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The band is splayed, quite literally, across a random array of
furniture in Paul’s Carlton flat. Jae and I sit outside smoking
cigarettes and talking about The Panics’ new album, ‘Sleeps Like A
Curse’.
Their second full length record (alongside four EPs), Sleeps is
hard to pin down with one listen. Sure, all the ingredients are
there, Jae Laffer’s wispy vocals, Drew Wooton playing subdued
guitar jangs, Myles Wooton’s rock drumming, Jules Douglas working
out on a variety of instruments and Paul Otway on his Rickenbacker
bass. But things are much, much different this time around. When
they came out with the extra long EP ‘Crack In The Wall’, Jae
commented that it was a placeholder, a bridge between the first
and second albums. Retrospectively, it was more of an introduction
to a much more mature sounding Panics. The tracks most indicative
of this growth on the new album, to my ears, are those relying on
piano to drive the melody. The press drools when Jack White
tinkles his black and whites, but with these guys, there is a
genuine growth happening.
Jae nods appreciatively when I mention this to him after opening
another green Coopers. “The piano tracks sound better a lot of the
time. I think I’m a tighter piano player than guitar player.
Getting a producer like Tim Whitten in was great, but you’re still
the same band playing, and at the end of the day there is only so
much a producer can do. Tim’s methods and tastes aren’t too far
from our own, so it sounds like a Panics record. It’s a little bit
more smoothed over than our other stuff. Which is a good thing,
it’s just the right step up from our last one, I think. We
wouldn’t want to take too harsh a jump into being too overproduced
just yet. I’m quite happy to do it in stages. People say that
maybe we’re trying to avoid the fact that we’re not a big band,
but it is actually a really enjoyable process, watching us slowly
get better and better. It’s such a proper way of doing things. And
word of mouth is the coolest if it is working, and it is. The
crowds are getting bigger, the records keep getting better, the
songs are getting better and deeper. It’s just a pleasure to be a
part of, and if it continues in this way and we keep our heads on
us, it is going to work for another ten years and we will have
time to get in bigger producers. That stuff all cost money too, so
it’s not something that we could snap our fingers and have anyway.
The Panics have a definite longevity. This is what we do in our
time off, just hang out together and listen to music.”
“You kind of sweep it aside after you’ve done it,” he relates.
“I’ve just been writing frantically and trying to get ahead on
something next. We just want to be able to make a record every
nine months. This is already past the fact now that we’ve done it.
We’ll just play out with whatever happens to the record and get to
work on another one. We started recording some covers in Perth as
well. We might do a little thing on the side and make a little
covers record to fill in some time. We’ve done two so far. We did
Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like a Woman’ and we did The Rolling Stones’
‘Factory Girl’. They were great fun. We just want to keep busy,
and we certainly don’t analyse it too much. I think you can make
big mistakes by always thinking that every song or every move you
make is completely pivotal to your future and everything can end
or break your career. You just have to keep at it and keep doing
better than you’re last one. It can take time, but we’re just
digging it.”
Blind Willie McTell is weeping out of Paul’s speakers inside. I
know this because I ask Myles, what’s playing? And he does his
best impression of a Delta accent and tells me. What’s so cool
about The Panics, what proves they do have longevity, is
that there’s no bullshit backstage. They’re good friends that
enjoy lounging around listening to Willie McTell, Johnny Cash, Bob
Dylan and Neil Young records loud. And they know not to talk when
music like that is playing, to just sit back and shut up. “I think
a lot of bands would claim that it was always even,” says Jae, on
the band’s preternatural fidelity, “but you can tell it’s not with
a lot of them. We’re all pretty vocal, and there’s enough respect
for everyone’s parts, it’s pretty easy. The guys would never let
me act like a frontman.”
“We really like
Nick
Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Go Betweens, older stuff like the
Triffids, all those cool bands that were really poetic and often
did a stint and did alright in Europe. Often the bands that we
like had respect overseas first before coming back over here and
having people click on. I don’t know what it is, they’re just
really ambitious groups. I don’t think Australia warms well to
people who are overtly mouthy and ambitious and ready to take on
the world. People try to shrug them off until the world says, they
mean it, it’s great.”
A
fate that The Panics must be aware of to some degree. After all,
it was in the UK where they were ultimately noticed, and signed to
littleBigMan records. Since then, the band has slowly moved over
to Melbourne, with most of the members currently residing here.
Killing time before their impending national tour supported by
Triple J, the band has assembled on the east coast, which will be
the staging point for this little jaunt. “I don’t know if we ever
liked the idea of staying in one place anyway to do records over
and over again,” says Jae on the band’s itinerancy. “We wanted to
record the new album in Australia, and in Sydney, we don’t really
know anyone. It just felt right at the time. We met a few
producers and we got along really well with Tim. Megaphon is his
stomping ground, and he’s really comfortable there. It could have
been there or BJB. We mixed it at Sony. We all thought it would be
a buzz to do it in Sydney. In Melbourne we’ve got distractions
around, we just wanted to get out of town.”
