‘We’re still working out if we’re joking’: Behind the deadpan glory of Australia’s best pop band

If you want to understand the world-conquering appeal of local dance-pop jokers Confidence Man, it’s all there in their viral performance from Glastonbury in June.

There’s the music, of course, that maximalist blast of Euro house that is I Can’t Lose You, the addictive lead single off their new album 3am (La La La), led by Janet Planet’s frantic pleas and Sugar Bones intoning like a silver-haired version of the dude from Aqua. But that’s not even the half of it.

There’s the synchronised head tosses; the frog leaps over each other’s backs; Sugar’s silk shirt, swinging in the smoke of a dozen lit flares; Planet’s acrobatic body flips drawing a collective “ooh” from 70,000 red roasting Brits. Theirs is the sort of bonkers highwire act that makes every other live band look like they’re half-arsing.

It’s little wonder then that the raves came: “Confidence Man Are Greatest Live Act in the World (Probably) at Glastonbury 2024”, went one. “The Australian duo have absolutely perfected the art of festival-pleasing,” went another. Even actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, of Normal People and Twisters fame, called the band her Glastonbury highlight.

“Our manager was like we should get her in a film clip. But what’s she gonna do?” says Bones, casually sipping on an afternoon cocktail.

“She can get her own job,” adds Planet. “I don’t need competition from Daisy Edgar-Jones.”

That wasn’t even the first time ConMan took the UK’s biggest music festival by storm. On the back of their second album Tilt, their barnstorming Glasto performance in 2022 – aided by their Talking Heads-esque “pole suits”, designed (like all their costumes) by Planet herself – marked their mainstream coming out.

Proving the pair’s dedication to the ridiculous, Bones was sick for a week after this year’s follow-up. “In an extreme situation like that, you pump out so much adrenaline that you just, kind of, black out,” he explains.

“We’d been learning those flips for a year, but they are f—ing dangerous. Like, I could totally die,” adds Planet, the faintest hint of the pair’s signature irony in her voice. “We’re putting our bodies on the line, literally, for the sake of our art. And I’m willing to keep doing it.”

“If you can’t have fun, you’re not gonna like us.” ConMan, pictured at Glastonbury this year, are seriously unserious.Credit: Harry Durrant/Getty Images

Clad in a tracksuit hoodie direct from a photo shoot, Planet (real name Grace Stephenson) looks more off-duty model than the pop diva she plays onstage, while Bones (Aidan Moore), dressed in a black leather jacket with grey hair slicked, naturally assumes his role as Planet’s reserved foil. Slumped in a booth at the lobby bar at Sydney’s Ace Hotel, they’re both sweet and easygoing, despite their outsized pop personas.

It’s July, and the band – which also includes anonymous producers Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild, who still take to the stage with faces covered in black shrouds – are enjoying a rare trip home on a weekend that was initially reserved for Splendour, before the local festival (and a potential onstage meeting with Kylie) was scrapped. As such, other bands are in town, including British indie upstarts the Last Dinner Party who scurry over enthusiastically to greet the pair, amused by the chance meeting.

“It’s so funny, the last time we saw them was in Dalston,” says Planet, of the East London suburb ConMan have called home for the past year. “They came to a party we had. They were in our house till the early morning.”

The early morning figures heavily in ConMan lore. 3am (La La La), a clubbier move from the band following the hi-energy pop of Tilt, was largely made in those same hours, during drug and drink-fuelled benders. “Cooked writing nights”, as Planet puts it.

“Yeah, it’s the only way to write,” she says. “Over the first two records, we figured out it works for us and we did it more and more. The trick is it’s a once a week thing. I’m such a sook, I can’t back it up.”

Bones breaks down the process. “You’d have a nice big lunch, get a bunch of drinks into the studio, get everything prepared, and then just go nuts for, like, 20 hours or however long we last. But it’s all just ideas, you know? It’s not finishing things, not being precise – just throwing everything at the wall, screaming into the mic. Then you have a day or two off, and then you come back and go, ‘Okay, what happened?’ Every time we did it, we’d get like two or three keepers. So we were like if we just do this 20 times, that’s more than enough songs.”

