A 3am concept album, an accent trick, and enough euphoria to power a warehouse rave. Confidence Man are hitting peak chaos, and they’re inviting you along for the ride.
Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Jake Terrey.
Stylist: Oriana De Luca.
MUA: Peter Beard.
Hair: Maddison Volishin.
Capturing the chaos of Confidence Man may be an impossible task, but on their third album ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’, they give it a good go. They’re a band so bonkers their last tour brought The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty out of retirement to go see it, with a live show so good it’s been the thing to write about on your Glastonbury postcard home twice, now pedalling an album that looks at a summer defined by partying and calls it a warm-up.
Taking the idea of the concept album, usually reserved for rock operas and rap recitals, submerging it in booze and dusting it with a miscellaneous white powder, ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is a dancefloor epic created mostly at that magic hour after a night of getting wasted.
“That was actually our goal from the beginning,” says leader of the pack Janet Planet. “Usually, we set a goal, and we don’t usually follow it. We’ve done the whole New Order thing where we write lyrics with cards and stuff like that, but this has been one thing that we actually managed to pull off.”
“Surprise, surprise. The one thing was we just had to get wasted,” adds assistant pop star Sugar Bones. We’re chatting to the pair in London, their new base that they’ve just, five hours before our chat, touched back down in after two weeks of touring their old home and birthplace, Australia. In true Confidence Man fashion, they haven’t slept yet, and it’s 10am.
There’s method in the madness though, and this approach to album creation has come out on top after almost a decade of trying things the non-Con-Man way and finding it utterly tedious.
“We’ve done tons of writing that’s more like nine to five going to the studio Monday to Friday, really being serious about it,” says Sugar.
“It just feels like you’re banging your head on the wall doing that for us,” adds Janet. “I suppose we figured out the best way to tap into the fastest and most easy way to write was this.”
Sugar explains, “Over the years, we’ve been perfecting the system, and we realised that when we’re coming up with ideas, if you’re in a bit of a lucid state of mind, it really helps with the speed of ideas and the creativity, because you’re just totally out of your normal mind.”
The record is certainly a reflection of the band and their relentless way of living, which throws away any traditional scheduling, instead existing in a perpetual party that takes them from studio to stage to club to kitchen and back around again but practically never to bed. Simply, all work, all play makes ConMan a great band. As a result, ‘3AM’ was made with little input from outside forces; other producers just couldn’t handle it, so it was all down to Janet and Sugar, plus the cloaked Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie.
“Initially, we were doing a few sessions with other producers, but we kind of realised they just slowed us down,” says Janet. “They were nine to five, and we’re kind of like a bunch of ratbags who just want to do our own thing. You can’t have ConMan exist in someone else’s studio in a lot of ways because we need the freedom and almost like, privacy to be gross.”
“We’re kind of like a bunch of ratbags who just want to do our own thing”
Janet Planet
After over a year of teasing a new club-focused direction with a variety of DJ collaborations – namely the DJ Seinfeld hit ‘Now U Do’ and Daniel Avery link up ‘On & On (Again)’ that stormed their festival sets last year, but also the recent DJ Boring collab ‘Forever 2’ and Janet-and-Sugar-less ‘Firebreak’ that made up this spring’s ‘ConMan Club Classics’ EP – it made sense that their big comeback would be just family.
‘I CAN’T LOSE YOU’, released at the start of June, is a bouncy introduction to their new era and a daring new direction, complete with a video that sees them helicopter naked over London (that’s one way to say hello to your new neighbours). It solidified their move further into the dance sphere, and suggested they’d been digging through the 90s archives for this album.
A natural evolution over the years, Confidence Man have gradually introduced more electronic influences, shifting drastically from the indie disco of debut ‘Confident Music for Confident People’, to the campy summer banger bliss of 2022’s ‘Tilt’, to the sweaty club that is ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’. If ‘Tilt’ thrived in the festival field, ‘3AM’ is made for the warehouse rave.
“I think with ‘Tilt’, that was us finding where we wanted to go, and we sort of hit some sweet spots with ‘Holiday’ and ‘Feels Like A Different Thing’ where it was really, really high energy harder stuff,” Sugar explains. “And then with ‘3AM’, we didn’t really have to talk about it or say much, we all knew exactly what we wanted. It was this bigger, faster, ravier, euphoric sound. Straight from the get-go, we were all on the same page.”
“We all knew what wasn’t the sound of the record,” adds Janet. “Like if someone brought something to the table that felt more ‘Tilt’ or even more disco or whatever, we could direct it in a way where we were like, the sound of the record is specifically this. So I feel like the record has a very distinct Confidence Man sound, whereas the first two I feel like we were trying to figure out exactly what that was.”
