The Panics
Seven Year Itch
Paul is inside making what I presume is green tea. Jae is sitting across a weathered wooden table in a chair which has obviously been long exposed to Melbourne’s schizophrenic climate rolling cigarettes. He is immaculately coiffured in a seventies button-up shirt surmounted by a single-breasted jacket which seems to sidle comfortably between the shirt and wool scarf. I once asked Paul why every Perth band wore scarves all the time and he replied, quite matter of factly, “because it’s so cold in Melbourne.”
The band is splayed, quite literally, across a random array of furniture in Paul’s Carlton flat while 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 the piano to drive the melody.
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.”
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 analyze 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 last done. 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 front man.”
“I play a Martin acoustic, a DX1 Dreadnought,” says Jae musically. “I bought it about a year ago and cracked it on the plane to England. I was a lead guitar kid all my life and just fell in love with rhythm when I started singing and now I have a real passion for acoustic guitars. . I’ve played some Matons and I quite like them. When I chose my particular one I just went around strumming guitars and I never really played any notes on them. I’m a rhythm player and I just wanted to hear it through amps. I just want to know that in a big venue it’s not going to sound too rounded, it’s just a nice flat shimmering strum to it that will carry across the whole room and that one does the job really well. Paul loves that old Rickenbacker, and if he had the choice he would probably never even try out another guitar while he’s in the studio.”
“I’ve been playing since I was twelve,” reports Drew, the band’s dedicated guitarist and card-carrying Robbie Robertson fan. “I just steered more towards playing the lead and melodic stuff, playing with Jae’s vocal melodies, and reinterpreting them into guitar lines.
“I’ve got a Fender Telecaster, which I use for the more twangy lead lines. I’ve got a Gibson Les Paul copy made by Ibanez before they started Ibanez. It was made in the late seventies, I think. That’s really warm with a big sound and hot pickups. I’ve got two delay pedals. Delay I’m a big fan of, just for depth in sound. And a tremolo pedal. They’re the only three pedals that I use. I mainly rely on good amp sound.
Drew uses a Hot Rod Deluxe from Fender, which has a clean and drive sound built in, “so you can drive the valves themselves and it breaks up a little more naturally than the new amps. I prefer that to using a distortion pedal or a fuzz box. It’s a lot warmer, the whole sound is warming up and breaking up. I prefer the whole amp to be rattling, rather than little things in the sound.”
Cigarettes burn out, and the evening air is beginning to approach a certain metallic sheen 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 overtop 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 90% of the song and the rest of it was just elaborating on that feeling, rather than just getting into that sound.”
“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 sellout and turn lots of people away. It’s nice to have that in your hometown. It keeps you energized 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. “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. When JJJ recorded a recent gig at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne, the band played like I’ve never seen them play before, sidling into one of those epic slipstreams a la My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves’ more energetic moments. As one of the best live bands in the country right now, you should watch these guys, because they’re going to make that existential leap from underground cult act to the kind of cult act you can’t get tickets to very soon.
- Australian Guitar Magazine
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