So what substances are we talking about? “A little bit of everything,” laughs Planet.

“Mostly cocaine,” says Bones.

“A little bit of ketamine,” adds Planet. “We have this one song on the album, Far Out, that sounds like mushrooms and it was mushrooms. But that’s usually not a very productive drug. You just get a bit confused.”

“The key is having a balance of life,” says Bones. “If you do that every single night, you can’t sustain it. So you need a bit of space in between those writing nights to be able to get new ideas in your head.”

The process stems back to their salad days in Brisbane’s indie scene, says Planet. “The way I started writing music, I was pulled into a group with boys because we were all living together. They’d be like, ‘We know you speak a bit of French, sing on this!’, and it escalated to, ‘You’re really good, have another crack!’ And then it’d be 1am and I’m all like ‘da-da-da la-la-la’, and that was how the band started. So it makes sense that it’s gone full circle and now this is the way we approach writing. It feels very natural.”

‘It’s something we realised early on, the secret ingredient was just to go as hard as we can.’

Sugar Bones

The Confidence Man story began in Brisbane in 2016. The band’s debut album, Confident Music for Confident People, was released in 2018 by Heavenly, the famed London indie that was home to Saint Etienne and Beth Orton, but it was their 2022 follow-up Tilt – an album that merged their tongue-in-cheek rave references and bombastic pop hooks, led by the anthemic Holiday and touching everything from handbag house to Shibuya-kei pop (Planet calls their sound “bubblegum warehouse”) – that marked their breakthrough. By then, they’d already made fans (and friends) of Noel Gallagher and Bono and the Edge from U2.

“I’d like to meet more [celebrities],” says Planet. “I mean, Noel’s lovely but he’s always a bit terrifying.”

“Ever since you poured a beer on his head,” says Bones.

“Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that,” replies Planet. “I crossed a line.”

“We had some weird stuff with U2 early on that shocked me into not really caring about celebrities after that,” adds Bones. “The Edge ate a sausage at my house. I’m done with the shocks now.”

Jimmy Cauty, the enigmatic icon of the KLF – those original purveyors of conceptual rave hijinks – is a fan, too. He went to see them live, supposedly his first gig in 25 years, and kept in touch, says Bones, even while living off the grid somewhere in New Zealand. He even contributed a couple of remixes to 3am (La La La), a serendipitous exchange considering the album’s titular nod to a timezone the KLF made famous.

Even more than Tilt, 3am (La La La) is a free-for-all paean to ’90s rave culture. Traversing Euro house, acid rave, Balearic trance, big beat, breakbeat and jungle (sometimes within four minutes, as on the far out Far Out), it feels like a tour through Simon Reynolds’ academic opus Energy Flash but with the pages ripped out, torn to shreds and pieced back together Burroughs-style by manic monkeys.

Like Tilt, the pop bangers are there – most notably in the Ibiza-esque anthem So What and So Tru, a bubbly UK garage track produced by PC Music affiliate Easyfun, who did much of Charli XCX’s Brat – but the album feels more refined, a tentative step beyond the gag.

“It was literally just like, ‘What are we into at the moment?’” Planet says of the album’s direction. “One week we’re into garage and the next we’re just listening to Orbital. We’re a bit all over the shop and that’s kind of what we like about it, it keeps us interested.”

In May, Confidence Man released the EP ConMan Club Classics Vol. 1, featuring production from electronic stalwarts DJ Seinfeld and DJ Boring, a purposeful tilt towards the club. It felt like a subtle move towards being taken seriously as dance proponents, or at least a desire to express a side of themselves beyond the overarching wink (although, to be fair, the video for single Now U Do, with all its ridiculous shape-pulling, is classic ConMan, recalling their spectacular Live a Version rendition of DJ Sammy’s Heaven).

For a band who’s said they started as a joke, it could almost be read as a defensive flex. Obviously with success, those parameters changed and ConMan became a legitimate thing along the way. Do they ever feel their penchant for silliness gives people an excuse to write them off as unserious?

“I feel like people take us more seriously than what we do,” laughs Planet. “But I dunno. I feel like we’re still working out if we’re joking. I don’t know most of the time.”