“It’s the same with the writing process. You don’t want to be
walking around the same streets for five years at a time. In the
streets you grew up in, you just find the themes in your head are
reoccurring. It’s nice to just be able to look back in retrospect
and have perspective on these places. Being in England was great
for that. Everything was reduced to a little bubble. At Megaphon I
had my little window with a picture of Bob Dylan and an escarpment
of Sydney. Listening to the song, when I’m singing along, you just
feel like it’s playing on the radio to the city. You’re just
singing to the country, and it’s good. I like that.”
“I’ve been playing since I was twelve,” reports Drew, the band’s
dedicated guitarist and card-carrying Robbie Robertson fan. “I
started just as I got into high school. I met Jae. He was playing
guitar before I was. I came from a musical background. I was
playing drums before I started playing guitar, so that’s where my
rhythm comes in. We started writing songs together. He would come
up with a lead line, or we would, and I would end up playing it
because he was singing. We’ve made a good bond since then in that
format. I just steered more towards playing the lead and melodic
stuff, playing with Jae’s vocal melodies, and reinterpreting them
into guitar lines.”
Cigarettes burn out, and the evening air is beginning to approach
a certain bitterness that makes me wish I was wearing a scarf too.
Meanwhile, Jae reflects on the lyrical side of The Panics machine.
“I come up with chords and melodies all the time. I often kind of
struggle to put the lyrics on top of them. Lately, over the past
few months I just got a typewriter and I try to just write
gibberish every day and stuff like that. I just come up with
little verses and choruses all the time and bring it to the guys
and see what they can make of it, really. I used to be right into
my music, but now I just try to focus more time on the language
and leave the rest to the guys if I can. It would be great to get
a lot of storytelling back, if I could progress more in that
direction. A lot of words in Australian music are there because
they have to be. Not to say that I’m filling any gaps, but I want
to move in that direction where the language makes up ninety
percent of the song and the rest of it was just elaborating on
that feeling, rather than just getting into that sound. Also, the
guys are starting to write a lot of songs themselves now. It’s
quite a good little factory now, and Jules is writing, he’s
written about six this year. Paul has played me about three of his
demos. It’s really just a productive band that’s a pleasure to be
a part of.”
“I think it is all pretty structured,” says Drew on the band’s
live interpretation of their burgeoning repertoire. “We always
improvise on certain nights, whether we’re in that mood or not.
There’s always room for interpretation. I think we’ve all been
playing long enough to take cues from each other. I’m pretty
confident that we can all talk to each other without talking. End
of the day, I don’t think we think about it because we don’t want
to feel that pressure. If we change a song on the night, that’s
purely what happens. You don’t think about it too much, you just
do it. You can’t satisfy everyone all the time. If it feels right,
just do it.”
Thing is, the band is satisfying people. At their last hometown
performance, the band had more fans than they could accommodate,
with people literally lined up around the block having to be
turned away. “That was a real buzz,” recounts Jae. “We hadn’t
played in Perth for a few months. It is still the one place where
you never know if people are going to shrug you off or keep coming
to your shows. It was a real surprise to go back and just have a
big sell out and turn lots of people away. It’s nice to have that
in your hometown. It keeps you energised for the rest of the
country. I don’t want to go on about it . . . but it’s a great
feeling, especially to end a tour with.”
The next day, the band played a free gig down the street to give
people a chance to see them that missed them the night before.
“We’ve always done those free shows, we don’t really tell anyone.
It’s a great way to finish off a tour. People in
Perth
now know that pretty much on the weekend that we play we’ll end up
on the Saturday night down at the Velvet Lounge to do this thing
and it’s really cool. It’s a special thing. I always just try to
think of what I would have liked when I was going out watching my
favourite bands. When you caught little gigs like that you had the
coolest memories of seeing the bands. Not the gigs where there
were a thousand people, you felt special to be at the small ones.”
So the band is hot on the road now, pushing their second album and
having a good old time. There is nothing more satisfying than
seeing a deserving good bunch of guys reap the rewards of their
hard work and bel esprit. Still, there are only so many
outlets these days able to support a band like The Panics, being,
as they are, between the genre cracks to a certain degree. Jae
presents the silver lining. “I don’t know if Australia lacks great
publications or the ones that exist are just stale about their
outlook on what bands they cover. But who am I to complain about
it, it’s up to them to write about what they think is relevant and
it’s up to us to shrug it all off and be proud of what we do and
if we don’t fit in places then we should look at the positives of
not fitting with an industry which is all about fitting in. It’s
pretty faceless stuff. Every band to me seems to have a story that
reads more like a press release. It’s all pretty bland. If we
don’t fit in I think that’s a good thing. We just roll with it.” |
