Kevin Parker Has Finally Revealed Who The Fuck “Trevor” Is

It’s the question that has plagued Tame Impala fans since 2015: just who is the inspiration behind the traitorous character Trevor who stole Kevin Parker’s girlfriend in the hit single ‘The Less I Know The Better’?

If you can’t quite remember the lyrics, here are the offending lines: “Someone said they live together/I ran out the door to get her/She was holding hands with Trevor/Not the greatest feeling ever.”

The elusive Trevor became one of the year’s biggest musical memes — then triple j hosts Matt and Alex dedicated hours of airtime to discussing various ‘dodgy Trevors’ they knew — and ‘FUCK TREVOR’ banners becoming a staple of any festival crowd Tame Impala were entertaining.

Now, in an interview with triple j Mornings host Linda Marigliano, Parker has finally revealed the origin of the lyrics.

“For every text message you’ve had talking about Trevor, I’ve had someone in person asking me who Trevor is,” Parker says wearily. “It doesn’t take a genius to realise that Trevor is just Trevor because it rhymes with ‘together’. Which just means that Trevor can be anyone.”

So… there you have it. Trevor lives inside us all.

Parker went on to tell Marigliano that the entire song was written in just 15 minutes: “The lyrics and the meaning of this song just kind of congealed,” he said. “As soon as I decided what the song was going to be about, the lyrics just wrote themselves. Which is a good way of knowing that it’s personal, that it’s real.”

More interestingly, he revealed that ‘The Less I Know The Better’ almost wasn’t released as a Tame Impala song. After recording the initial demo, Parker thought the track didn’t sound enough like a Tame song to be included on the album Currents, so he passed it along to his famous producer mate Mark Ronson.

“For a while, it was going to be on Mark’s album [Uptown Special]. But he eventually said to me ‘I can’t use this, I feel like I’ve stolen your hard drive and I’m stealing one of your songs’. Which I immediately interpreted as ‘oh he doesn’t like it’.”

Regardless of whether that was true or not, the track was punted back to Parker, who released it as the third single for Currents. As fate would have it, the track would become one of the most beloved of the Tame catalogue.

Listen to Parker’s chat with Marigliano here, and listen to ‘The Less I Know The Better’ below.