Inspired largely by their move to London, ‘3AM’ explores every corner of British dance music, particularly that of the 90s but occasionally teetering past the millennium, like an oral history of the genre without feeling like a tribute; even the album cover looks like Janet is stepping out of a fucked up DeLorean with Sugar’s twisted Marty McFly in tow.
Dropping us straight in the middle of the party is the handbag house opener ‘WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL FIND?’, ushered in with Janet’s nonsensical spoken word “Meet me on the corner of Mare Street and Ridley Road” line (two streets that don’t meet but were the only ones she knew the names of when they arrived in London), before bursting into a boppy instrumental that recalls Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’.
Like most of the record, ‘3AM’’s opening was completely unintentional, recorded when Janet was very merry and originally in a Russian accent. “I had to redo it because I couldn’t have a Russian accent on the album,” she confesses, and after a little back and forth about whether or not to reveal their secrets, they decide to share their new trick.
“If you want to do a spoken word thing and make it sound cool,” Sugar starts, “we realised that if you do it in a Russian accent, then you rerecord it with-”
“You copy the inflections, but you do it in like an English accent,” Janet jumps in. “It’s my strategy, so it might not work for everybody. Don’t try this at home.”
“We came here and got immersed particularly in the queer club scene”
Janet Planet
Down at the bottom end of the tracklist is another one-taker ‘WRONG IDEA’, a house tune that features Janet’s drunken rambling. She says, “I was just on holiday in Greece, and I was showing my girlfriends the record. The first lyric in that’s like, ‘I don’t even know where I am anymore’ and all of them just turned around and said ‘We can literally hear how wasted you are in your voice, you put that voice on when you’re fucked up’. That one was just from a 3am thing that I said really drunk that the boys sampled and refused to take out. I’d literally winged that whole vocal, and it turned out pretty good.”
Riding the wave of hedonism making its way through pop right now, tracks like follow-up single ‘SO WHAT’ – pulled forward due to its Glastonbury road test going a little too well – urge you to chuck excuses out the window and go party, while the much spacier ‘FAR OUT’ asks existential questions over a trance beat.
Then there’s ‘SO TRU’, a real back-of-the-bus banger that channels early 2000s garage, and the sprawling Sugar-led centrepiece ‘SICKO’ that would go down well at the Haçienda; the influences here are undeniably British.
“We were clubbing a lot more than we ever had in Australia,” says Janet. “We came here and got immersed particularly in the queer club scene, so a lot of it is just inspired by music we were hearing out. We were seeing a lot of live music, going to Manchester Warehouse Project and stuff, seeing like those big rooms, I suppose a lot of it was inspired by that euphoric pinger feeling.”
Chasing that feeling and taking in all of these huge sounds in a new way means ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is full to bursting. There are marriages of genres that shouldn’t work, but they make it; like ‘REAL MOVE TOUCH’, which feels the most influenced by those queer clubs, but the addition of reggae rap icon Sweetie Irie adds another level of chaos. Then there’s ‘BREAKBEAT’, which begins with Peaches-style attitude and spins out into Air-ish French ambience.
“I suppose we’re still exploring those sounds in an Australian way,” says Janet. “Because we are so isolated, I feel like we do tend to explore UK sounds in a way that takes them out of context and makes them not really make sense again. Like these big euphoric sounds with really pop vocals, they’re a little bit of a mismatch. That’s what Australians do best.”
“Growing up so far away from it, you just don’t really know what’s wrong or right,” Sugar adds. “So you’re quite free to do whatever feels good. Then moving here to where all the sounds and pop stars and DJs that we love come from, it’s super inspiring.”
Ahead of the release of ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ comes a compilation in conjunction with historic London nightclub fabric. Their ‘fabric presents’ DJ mix features ‘BREAK IT DOWN (ON THE BASSLINE)’, the collaboration with IN2STELLAR they also previewed at Glastonbury amongst other exclusive mixes they’ve been flaunting at their ConMan DJ sets over the past year. It’s an honour that welcomes them with open arms into the British electronic scene.
“Where we came from, Brisbane, it’s mostly rock bands, or like surf rock in particular. So we were always the weird anomaly in that scene to come out of nowhere,” Janet explains, “and in Melbourne, we were a lot more ordinary I guess, but we were still weirdos and probably didn’t really fit in there in the way that we seem to be very much accepted over here.”
