Getting cooked with Confidence Man

It's 1:AM on a Saturday and I'm in the back of an Uber, lights of the A12 carriageway rushing past in a semi-psycho-active blur. A haze that’s nothing unfamiliar to anybody living between the pulses of London’s throbbing nightlife heartbeat. Camera flashes begin to pepper me from the front seat. Maybe the driver can multi-task? A man who looks fresh off a fashion runway with sunglasses on is sitting to my left, looking forward with a resolute pout. Meanwhile the bratty tones of a Peaches-cum-Uffie lovechild begin crawling, nay, ringing in my right ear: “I've got a pill in my pocket and I really wanna drop it but I'm not gonna pop it 'til I hear a breakbeat.”

It starts to feel like I'm in a scene from cult classic film Human Traffic. The spirit of that chemically-enhanced clubbing bible oozing from over-stimulated pores, right here in the backseat of Michael's Hyundai Ioniq. But then, every moment spent in the company of Australia's rowdiest dance music export, Confidence Man, feels like an ode to the hedonistic joy of watching sunsets with your newly found tribe — a feeling perfectly encapsulated by that film. And yeah, I think, man, listen, dude, this is hectic, yeah I'm definitely, I AM definitely coming up.

"Is there more to life?" I find myself asking the dynamic duo that front Confidence Man, “The Fucking Boss™️” Janet Planet and “willing assistant” Sugar Bones, about 40 minutes into our interview — scheduled for the sesh-friendly hour of three o’clock in the morning. We've waited all kick-on to kick-off this interview and in a show of composure, determination and focus befitting... Well, people in a better state than us, we've stuck to it. Their new album is called ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’, which is why we're doing the interview at this time. The inspiration behind the name, and scheduling, is that this ungodly hour is when Confidence Man are at their most creative. It’s when most of the tracks for the LP were recorded during delirious studio sessions, and when they feel most fired up and in the zone. Who other than Mixmag could you really pitch that to? I mention the popular school of thought that nothing good happens past 2:AM but Sugar rebuffs it saying they've “killed all of those people”. So here we are, punching darts, flopped out on a simple, white circle-patterned bed while prosecco flows in the front room and people complain about “London being a 24-hour city but not having any 24-hour off-licences”. Will this be a successful interview? Could this be a successful interview in the state that we're in — brain cells dancing their last tango in a Dalston flat? Even if the interview is no good, at least we have an answer to the eternal question for those of spangled minds: “Is there more to life?”

“There's always more,” says Janet.

“As long as you know where to look,” says Sugar, finishing her sentence with a sense for timing more akin to a Hollywood screenplay than a pilled-up pop star.

This band has done a lot of looking - and finding - ever since their recent move to London. Janet Planet, Sugar Bones and the mysterious veil boys Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffin started their project from extended after-party music-making sessions in Brisbane. With the psychedelic feel of late nights on the sauce baked into their music's DNA, they made waves with early tracks like 'Boyfriend (Repeat)' and 'Better Sit Down Boy'. Little nuggets of pop-dance owing as much to the eccentricity of David Byrne as the fair-dinkum, give-it-a-go attitude of the Antipodes. Upbeat yet disquieting, Confidence Man became a siren call for those yearning to escape the banality of everyday life. “[Reggie's] the beat boy. He's the spark in the fire. He's responsible for many, many songs, and many of them bad, and luckily, we were there for the right ones,” Sugar says while pulling the curtains shut.

“The format of Confidence Man is based around our personal relationships and us having fun and writing together, rather than just, like, two pop stars, which is what people always seem to think we are. But it's definitely not just the two of us,” explains Janet.

But where Confidence Man really came into their own, was the worlds they began to create in their live shows. With multiple costume changes, straight-faced, self-choreographed dance moves and a pair of light up breasts, their performances are a pulsating celebration transcending mere entertainment and becoming an immersive experience. The stage transforms into a carnival with Janet and Sugar drawing the crowd into a collective frenzy, a joyous surrender to the music that unites them all.

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But these performances and their music haven't always been well-received, even in their homeland. A clip of them playing ‘Australia's Glastonbury’ Splendour In The Grass went viral with hate early in their career.

“There was this outpouring [of anger] from always fucking, like, straight white guys,” Sugar says.

“Always playing Deep Purple,” Janet adds.

