LA Priest: ‘I’m not trying to be freaky for the sake of it’

The green, green hills of Wales’ Montgomeryshire would seem like the ideal place to disappear. Sheep greatly outnumber humans, and you’re more likely to come across a red kite than a 3G signal. Even the area’s newest resident, Sam Eastgate AKA Samuel Dust, calls it “a gap on the map”. Except this is the countryside scene of Sam’s great rebirth, the place where – five years after abdicating his role as leader of cultish indie ravers Late Of The Pier, and eight years since first anointing himself LA Priest – he finally got his head together and finished his debut solo album.

Inji doesn’t sound like the typical product of rural isolation. There are no back-to-nature folk ballads or desolate soundscapes; instead it’s an album of restless funk and frisky psychedelia, an excellent companion to similarly vivid recent albums by Ariel Pink and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. If you like your pop fizzy and fantastical, it could be the soundtrack to your summer. Yet there’s also a faint sense of shut-in strangeness to it all.

When my taxi finally locates Sam’s remote rented cottage, he is waiting at the gate of his overgrown garden in a rumpled Dalí-print T-shirt and purple shellsuit bottoms. Even his slightly more luxe stagewear – baggy silk pyjamas or a white hooded robe – gives the impression of a man who’s recently risen from a lengthy slumber. Sam admits he has difficulty keeping pace with the clock’s relentless tick.

“I might have a memory disorder or something,” he decides, rubbing his head blearily. “I can’t really remember what I did last week, or how long ago something was. So I’m just getting used to the idea that it’s been five years since I released anything, because it feels like it could be 10 years or a few weeks.”

With a little prompting, however, some details begin to emerge. After two years on the road with Late Of The Pier, Sam knew he didn’t want to continue fronting a rock band. His label at the time was ambivalent about the dancier direction of the first LA Priest single, so Sam lost confidence in it, too. He travelled to Iceland, the USA and Scandinavia. He produced other people’s music and collaborated with fellow psych–pop traveller Connan Mockasin. For a while, he considered setting up his own company building bespoke synthesizers. Then he spent a few months wandering through abandoned quarries in Greenland, recording electromagnetic interference on a Dictaphone. Eventually it dawned on him that, if he wanted, LA Priest could incorporate all of these things.

“There was definitely a moment when I went: ‘All right, forget it, I’ll just make a record and call it LA Priest,’” Sam says. His homemade synths play a key role on Inji, as do the electromagnetic drones. “I want listeners to feel like there’s a pool they can jump into, as deep as my thoughts. I want to be the host, I suppose. Very much like a tour guide in a museum.” So who is this tour guide and what does this place look like? He pauses for a moment: “That identity’s still being formed, really.”

Sam is clearly not your typical pop crooner, but the directness of his new lyrics, especially on dreamy love song Mountain, show a determination not to be ghettoised as “weird”. He’s unhappy with the posters on the tube currently billing LA Priest as “The Inner Space Adventurer” because he feels that makes him sound too way-out (for the record, he’d have preferred “Earth Shaman”). “I’m not trying to weird people out or be freaky for the sake of it,” he insists. “I’m trying to turn people on to something that can be real for them, if they can accept its unusual form.”

It was a collective decision to split Late Of The Pier after just one album, 2008’s still-fresh Fantasy Black Channel, which Sam largely stands by. He wishes he’d made an LA Priest record more quickly, he says “but it didn’t seem right to do what people expected, to do another Late Of The Pier record. We all wanted to shapeshift”.

If there is a lingering sense of regret that Late Of The Pier never followed through on their early promise, it’s been exacerbated by recent events. Last month, the band’s drummer Ross Dawson died suddenly at the age of just 27. A close friend since primary school, Sam is still struggling to come to terms with the loss, but he takes some solace from their last conversation.

“Ross told me a few weeks ago how much he loved [recent single] Oino. And he was the only person I wanted to hear that from, because we grew up listening to the same stuff and wanting to achieve the same things: to be as good as the bands we were listening to. So when he said that I’d cracked it, it was pretty amazing to hear.”

It might have taken eight years, numerous false starts and relocation to the Welsh wilderness but, with blessing from beyond, LA Priest is finally ready to preach.

Inji is out now on Domino