Sauce

Interview with Drew from The Panics by Tom Wilson

Triple J declared Cruel Guards “Album Of The Year.” How have you guys milked that for your advantage?
[Laughs] We’ve had a lot of interest from other parties that have never bothered to call us before; different magazines, and radio. We’ve got Don’t Fight It on commercial radio simply because of that happening … and, you know, being on TV! [Laughs] That was never really on the cards. It felt like we were kind of noticed … it was a good one to win.

I imagine it would make a really good comeback – if someone was disagreeing with something that you were doing musically, you could just come back and say, “Oh yeah? Well, we made Album Of The Year, so get f*cked!” [Laughs]
[Laughs] We haven’t really had to use that one yet, which has been good. We must just be talking to nice people! [Laughs]

You can let your ego run wild here – what do you think it was about Cruel Guards that kind of clicked with people?
I don’t know … this is how wild my ego will go! [Laughs] I guess … we were using strings and orchestration – what I can gather from it, anyway – a bit differently from other people. They weren’t really sappy, over-the-top ballads, you know? You put them on there and layer it so it makes some sort of huge f*cking Bon Jovi thing. That’s not what we wanted to do. We like … music like Martin Denny … he’s an old composer … [Ennio] Morricone – people that had a different idea of exotic and strange sounds, but used with great melodies, and used for a good reason, you know what I mean? It wasn’t just to back it up or wash it out or make it sound big or anything like that. We wanted each little sound to be its own little part, you know?

At this point, what plans do you guys have to follow it up?
We’re always writing, so we’re always going to be doing new stuff. We’ll probably have a couple of weeks after this tour of getting back into studio mode for a little bit, and nailing some stuff down. We’ve already got a couple of songs building at the moment. We’re always writing, so yeah, the next one is hopefully going to be a worldwide release … it could be really fun, having a bit more of a world sort of outlook on the release, and thinking about it in world terms rather than just [as an] Australian record, you know what I mean? Try to deliver on that world scale.

So you guys have got some international touring planned?
We’ve got some nice ones coming together now. There’s an agent in Germany who’s pretty keen for us to get over there in June, and while we were in the States and the U.K. we met agents that, you know … as soon as we get a record release over there, are willing to set something up straightaway. So definitely by the end of the year, we’re going to be spending more time overseas, which is going to be great – get the Cruel Guards around the world and see what other people think about it!

The Panics play Launceston’s Country Club Showroom on the 23rd of April, and UTAS in Hobart on the 24th.

Press play to listen to a full MP3 interview below: