (which it sometimes doesn't in Brisbane). Full disclosure: I actually guest on a remix of this track, available in the UK. Blank Realm - Falling Down The Stairs Strange rhythmical music from Brisbane, played with a disorientating wooziness that makes you feel drunk or stoned, whether or not you've been indulging in illicit substances. Tame Impala - Elephant The KLF got (arguably) immensely rich and famous plundering this same bass hook. Trippy as hell. The Darkness meets the JAMMS, only even slicker - and that's not an insult. Bushwalking - No Enter A cyclical, devastatingly heavy riff that threatens to devour all before it. Possibly the mightiest groove to come out of Australia in recent years. Violet Swells - Jupiter's Garden Officially Australia's first post-Tame Impala band, with a hefty dose of Sgt Pepper's thrown in. Sounds a dead ringer for half the records released on Creation between 1984 and 1986.