“Well, we’re seriously joking,” adds Bones.

“Yeah, it’s 100 per cent serious when we’re taking the piss,” says Planet.

“But we are taking the piss when we say that,” adds Bones

There are too many levels to this. But surely it baulks to have their music called dumb?

“Oh, it’s so dumb. Love it,” says Planet. “But I think you have to be really smart to make music sound this dumb.”

“It’s like that Dolly Parton quote,” says Bones, “‘You’ve gotta have a lot of money to look this cheap.’ And you’ve gotta have a lot of brains to sound this dumb.”

Well, sure. But even they must get frustrated enough by the confusion to just want to spell it out for the naysayers: I don’t know if you know that we know.

“That’s the thing,” says Bones, “they’ll get the joke eventually.”

“And if they don’t, then they’re never gonna be one of our people anyway,” adds Planet. “If you can’t have fun, you’re not gonna like us.”

“We’re putting our bodies on the line, literally, for the sake of our art,” says Janet Planet.Credit: Getty Images

Especially in earlier days, the joke was often missed with Confidence Man. In 2017 when Triple J called them Australia’s best up-and-coming live act following their performance at Splendour, the station’s listeners responded with fury. There was also the time they opened for Noel Gallagher to confounding results. “That was a trainwreck,” Planet recalls of the rocker’s crowd’s indignant response to their synchronised absurdity. “It made me realise you have to be smart about who you choose to support. But that was truly painful.”

Of course, there’s a bit of classic Queenslander f— you to the band. “Oh, we definitely have an angsty, aggro side to us that kind of defends us against hecklers. ’Cause we’re really nice and silly and pop, but we will f— you up,” says Planet. “In those situations, we just go harder.”

Beyond the Oasis-obsessed, most Brits – rave culture completists and longtime lovers of pop’s campier corners – immediately understood ConMan’s shtick. But in the US, where even the blandest EDM is treated with reverential solemnity, it’s been a different story so far.

“I think they struggle with the Australian dry humour. Whereas the Brits, they’re drier than we are,” says Planet.

“The tongue-in-cheek factor, [Americans] just can’t understand if we’re serious or not,” says Bones.

Breaking the US is high on the band’s objectives, says Planet, and a recent headline run this year, which included sold-out rooms and festival slots, proved promising, particularly among the queer community.

Recently, a viral Boiler Room clip showed Dimes Square indie sleaze revivalist Harrison Patrick Smith of the Dare spinning their trashy instrumental Firebreak while megastar Charli XCX danced laconically beside him, drink in hand. In the wake of Brat summer, you can imagine the cultural lexus ConMan’s music could yet occupy on a global scale. This is bombastic club music for the terminally ironic. Bones feels confident their US moment is imminent.

“This is my prediction, in the next five years that proper ravey dance music, not the EDM thing, is gonna blow up in the States,” he says. ”Just look at the bookings at festivals, what songs are becoming popular, and also how the culture in America takes some time to catch up. I think that’s about to happen, and then we’re gonna get rich and famous.”

In the meantime, there’s home to contend with. Later this month, the band will embark on a national tour in support of 3am (La La La). ”My ethos for playing live is literally giving absolutely everything I’ve got, and if I don’t, I feel like I haven’t given enough,” says Planet. “Literally, like every show, I absolutely f— myself, as hard as possible.”

“It’s something we realised early on that it works okay if we’re just sort of doing it, but if we go really hard it makes everyone else go harder, too,” adds Bones. “So we realised the secret ingredient was just to go as hard as we can.”

Venues like the Enmore and the Forum are decidedly smaller than the main stage at Glastonbury. Will they be bringing the same outlandish vision to their national shows? “Yeah, we have a second rig, which is the same idea, just a bit smaller,” says Planet. “But we’ll definitely be going full throttle. We’ll be falling. Australia doesn’t need to worry about that. There will be enough injuries and blood for everyone.”

3am (La La La) is out on October 18. Confidence Man will perform at Fremantle’s Freo Social on October 24; Adelaide’s The Gov on October 25; Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on October 26; Brisbane’s The Tivoli on November 1; the Torquay Hotel on November 2; and Melbourne’s The Forum on November 4.