There is a fine line between an obsessive fan and a stalker – anyone who stays up late watching questionable movies starring Jennifer Jason Leigh or Ali Larter is well aware of this phenomenon. I’m curious to know if All Time Low have ever actually experienced this for themselves, or if the band have come away from any fan encounters in genuine fear for their lives or personal safety. “I haven’t really feared for my life …” Barakat says with a laugh. “When we toured South America last, the fans were getting really rabid. We were trapped in the van at one point with them beating against the window and rocking it from side-to-side. At that point, we were really thinking, ‘Okay, what are we going to do if they break in?’”
All Time Low’s new album, Don’t Panic, arrives this month – it is their fifth in total, and first since leaving their deal with major label Interscope to once again go independent. “I just think that Interscope didn’t know what to do with us,” Barakat says of the split. “They had never really had a band like us who had seen success in the scene, and they didn’t really know how to translate that into mainstream success. So we kind of just recorded the album on our own and decided to do the label stuff later.” All Time Low’s Interscope album, Dirty Work, featured all kinds of bells and whistles – including a collaboration with Britney and Rihanna producer The-Dream – so going independent again meant an overall sense of freedom and liberation for the band.
“We literally just did whatever we wanted, we made the album we wanted, and it was just All Time Low,” Barakat explains of the recording sessions for Don’t Panic. “We didn’t want a lot of people in the studio to distract us. For a lot of the time, it was just Alex alone in the studio with our producer Mike Green, really carefully crafting the song in the way they wanted. They’d spend hours in there writing, and then we would come in and learn the songs and add our flare to them.” It was just the kind of relaxed experience that the band craved this time around. “It was just us – there was nobody speaking in our ears or telling us what to do,” Barakat says. “That’s not to say we’ve never had creative freedom before, but this time, it was literally just us, and that was a really great feeling.”
The band weren’t all alone in the studio, however – one of the new songs, Outlines, was co-written by none other than Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump. “I believe that he contacted Alex one day, he texted him to say that he was writing songs while Fall Out Boy was on hiatus, and that they should write a song together,” Barakat explains. “They didn’t know at the time where the song would end up, but we fell in love with it when we heard it, so now it’s ours!” Fall Out Boy have been on a break for three years and counting so the individual member can pursue their own projects, but All Time Low are still a tight unit after five albums, and I ask Barakat what it is that keep the band together. “I think it’s the fact that we all came from the same place, we all started together,” he says. “We grew up together, so we know how to push bullshit off to the side and make it happy – it’s easy to achieve a goal when you all share that same goal.”
All Time Low are no strangers to Australian crowds, and will return here for the fifth time next year to play Soundwave. This upcoming tour, however, will likely be a highlight for the band. “It’s funny,” Barakat says, “because at first, we weren’t going to be at Soundwave, but then I saw Blink-182 were doing the festival, so I tweeted at AJ that we needed to be on that bill too. When I was a kid, I used to watch videos of Blink 182 playing at Big Day Out and I thought they were the coolest things I’d ever seen; it had always been a dream of mine to play at a festival with them, so as soon as we got that opportunity, I knew we had to make it happen. Australian crowds are always great, we’re going to put on a great show, so yeah, it’s going to be awesome.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
