Kav Temperley Eskimo Joe Gavin Woods Podcast Series 5 Episode 4

Gavin Wood's Countdown Podcast

Temperley was born in 1978 in Mosman Park, Western Australia, and grew up in Fremantle. At seven years of age, his name was changed to 'Satyam Kavyen Temperley'—Temperley is his mother's maiden name and 'Satyam Kavyen' means "Poet of Truth".

The Temperley family were members of the 'Orange People' (Rajneesh movement) and made trips to India as well Oregon, United States, throughout the early 1980s.

Between the ages of seven and 12, Temperley attended the Lance Holt School, a Fremantle community school. At the age of thirteen, he accompanied his mother on a trip to India, where they stayed at the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune. It was during this trip that he enrolled in an international alternative boarding school in Devon called Ko Hsuan that is based on the teachings of controversial Indian mystic Osho. Temperley was accepted as a boarder and remained at the school for a year:

“That was an amazing place, musically. They had a really good music room. If we had two periods of math, in between we'd run off and jam for 10 minutes. We'd come back and be totally chilled because we'd gotten all that nervous energy out of our systems.”

Temperley referred to his time at Ko Hsuan as his "saving grace", and it was there that he discovered a passion for music before he returned to Fremantle and John Curtin High School due to homesickness:

“Then I thought I was going to become an actor until I started wagging school and writing songs.”

Kav Temperley was frontman, bassist and songwriter of legendary Australian Rock band and 1990’s Indie icons, Eskimo Joe. With 6 studio albums under their belts and sales in excess of 750,000, in Australia alone, the band has seen 3 of those albums debut at number 1 on the ARIA charts, with steamroller ‘Black Fingernails, Red Wine’ shining for a monster 62 weeks in the ARIA Chart Top 50 and “Foreign Land”, from their 4th album ‘Inshalla', bringing home 2 APRA Awards, for Most Played Rock Song on Australian radio and Best Rock Song of 2010.