“People were just so angry. I remember there was this rock band who made a [parody] cover of 'Boyfriend (Repeat)', and then they made a video,” Sugar says. “We did the video with all the Ken [dolls] getting fucked up and then they made a full video of just killing Barbies. Like, they must have spent fucking hours on this, just like, stabbing Barbies... [But] if you're, like, a fucking old dude sitting at home and you need to leave a comment because some girl just said 'my boyfriend talks too much', for us it’s like, push those buttons.”

“We enjoy the controversy of it,” Janet states. "I think it means that you're doing something different. In Australia, we're fucking weirdos. Everyone thinks we're fucking weirdos over there because it's mostly, like, surf rock. I mean we're weird everywhere, but we were particularly weird there.”

It seemed like Confidence Man had tweezed out an insecurity in many people. Was this a joke? Was this serious? Am I getting pranked? Why is that guy in his underwear? What's up with these dance moves? But the effect was undeniable. “The moment you confuse [the crowd], if they're a little bit inhibited it makes them put the guard down. Like, ‘what the fuck am I looking at?’” Sugar says.

Their first album, 'Confident Music For Confident People' was released on Heavenly Recordings, an independent label with one foot in the band world and one in electronica with releases from the likes of downtempo all-stars Saint Etienne and Irish upstarts Kneecap. Needless to say it's been a fruitful collaboration that introduced Confidence Man to a club-minded audience, and DJs, with smartly targeted remix packages straight out of the gate. “Those guys educated us in a lot of ways to dance music,” Janet says, eyes wide and bushy-tailed. “We had an Andrew Weatherall remix of 'Bubblegum' and I didn't even know who he was when we got that remix. And I remember listening to it and just being like, ‘this is fucking weird’. Now I listen to that remix and I'm like ‘that remix is fucking incredible. Like, it's amazing.’”

Heavenly helped kick the door down for the move to the UK, a path well-trodden by the likes of Kylie and Saz from Peep Show. For years from Clapham to Clapton, Australians and New Zealanders have frothed on London, enamoured by its lax laws around drinking on the street, ‘pub culture’ and cheap drugs. Although it's safe to say two-year-stay Sally from Manly isn't playing Glastonbury as soon as she gets out of the gate at Heathrow. It was the one-two punch of playing the Park Stage in 2022 and then releasing their album 'Tilt' that catapulted Confidence Man into the British clubbing consciousness, turning tunes like ‘Holiday’ and ‘Feels Like A Different Thing’ (tracks that mined the heady vibes of Primal Scream’s acid house era and Dee-Lite's flower power) into certified festival bangers that simply had to be heard in an open field. It solidified a move that felt pre-destined… kinda.

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“Jeff [from Heavenly] was like, ‘You've got to come to the UK, you're gonna be huge.’ And we're like, ‘what the fuck are you on about?’," says Sugar taking another drag. “They just embraced us with open arms. There's some underlying connection with that. It was never intentional.”

“It also makes me wonder if we did start tailoring what we were doing in the music we were writing to the UK because of that influence of how open they were to us,” contemplates Janet. “It makes me wonder if we were going to do it anyway, or if we did it because we were loved and accepted by these people, and we thought we were understood by them.”

Part of the precursor to this interview is a DJ set at Body Movements, a London queer festival that boasts a line-up of underground favourites to rival anywhere in the world. It's a testament to how smartly the band has positioned itself and their love for London’s queer scene to have landed on this line-up. Yes, the live show is biblical and yes they have crossed that threshold to be mainstream stars, but the veil boys Reggie and Clarence are great DJs in their own right, with a cheeky streak that tickles the less serious side of any tasteful clubgoer. Plus Janet and Sugar are always up for a party. Their mere presence gets the crowd going at Southwark Park thanks to these larger than life characters they've built for themselves. Sugar Bones stands at the side of the booth smoking cigs (sunglasses firmly on) while Janet Planet, that unrelenting force of nature, drags everyone into her orbit on stage to party. I ask her later why she doesn't want to DJ herself. “There's enough DJs in the world, I'm too important and need to be the hype man,” she deadpans.

It's a familiar scene for the band since moving to London. Immersing themselves in everything this city's clubs have to offer has been a top priority as well as creating connections with fellow ex-pats like HAAi and DJ Boring. They're certainly never short of a party to go to. “There's an art to hedonism in the right kind of way, where it's like, we're doing this for fun. We're not drug addicts. We're just having a really good time,” Sugar explains.

