The Panics Don’t Fight It By Max Easton
T
he Panics have traced a strange career trajectory from their beginnings in Perth almost a decade ago. Discovered and signed by Paul Otway and Jules Douglas from the Happy Mondays (heads of Little Bigman Records) in 2001, The Panics quickly became community radio darlings, the quiet and steady acclaim they found for their first two LPs always seeming slightly at odds with their big-name label bosses. However, it wasn’t until they left Little Bigman for Brisbane’s Dew Process that things really took off for the five-piece, with their ARIA-winning Cruel Guards spawning one of the most recognisable Australian singles of 2007 in ‘Don’t Fight It.’
“You get lucky occasionally with a song like that,” front-man Jae Laeffer reflects. “To get a big sing-a-long was a bit of a gift. We’d been touring for a while and the first big festival slots we did were like, ‘Wow, people really have a favourite song of ours!’ You’d look out at these crowds with all kinds of people singing along, and it was a very powerful thing – and once you get a glimpse of being able to create that feeling amongst a group of people, you start making a bunch of goals based around
BABY ANIMALS DIESEL JEFF LANG ASH GRUNWALD JEFF MARTIN (CANADA) THE VOICE OF THE TEA PARTY
FOLK UKE (USA) CATHY GUTHRIE & AMY NELSON
ABBY DOBSON CHAIN THE BREAK BRIAN RITCHIE (VIOLENT FEMMES) & MARTIN ROTSEY, ROB HIRST & JIM MOGINIE (MIDNIGHT OIL)
SNOWDROPPERS SARAH MCLEOD (THE SUPERJESUS) KIM CHURCHILL WATUSSI THE FLOOD TIM CHAISSON (CANADA) THE BREWSTER BROTHERS BONDI CIGARS PERRY KEYES BAND DOM TURNER & IAN COLLARD CHASE THE SUN ANNE MCCUE BAND
(USA) BUSHWALLA RAY BEADLE BAND SPOOKYLAND BOATS OF BERLIN PAUL GREENE (CANADA) COLIN MOORE ASHLEIGH MANNIX HAT FITZ & CARA ROBINSON STEVE EDMONDS JASON WALKER BAND THE MICK HART EXPERIENCE
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recreating it, just to have some more of that. It’s really addictive.” From their chart-crossing hits to the sleeper ballads on their lesser-known records, The Panics have always found a unique balance between walking their own sonic path and tipping the hat to their influences – but Laeffer is wary of just how fine that line is. “It’s all about a choice,” he begins. “There are a lot of these bands that we might get compared to or that we aspire to be like – whether that’s a band like the Triffids or whoever – but you don’t want to be living off the coat-tails of bands who were around quite a long time ago. People have done certain things and they can influence you, but they’ve probably done it a lot better than what you could. You have to find something that’s yours and is unique, and go in that direction. The only reason I’d shy away from being like my influences is because they’ve already done it, and I want people to eventually look back at my band and be influenced by us because we had something of our own that was unique.” For Rain On The Humming Wire, the follow-up to Cruel Guards, The Panics uprooted themselves from their Melbourne home to head overseas, a move that’s long been an Australian band’s rite of passage. Trapping themselves in the backwoods of New York state, they made their own studio and set about recording over four weeks with no access to the outside world. “We were out in Woodstock, we didn’t have a car, we were right out in the forest at the side of a disused train line in an old church,” Laeffer explains. “It was a beautiful thing, and we created an atmosphere and an environment to work in that suited us. Instead of working nine-to-five, we’d wake up the producer when we had an idea at any time during the month, and eventually we had people working all over these different parts of the church. We’d have our drummer set up with a huge amount of percussion stuff down in the corner and you wouldn’t see him for five days ‘cos he’d be working on that, or you’d have another guy recording backing vocals in some room above the church,” he says. “And when people ran out of an idea briefly, that’s when you stopped, lit a fire and drank a can of Bud.”
“Instead of working nine-to-five, we’d wake up the producer when we had an idea at any time... When people ran out of an idea briefly, that’s when you stopped, lit a fire and drank a can of Bud.” Laeffer describes himself as broaching similar thematic territory regardless of where he and the band are geographically; songs of departure, return and the losses in-between run throughout Rain On The Humming Wire as they have throughout the band’s discography. “I look back on songs and realise that I often return to themes,” he admits. “There are parts of this world and places I’ve lived which I just want to write about, even if the songs are just about waking up and looking outside the car window. I find certain beauty in different places I’ve existed… Whether that appeals to people, I don’t know, but it’s just something I keep coming back to – and sometimes it takes being in different parts of the Earth to look back and see the romance in that.” A recent resurgence in the appreciation for bands like The Go-Betweens, The Triffids and The Church have resulted in an appreciation for the common sounds that those bands have left in acts like The Panics – sounds which Laeffer reserves a degree of fondness for himself. “[They] had something which had a certain romance to it,” he muses, “but it had an Australian feel too, which is hard to put your finger on. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it comes out somewhere between a mix of lyrics that are talking about an environment that we can all identify with, and maybe a certain guitar sound that has slowly been worked by that kind of two- or three-guitar band that has become quite prominent in Australia in the last couple of decades. I don’t know what it is, but you know it when you hear it – and it’s a great feeling to get that on record.” What: Rain On The Humming Wire is out now on Dew Process With: Georgia Fair and Avalanche City Where: The Metro Theatre When: Saturday September 24