The Panics have certainly come a long way and travelled many miles in the process since their humble beginnings in their home state of Western Australia. The now Melbourne-based group have well and truly become an international entity; spending the majority of their time over the last few years both touring and residing overseas. For Laffer, it’s all about soaking up the different cultures and different atmospheres of foreign cities and using it as inspiration in their music; something that the group as a whole enjoys. “Well we’re lucky enough to have made a few albums and we understand if we’re away and travelling and doing a bit of touring overseas, if you can attach the recording, you know the making of, being creative, it can have a great effect on the music or the writing,” he admits. “But also the general head space and everyone in the band wants to keep working in places that you find exciting and you know, we’re very lucky in terms of being able to get together and go somewhere like New York. We just knew we’d have a really good time so it was our way of making it interesting.”
The trip to New York that he is referring to was when the band was overseas last year and in the midst of recording their majestic fourth album, Rain On A Humming Wire. Having written the record whilst residing in the north of England and in between tours, the band then jumped on a plane and crossed the Atlantic to record it in the town of Woodstock, just outside of New York. It was a process that the band planned deliberately and one that clearly had a direct and profound impact on the themes and sounds that are found on the record. “We started the record when we were on tour over in England which has a very unique atmosphere in itself and we did a lot of writing there which brings out whatever it is in us and in the music and then we took it over to New York, in a forest and it was like a completely different feeling.”
The band then had the privilege of mixing the album in the famous Electric Lady Studios in New York City, which was a creation by none other than Jimi Hendrix. It’s a place that has a continuous influx of some of the biggest and most influential bands and musicians around. “It was right in Greenwich village, right in this great part of Manhattan. It was a great thing to be able to wake up in a place like that, catch the subway to somewhere as special as the village and get off,” recalls Laffer. “You know, you’re working with really special people and a lot of great bands are in there at the same time. It just felt really good and we had Kanye West up above us in a studio and the Beastie Boys were in there and it was really, really cool.”
With The Panics currently in the midst of a rare stint in their adopted base of Melbourne, they are taking the opportunity to play a number of shows to round out the touring for Rain On A Humming Wire, with a headline spot at this year’s Moomba festival being one of them. “We released a record in September last year so we’ve been touring and playing a lot of last gigs for the whole kind of promotion for the record so it feels like we get to kind of finish of celebrating with a couple of these shows. So it should be fun, I haven’t been before; I’m looking forward to it.”
As has been the case throughout most of their career, The Panics aren’t ones to stay in the same place for too long and Laffer assures me that they will again be jetting off overseas when it comes time to begin work on album number five. “Yeah we’re working hard on some new songs at the moment, there was a bit of a gap between our last two records,” he admits. “It’s an exciting time. I’m looking forward to what the band is going to come up with and I’m enjoying what I’m hearing so far and there’s a good energy in the group and what we can show people over the next year or so.”
BY JAMES W. NICOLI