They clearly are having a good time on the new album '3AM (LA LA LA)' which hits all the right notes of what’s du jour in 2024 while also honouring key cultural touchstones in dance music's history, weaving a delicate tapestry for old heads and new ravers alike. Plus it remains defiantly, outrageously catchy, with tunes so determined to stay in your head they're positively belling the hippocampus over and over again lad like it's 6:AM and the sesh needs to keep going.

Confidence Man make no bones about this being an authentic party album, forging the tracks from some hedonistic studio sessions. “We were doing a few sessions with producers and we weren't really getting anything from it because we'd always written everything, just us,” Janet says. “And then we were like ‘just give us one cooked session.’”

“And they're like, 'What do you mean?'” chimes in Sugar. “We're like, ‘alright, we need £600 for drugs to make this session work.’ And they're like ‘I don't know if we can approve it.’ [We're] like, shut the fuck up. This is gonna be awesome.”

“There's one vocal on the album. It's like ‘I don't even know where I am anymore’. And I remember at the time my eyes were like half-closed and those are the moments you want to catch,” Janet adds.

“Yeah, that's the magic when you let down all the fucking walls. Not like you're rocking up to work at 9:AM. You're free to fucking do whatever you want, and when we get in the studio, it's the most fun ever,” Sugar says, ciggie fading away between fingertips.

These larger than life claims from larger than life characters feel in step with the last six months. Much of summer ‘24 had an aura of unbridled indulgence thanks to two words: Brat Summer. Charli xcx’s album featuring lines about doing, well, lines, sent the mainstream consciousness into a frenzy over what it really meant to be ‘brat’ all to the pulsating rhythms of 2008-coded dirty electro that introduced the aesthetic of ‘getting messy in a club’ to a terminally-online generation. It’s nothing new in dance music, a genre known for Pacman-esque escapades like eating pills and running around dark narrow corridors. With ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ and a fresh signing to Chaos, the high-energy dance sub-label of major Polydor, Confidence Man are bringing this living and breathing embodiment of what it’s like to be up and out late at night to the mainstream while properly bridging the gap with clubland thanks to their infectious hybrids.

"If I could do anything in the world, it would just be sitting around getting cooked writing stupid stuff. Then you listen back the next day, like, actually, yeah this is pretty good. Then there's also moments where you're like, 'that is fucking terrible',” Janet laughs.

After Body Movements and cats have been herded the plan forms into a dance at beloved queer party Adonis, being held just around the corner at Venue MOT, pre-interview. A converted mechanic’s garage, Venue MOT is not large and it seems like the night is going to end in disappointment if the throngs of people swarming to Bermondsey this soon after the festival has ended are anything to go by. Janet, who’s never been to Adonis but started clubbing in London to queer DJs like Guy Williams and at LGBTQ+ clubs like Dalston Superstore, is undeterred by the crowds and leads the charge with a merry band of PRs, photographers, other DJs and various hangers-on like myself. “Their music is sick, and even everything outside music is slay,” the mustachio-ed Gabriel, who met them a week after they landed, tells me. Conversation reverts back to that common clubbing genre of ‘travelling between venues chat’. “Ah look someone’s being funny on a scooter!”, “Yeah I’ve been to MOT about seven times but last time the sound was a bit shit”, “Is there a cash machine on the way?”, “We’re going to the tunnel rave. Let’s just commit. I don’t want to go home”. All of London’s greatest hits ringing out during a 12-minute dash to our destination under the light-polluted skies.

Venue MOT does end up being small, the crowd does end up braying for the doors of Adonis in their hordes and Sugar does end up getting lost. We manage to get squeezed in but despite a spirited attempt by Janet to keep everyone at the club by dancing away from anywhere anyone can reach her, the matter of the interview is still at hand and we make our move to a more relaxed environment. It’s been a night already and in true ConMan fashion it’s only just beginning. As many Antipodeans know for reasons mentioned above, the flat is as much of a lure as the clubs to begin with. The A12 beckons. Conversation with strangers beckons. Doing it all again next weekend beckons. Is there more to life? Of course there is, daylight always breaks and real life knocks. But in the throes of the playful, buzz-seeking swirl of the night that never ends, Confidence Man are the full package.

‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is out October 18, get it here

Louis Anderson-Rich is Mixmag's Digital Producer, follow him Instagram