The lore around the creation of Confidence Man's third album begins at an unassuming east London café. As the Australianborn, 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 in the morning.
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".
This story is from the October/November 2024 edition of Rolling Stone UK.
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This story is from the October/November 2024 edition of Rolling Stone UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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