Confidence Man are back! Back! BACK! And they’re bigger, bolder and better than ever. Jim Butler hears how the Aussie dance pop superstars went about creating their anti-lockdown lockdown opus, ‘TILT’. “It was like getting drunk and writing at 5am on a Tuesday, and then sleeping until Thursday,” the band explain…

Lockdown did funny things to a lot of people. Gardening, wild swimming, refining the perfect artisanal sourdough bread… the gift of time gave many the unexpected opportunity to develop new skills and hobbies. Not so eight-legged Aussie groove machine Confidence Man. Rather than adopt mindfulness, jogging or some other mood-boosting makeover, the charismatic quartet doubled down on their Technicoloured party-first-ask-questions-later lifestyle and turned everything up to 11.

Having moved in together in the north Melbourne suburb of Thornbury at the start of the pandemic when they realised their adopted city (they originally hail from Brisbane) was heading for an extremely long lockdown, they just kept the party going at home.

“We’re the best of friends,” explains ebullient frontwoman Janet Planet – not her real name, not that it matters. “And we pretty much exclusively hang out with each other anyway. So we created a club in our house called The Fuck Bunker (the band are big fans of ‘Peep Show’, The Fuck Bunker being a scuzzy venue where Jez’s group play).”

“There was nowhere else to party,” confirms Sugar Bones (most definitely not his birth name), Janet’s co-front-person and an equally magnetic force-of-nature. “There’s only so many times you can get drunk in the kitchen. We realised all we needed was a smoke machine, two shitty lasers, some decks, a couple housemates and you can make a club anywhere.”

The Fuck Bunker quickly became the band’s – alongside Janet Planet and Sugar Bones, the group is rounded off by a pair of shadowy musical masterminds Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild – refuge. Their safe space. If indeed they needed one. Alongside the incessant partying (“Our neighbours hated us,” laughs Planet), the group eventually began to write a follow-up to their acclaimed 2018 debut, ‘Confident Music for Confident People’. And in true hedonistic musical fashion – think the Stones recording 'Exile on Main Street' in French mansion Nellcôte, albeit more Melbourne youth club than French villa – time became an amorphous and immaterial concept.

“It was like getting drunk and writing at 5am on a Tuesday, and then sleeping until Thursday,” explains Planet. “And then waking up and doing it all again. Weird, crazy hours. A pretty gross lifestyle.”

“There was nothing else to do,” offers Bones by way of supposedly rational explanation.

Thankfully, for us at least, if not the band’s livers, the result of this endless partying has been worth it. At a time when the world could do with an unapologetic shot of sonic dopamine, Confidence Man have delivered. And then some. Their new album, ‘TILT’, is a no-holds-barred, glitter bomb-fuelled rush to the dancefloor. Taking onboard everything from the euphoric sound of early 90s rave and 80s imperial pop to 00s UK garage and modern-day R’n’B, it is less a love letter to dance music, and more a flirtatious and instant TikTok message. 

For the listener it sounds like all great parties – fun, maddening, flamboyant, crazy, playful, soulful… For Confidence Man it was an escape.

“It reflects the freedom we found in the Fuck Bunker,” says Bones in a rare moment of levity. “But more so the freedom and escapism you can find through making music. It took us out of reality, gave us purpose and kept us sane. This sounds cheesy, and she’ll hate this, but music is medicine, you know?”

Planet: (Audibly gagging) “Eurgh.” (laughs)

The pair do agree on one thing, though. ‘TILT’ is not a lockdown album. Rather than reflect upon the grim reality the world found itself in two years ago, as Bones notes, the band dug deep to find an alternative, magical reality.

“It’s the opposite of a lockdown album,” affirms Planet. “Out of desperation we created something else that saved us. In a really dark time it’ll probably save some other people too.”

“We’re super proud that we managed to create this escapism,” admits Bones. “I suppose in reality it was a lockdown album. But, you know, in non-reality it was way beyond that.” 

The global pandemic also shaped ‘TILT’ in other unforeseen ways. Before the world came to a shuddering halt in spring 2020, the Fab Four had been grappling with the direction their second album should take. In the vaults of The Fuck Bunker reside a disco version and a pop iteration inspired by working with songwriter and producer Greg (The New Radicals) Alexander. The band worked with him for a couple of weeks in Brighton, alongside U2 producer Andy Barlow, and although these tracks didn’t make it onto ‘TILT’, Planet points to a third Confidence Man über pop album, or even side project.

“There’s a handful of bangers that we’re going to finish,” she says with relish.

“It was definitely inspirational seeing his mind work,” adds Bones of the time spent with the man behind the late-90s archetypal pop tune, ‘You Get What You Give’. “The way he approaches songs is very open and free. I think that’s how we worked in the beginning. So after four or five years of being in the band it was good to get that refreshing energy again. The guy’s a fucking genius.”

Back in Melbourne after years of touring both pre- and post-‘Confident Music for Confident People’ (“We were a bit burned out,” admits Bones; “Our thighs were sore,” adds Planet), the group – like the rest of the world – were afforded the luxury of time. They opted to go bigger. To ditch the kitsch elements and dial up the anthemic.

