Confidence Man: ‘We can get away with being bad boys and girls now post-Brat!’
Janet Planet and Sugar Bones go bigger and wilder than ever before on ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’, an album made about partying, written while partying, and perfect for partying to
The lore around the creation of Confidence Man’s third album begins at an unassuming east London café. As the Australian-born, London-based duo — Janet Planet and Sugar Bones — explain, their days would begin at Café Cecilia on the banks of Regent’s Canal, where they would load up on steak and cocktails, before decamping back to their Hackney studio and working until after sunrise.
It’s fitting, then, that Rolling Stone UK meet the duo at that very spot for lunch, as they explain how they decided to make their supreme new album, full of songs about partying and getting messy, by doing, well, just that. “We realised that we could write way better songs when we were drunk,” Janet smiles.
Her sidekick Sugar adds, “We’d been doing that for years just for fun. We’d be partying at home, drunk, and get out the laptop and make a song. But this time we realised that we could actually do it and it actually be good. Go straight to the source!”
On these infamous nights at the studio, the band would return from Cecilia with bottles of wine from the off-licence, get cracking in the evening with their bandmate and producer Reggie Goodchild, and often keep hammering away until nine or 10 in the morning. Over time, they realised that the best ideas started to arrive at around three.
This process is immortalised on 3AM (LA LA LA), a supremely fun dance-pop album about partying, written while partying, and to be absorbed while partying. It’s an ecstatic record that solidifies Confidence Man as the premier party starters of this new era of music.
It’s almost impossible to believe in their current guise, but Confidence Man began when Janet was holding down an office job, and Sugar was working in bushland regeneration, describing himself as a country music lover who “just wanted to sit on my deck and strum the banjo all day”.
“I always loved doing music, and Janet started singing on the drunk Sunday jams we used to do. We all realised that there was this whole other world of a band that could exist,” recalls Sugar. The debut Confidence Man album, Confident Music for Confident People, was released in 2018 and presented a duo determined to have as much unadulterated fun as possible. Lead single ‘Boyfriend (Repeat)’ saw Janet lamenting a partner who couldn’t keep up with her appetite for partying, concerned with too much thinking and not enough doing. Musically, it was a delightfully camp version of dance-pop that made them an instant hit at festivals worldwide.
When the party had to stop during the COVID pandemic, Janet, Sugar and Reggie were holed up at home in Melbourne during the longest lockdown on the planet. Second album TILT, written during this period, became a record of escapism, where they relied on “fake circumstances” to build the world of partying they envisaged. The pair made a fake club in the back of the house. “It was a bit Truman Show,” says Sugar.
He adds, “[TILT] was about having to get into our own heads and out of reality. This time, we were just like, ‘Let’s make the world a fuckin’ party and stay right here!’”
“We couldn’t make the perfect song! We make things slightly shonky and then live with it.”
Janet Planet
Across their three albums so far, Janet Planet and Sugar Bones have become one of pop music’s great double acts. Janet plays the confident, hedonistic ringleader, with Sugar her submissive, sleazy sidekick. “We really push those characters — the dominance of Janet and the submission of Sugar… Mr Bones!” he laughs. “That power play has always been really fun to play with, and it’s a funny gag that will never get old.”
Janet adds, “Having a dominant female frontperson with a slightly submissive male partner — you never really see it. We didn’t do it on purpose, but it happened like everything we do… a happy accident!” Sugar winces and says, “Just shreds of the truth coming through…” On stage during their action-packed and choreography-filled live shows, he begrudgingly guides Janet through all manner of dance routines and outrageous lifts, proving the perfect foil for his bandmate.
While personas and monikers are seen all across pop music, the Janet and Sugar that Rolling Stone UK meet feel indistinguishable from the larger-than-life personalities seen at Glastonbury and beyond this summer. When this writer interviewed them after their rapturously received Other Stage set on the Friday of this year’s Worthy Farm festival, they insisted that they were far too busy to sit and chat. Instead, they suggested a walk-and-talk through backstage, giggling while slagging off pop stars and beginning a night that saw them perform an unreleased song with Eliza Rose, and shut down the Greenpeace stage with their Active Scenes club night. Twenty-four hours later, they performed ‘Boyfriend (Repeat)’ at the NYC Downlow (well, Janet did, as Sugar slept through his alarm).
On 3AM (LA LA LA), they play up to their personas while backing them up in real life. “I’m such a sicko,” Sugar croons on ‘SICKO’, while Janet is the flirty and thrill-seeking main character. On the song ‘JANET’, they self-mythologise and share their love for each other. “Janet, you’re the ringing in my ears / I’ve been saying it for years!” Sugar sings, before she responds, “Sugar, you’re special just like everybody else!”
Such is the conviction with which the pair inhabit the characters that the rumour mill among fans regarding their real-life relationship is a consistently hilarious and almost certainly untrue delight. “Siblings or dating?” a flag held up at Glastonbury asked, with the ongoing guessing game far more entertaining than whatever the truth might be.