It’s easy to see why. Confidence Man have the kind of understanding of camp required to fly in Europe (there’s a reason Australia was added to Eurovision, right?). Just listen to the popper-tastic ‘Barbie Girl’ of ‘JANET (SUGAR)’, a track that has the energy of a Brits abroad floorfiller but is still sugary enough to be PG. They tread the line between irony and sincerity very carefully, knowing when the ridiculousness is getting too much. Laser boobs for the stage costumes? Yes, but the rest of the wardrobe is strictly monochromatic.
“We just had to get wasted”
Sugar Bones
It’s an outlook that’s earned them some stripes with actual British legends The KLF, the infamous electronic duo whose own ridiculousness knew no bounds. After getting obsessed with both the music and all the stunts they pulled, Confidence Man managed to get in touch with founding member Jimmy Cauty through their old record label and brought him along to their show at Camden’s Roundhouse in 2022, his first gig in 25 years.
“Apparently, at the start of the show, he was like, ‘These guys are good’. Then by the end he was like, ‘These guys are fucking amazing!’,” says Janet.
“We managed to get into his house one day and he was showing us all these crazy miniatures,” adds Sugar. “He was just like a fun crazy guy that we’re kind of obsessed with, and then we sort of stayed in touch with him and were telling him about this album we made, [saying] sorry about stealing the name, but here it is.”
So in an incredible turn of events, the ambient Orbital-esque title-track is now headed for MuMu Land, with Jimmy remixing it not once, but twice. Sadly, as enthusiastic as ConMan are, he doesn’t endorse replicating any of his own antics.
“He said, ‘If I can give you any advice, it’s not to do that’,” says Janet of his response to them suggesting pulling off something as daring as The KLF’s final Brit Awards performance. “All his advice has been like, don’t burn a million pounds and don’t shoot guns into the crowd. So he’s ruining all our fun.”
“We have no shortage of big ideas; we’re in the process of making robots at the moment”
Janet Planet
Jimmy’s reaction to the Confidence Man live show is likely a universal one. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’d either been to one of their gigs or caught them at a festival and wasn’t immediately a convert. The tour they have planned for ‘3AM’ will be their biggest yet, finishing up with two nights at Brixton Academy.
“Oh, we have no shortage of big ideas,” says Janet. “There’s going to definitely be some kind of flying things. And we’re in the process of making robots at the moment. There are a few big, big things in the pipeline, which are very unnecessary art pieces in a lot of ways.”
Working with staging veteran Rob Sinclair (who’s credited with producing shows for Madonna, Kylie, Lorde, and many, many more) on this year’s Glastonbury set, it was the kick up the arse they needed to get back into their performance groove. Rob’s sticking around for the tour, but even without his touch, the pair front and centre are a spectacle on their own. Going back to the drawing board in preparation for the tour, it’ll be brand new choreography, if they can come up with some new flips after putting every one they’d learned in the past year in the same song for their Glasto comeback.
“We have no shortage of big ideas; we’re in the process of making robots at the moment”
Janet Planet
Again balancing out the frivolities of their extravagant stage shows, the duo choose silence in between songs over camaraderie with the audience, noting they found early on that chatting on stage just wasn’t for them. Instead, the characters within the band do the heavy lifting. Persona in pop is back with a vengeance – as is making music that’s fundamentally quite silly but taken seriously by its makers – but ConMan are already way ahead.
“I guess it’s a bit of freedom really, like when you’re performing especially, Sugar Bones can do whatever the fuck he wants,” he says.
“I also feel like, at the heart of who we are, we probably are those people in a lot of ways,” Janet adds. “Because we never really planned to be those people; they were just who we were on stage. It’s not really even so much a character; it’s kind of another version of who we are. Which is weird, because you don’t think that you have this other persona and then as soon as you’re up on stage, you can turn into a completely different person. I think maybe that just comes from having so many people look at you.”
“There’s some good therapy in that,” says Sugar. “You can be a bit more silly and have more fun with it because you’re not in your real life. You can make up your own world because you’re someone else.”
So, are you ready to join them in the Confidence Man universe? When that 3am vortex pulls you in, it’ll take over the rest of your year. Kiss goodbye to your body clock and strap in for an autumn of debauchery; Janet and Sugar will meet you on the other side.
“It’s really exciting times, you’ve put so much energy into the art and every little concept and you know, Janet’s been making these costumes…” teases Sugar. “It’s just sick seeing it all come together, all the little pieces. Get ready to get fucked up.” ■
Taken from the September 2024 issue of Dork. Confidence Man’s album ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is out 18th October.
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