“The characters are still there,” says Planet. “But they’re being sluttier and badder over bigger and better beats.”

She’s right. The band’s first album of playful electronic punky pop and indie dance was spectacular if a bit more literal. ‘TILT’ is a different beast altogether. It begins with a pair of turbo-charged early-90s Italo house bangers, ‘Woman’ and ‘Feels Like a Different Thing’ – the latter with a gospel-infused coda. Both are anthems of female empowerment and a clarion call to the dancefloor. These are followed by the block party Sub Sub-flavoured hip house boogie of ‘What I Like’ and the brand-new-you’re-retro Neneh Cherry vibes of ‘Toy Boy’. Elsewhere, there are traces of Bow Wow Wow and Haysi Fantayzee on the Pop Art collage of ‘Angry Girl’ (recorded when Planet and Goodchild took a [romantic?] break to an Airbnb out in the Australian country during an easing of lockdown and Planet just screamed uncontrollably into a microphone), and even some broken French sophistication on closer ‘Relieve the Pressure’.

“It’s definitely a bit like a collage,” admits Planet. “It's the same thing with the clothes and the stuff that we do on stage as well. A bit of it is like theatre and then we mix it up with the dance stuff.”

“We all have these wide-ranging interests,” concurs Bones. “So that all kind of boils down into this…”

Planet: “Icky mess.”

The album’s centrepiece, however, is undoubtedly the escapist Fuck Bunker anthem ‘Holiday’. Coming on like 2 Unlimited mixed by Felix Da Housecat, Planet coos: ‘I get away every day, my holiday, I'm gettin' paid/I live it up on the go, I’m gettin’ high, I'm never low’. Bones repeatedly adds: ‘We all need something to live for, baby.’

In a perfectly-aligned cosmos, it would have shot to the toppermost of the poppermost global hit parades. The world’s loss is of course our gain. Conceived in a four-hour session and inspired by a coming together of Underworld and MIA, it’s the perfect embodiment of Confidence Man’s so-anti-cool-they’re-actually-really-cool aesthetic.

“I want to be taken seriously,” says Planet, “but, like, not too seriously. I kind of think we're a joke, but then also, like, not a joke. I am serious, but I’m also not.”

“We're just going to do our thing and we're going to do it with as much energy as we can, which will be a lot of energy,” states Bones. “So whatever people want to interpret that as, it's up to them. But yeah, we'll probably fuck-‘em-up.” 

Confidence Man weren’t meant to be a band. Planet, Bones, McGuffie and Goodchild came together not-so-much from the ashes of other outfits, but as a means of release from them.
A desire to have fun. In a typically flamboyant twist (of pleasing embellishment?), Bones believes this was destiny. He describes how Janet was playing keys in a band at the same time Confidence Man was starting out and it didn’t sit right.

“When we made ‘Boyfriend’ and ‘Bubblegum’, it was like, she needs to be front stage, centre, being a fucking superstar,” he explains.

Planet chuckles at the memory: “I feel I've been building up my whole life to be able to do what I do on stage. I feel like it would be such a shame for people not to see that.”

And like their Australian forebears, The Avalanches, their contrarian streak of chucking everything into the blender not only set them apart from the tired rock bands that clog up their home music scene but helped distinguish them in the eyes – and ears – of kindred spirits, and their eventual label, Heavenly Recordings.

“Naivete is bliss in music,” says Bones. “We’re out here on this island, kind of detached from the world…

Planet: “… filled with rock bands.”

Sugar: “It gave us the freedom to take our own path and to take our time.”

Planet: “I do think once we came to the UK and started working with Heavenly, they probably educated us a little bit too much. We know too much now. We can’t fuck up as much. Fuck ups are good sometimes.”

According to Planet, the band didn’t understand all this talk of remixes Heavenly were suggesting at the outset. This charming lack of wisdom was soon rectified when Andrew Weatherall transformed ‘Bubblegum’ into an infectious and joyous dose of widescreen ALFOS-friendly chug.

“When I first heard it, I was shocked,” recollects Planet. “I was like: ‘What is this wonky song?’”

It’s now one of her favourite remixes – she describes it as “sick”. Talk of Weatherall soon turns to the times they met Lord Sabre. Bones remembers a time in Dublin when he was strung out, post-gig. 

“I had the most beautiful chat with him,” he affectionately notes. “And then he gave me this perfectly rolled joint and sorted me out. I loved that guy.”

“I did way worse than that,” Janet laughs. “He was DJing, and I jumped up and tried to steal his joint. I started dancing with him and he was asking who I was. I kept saying: ‘I’m in Confidence Man, give me your joint.’ So of course, mine is way more embarrassing.” 

Riches of embarrassment; tales of excess; dancefloor-slaying songs… all born in the Fuck Bunker during lockdown. This is Confidence Man’s TILT at world domination. Don’t say you’re not tempted. 

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This article first appeared in issue one of Disco Pogo.