“We really push those characters – the dominance of Janet and the submission of Sugar”
Sugar Bones
While Confidence Man’s first two albums made a start at translating the pair’s dynamite chemistry and love for hedonism, it’s 3AM (LA LA LA) where the joke truly lands. The beats here are harder, the tongue-in-cheek lyrics funnier and more biting, the hooks sweeter and the concept executed to perfection.
“Last night I kissed a DJ / Don’t be jealous, he reminded me of you!” Janet sings on opening track ‘WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL FIND?’ over the kind of trance-like synth lines that define the record. Elsewhere, she flirts with the reggae singer Sweetie Irie on ‘REAL MOVE TOUCH’, demands her desired choice of music before getting high on ‘BREAKBEAT’ and reaches pure club euphoria on ‘SO WHAT’. “I know what I’m chasing,” she shouts on the latter track, with the end goal of blissed-out elation clear for every listener, too.
Also on the album, they lean into UK garage influences on the throwback ‘SO TRU’, produced by PC Music affiliate EASYFUN, and enter full-on dancefloor ecstasy on the closing title track.
3AM (LA LA LA) arrives after a year in which Confidence Man embedded themselves in the dance scene through a series of club-focused collaborations. ‘Now U Do’, featuring DJ Seinfeld, became a festival staple in 2023, while ‘On & On (Again)’ with Daniel Avery took them down a darker techno path, and the DJ BORING link-up ‘Forever 2 (Crush Mix)’ connected the dots between their dance and pop leanings perfectly.
In a move that proved themselves as a band for every mood, they also released the ecstatic instrumental track ‘Firebreak’ — played as a highlight of Charli XCX’s PARTYGIRL Boiler Room set in Ibiza — and launched a new Fabric Presents mix with the buoyant IN2STELLAR collaboration ‘BREAK IT DOWN (ON THE BASSLINE)’. It’s an overwhelming collection of music to release inside a year, but the consistent quality just shows a band on blistering form determined to release the soundtrack to any kind of party you could wish to attend. “We were on a red-hot streak,” Sugar recalls. “We were chomping at the bit!”
Anticipating Confidence Man’s ascendance to the pop big leagues, the band’s label aimed to get them in the studio with big-name producers and were hesitant about the idea of their all-night parties resulting in a great album. Then the band wrote the ecstatic dance hit ‘CONTROL’ on the first night, and the bosses changed their tune. “Keep going! You should go and do drugs today!” Sugar laughs of their response. “They saw the hits and let us be.”
He adds, “It’s all down to what your taste and vibe is. Jumping in with [a producer] just because they’ve had some success and made some hits isn’t really the connection we need. There’s a very low chance that you’re actually going to vibe on the same things. The success we’ve had in that way has always come from our end. We’ve made a weird situation for ourselves with the music we make, and it’s hard for people to get sometimes.”
The defining aspect of this unique approach to creation that Confidence Man implement is imperfection, as Janet explains. “We had no choice — we couldn’t make the perfect song! We make things slightly shonky and then live with it.”
Sugar adds, “Pure perfection isn’t beautiful, but if something is slightly off or eschew, that makes it beautiful.”
Sugar describes the level of honesty between himself, Reggie and Janet in the studio as “brutal”, saying, “We know it’s all for the song, and not each other’s egos. No one gets upset; we’re all just trying to make the song good. Trying to explain that to a newcomer at 3am is not going to work.”
Through this lack of perfection and return to messy maximalism, Confidence Man have managed to tap into the pop music zeitgeist of 2024, unintentionally riding a wave of what people want right now. “We’ve seen it with Brat summer,” Sugar says. “Those tracks are quite naughty and not very commercial but are some of the biggest tracks in the world right now. This new wave of kids growing up want something a bit more edgy. They’re not satisfied with a perfect pop track. The world’s more ready for a bit of heat in their tracks.”
“It’s lucky timing,” Janet says. “We can get away with being bad boys and girls now post-Brat. That’s what we always were anyway!”
They will continue to ride that wave on the tour behind 3AM (LA LA LA), which kicked off with their Glastonbury set and is sure to finally make Confidence Man one of the defining live acts of this era. In past years, they’ve donned Stop Making Sense-style enlarged suits, worn light-up cones on their chests, taken advice from the circus on their ever more elaborate dance routines and blown everyone else out of the water at festival after festival.
“We just walk around festivals with a huge plastic bag full of blood and other ridiculous things… people outside our crew look at us like, ‘What on earth is this?!’” says Janet.
This autumn, they will play their biggest headline shows to date, including two gigs at London’s re-opened Brixton Academy, and promise even more maximalism and ridiculousness. Ideas for the forthcoming tour include robot versions of Janet and Sugar, one of hundreds of ideas in Janet’s “creative bible” on her phone that have been a financial impossibility until now. “We need to go get our faces printed for the robots!” she says gleefully.
On 3AM (LA LA LA), at the band’s live shows, and every night until dawn at their studio, the idea for this new era of Confidence Man is to be bigger, bolder and brasher. It’s borne out on an album that is the perfect soundtrack for the end of the hedonistic, chaotic year that has been 2024, and there are no better party starters alive to guide you through it than Janet and Sugar.
Taken from the October/November issue of Rolling Stone UK – order it here now.