“It’s the biggest venue we’ve ever done,” says Janet Planet about Brixton Academy, where her band, Confidence Man, will perform two sold-out gigs this weekend. “I haven’t actually been yet. It’s very cool to go for the first time and play there.”
Her comments neatly sum up where the Australian quartet find themselves in late 2024. Their irresistibly euphoric dance music has earned them a reputation as one of the hottest live acts around, hence playing to almost 10,000 people over two nights. Their stage show is a riot of acrobatic dancing and eye-popping costumes, which invariably end up strewn on the floor.
As relatively new London residents, Planet and her bandmates are still in wide-eyed, Tiggerish discovery mode about the city’s nocturnal haunts. Their most recent album 3AM (La La La) is a London-loving paean to Nineties British dance music. Brixton Academy, a key crucible of rave culture back then, could prove to be 3AM’s spiritual home.
Confidence Man are part of a new pop vanguard in which artifice and exuberance co-exist. They’re essentially the clubbing branch of the Brat phenomenon spawned by Charli XCX, a lifestyle defined by hedonism, messy empowerment and imperfect defiance. There’s a thrilling element of unpredictability to their shows. At one point Planet and male co-singer Sugar Bones fall backwards onto a concealed mattress. Injuries aren’t uncommon and flips will go wrong (“It would be great if we died on stage,” says Planet says at one point). But mistakes don’t matter. Their attitude is almost punk.
“Luckily for us We’d never be able to do ‘perfect’ anyway because we don’t have the skills. Sugar will fall off the stage and be covered in blood. We’ve always been imperfect, and our goal has always been to be a little bit reckless,” says Planet. Post-Covid, people want visceral “real” experiences and not “pop princess perfection”, she adds.
Bones agrees as I chat to the pair from their rehearsal space. “It’s an exciting time in pop music because, until recently, it was the rock stars who are doing drugs and being wild, and pop stars were very clean and tailored. The Brat thing has really opened it up. It’s naughty pop. Anyone can do anything.” The movement’s here to stay. “You can’t put it back in the box,” Bones says.
Confidence Man have traction too: Bono and Noel Gallagher are fans; in June they played Glastonbury’s vast Other Stage having performed on the far smaller Park Stage the year before; and two weeks ago the band were longlisted for the BBC’s Sound of 2025 poll.
Confidence Man play “silly, sexy dance music”, according to Bones. “With lots of lasers,” adds Planet. “Lasers, tits and beats,” parleys Bones. They’re as irreverent as interviewees as they are in concert and, as might be obvious, they use stage names offstage as well as on it. The band also comprises instrumentalists Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie, who play anonymously in black beekeepers’ outfits.
Planet and Bones claim that they’re siblings. Or lovers. Or cousins
As well as the pseudonyms, Planet and Bones claim that they’re siblings. Or lovers. Or cousins. Or second cousins, depending on whim. They won’t tell me their ages. This shtick can grate but Confidence Man create a tide of positivity that’s very easy to be swept up in. And they live the lifestyle. The hedonism is real — very real.
All four bandmates live together in Dalston, having moved from Brisbane in 2022. “We have one bedroom with two bunk beds. We go down a fireman’s pole into the kitchen. We only eat Coco Pops. There’s a ball pit,” says Bones. Right. Their songwriting process involves day-and-night-long drunken sessions in either the studio or at home. They “let it unfold” with “zero rules or expectations”, says Bones. “Sometimes the best things happen in the later, looser hours. It’s a method that we’ve been doing for years and, I dare say, mastered.” Do they get high when they write? “Yeah, yeah,” says Planet.
This process is vividly reflected in third album 3AM (La La La). Sicko sounds like Nineties British electronic duo The Beloved, Far Out nods to Orbital, while So What could have seamlessly fitted in a Top of the Pops episode from 1993 between 2 Unlimited and Utah Saints. Jimmy Cauty of The KLF, whose track 3AM Eternal is referenced in the album title, is a mentor.
The LP sounds like the “psychedelic pop-infused tribute to UK rave culture” that Dua Lipa threatened Radical Optimism would be. Growing up in Australia, the band admit that these cultural reference points were at some remove from them. “Getting pieces of [British rave culture] but not getting the whole story is probably a good thing because we can then really destroy it and break all the rules,” says Bones. There’s cheese too, with knowing winks to Aqua’s Europop and Britney’s dance moves.
One fan in Bristol asked Planet to spit champagne into his mouth
British fans instinctively understand the band’s “campy dryness”, says Bones. They’ve received wedding invitations. One fan in Bristol asked Planet to spit champagne into his mouth, which she did (the fan said it “was the best moment of my life”). Back home in Australia, though, not everyone gets it. “When we do a New Year’s Eve show at Sydney Opera House, we get comments from all the old Karens, saying, ‘What the f*** is going on here?’ There’s just always been some instant understanding with UK fans,” says Bones. And they adore their new hometown, although Bones would like pubs to stay open later (although “stunted London nightlife is still better than Aussie nightlife”).
It was back in Melbourne in 2019 that Confidence Man had a big night with Noel Gallagher and U2’s Bono and The Edge, who were touring together. Margaritas flowed. “Bono’s actually a naughtier boy than you would expect. I was very impressed. He drank twice as much as I did,” says Planet, adding that an assistant would pop up to refill their glasses as soon as they were empty.
Talking of Australia, Planet and Bones are cryptic when discussing their history. Planet says she and her “brother”, referring to Bones, come from Caloundra, north of Brisbane. Fine. But they met bandmate Goodchild at “the club” in Brisbane, where Goodchild warned Bones against Planet (his apparent sister) because she’d stolen some money.
Naturally such evasion elicits curiosity. So here’s what a quick internet dig reveals. Bones is actually called Aidan Moore and he was — possibly still is — also frontman of a Brisbane psych-rock band called Moses Gunn Collective, whose latest album came out in 2022. Also in MGC, according to the Discogs website, is (or was) Lewis Stephenson, who performs in Confidence Man as Goodchild. Stephenson used to be in a band called The Belligerents who released an EP in 2012 featuring backing vocals from one Grace Stephenson… aka Janet Planet.
Watch Confidence Man live and the last thing on your mind will be their history
So are Lewis and Grace the actual siblings here? The truth is, it doesn’t matter. Watch Confidence Man live and the last thing on your mind will be their history. Believe me.
Not that everyone has fallen for Confidence Man’s bombast. In 2023 they supported middle-aged indie-dance stalwarts New Order. The slot “wasn’t the easiest”, concedes Bones, “but it was way easier than Noel Gallagher.” He and Planet laugh at the painful memory of supporting their old buddy Gallagher’s High Flying Birds in 2022. It turns out that guitar-based Britpop and silly, sexy dance music aren’t natural bedfellows. Planet says the crowds weren’t just dismissive, “they were mad”. “At this show in Margate we finished this song and there were 5,000 angry geezers standing there just… dead silence,” recalls Bones.
The band learned from the experience. “People have said, ‘Would you support Oasis?’ And the answer is no, but not because we don’t like them — we love Oasis — but because [the fans] just hated us,” says Planet. But she’s thankful to Gallagher for giving them a chance. “It was nice for Noel to do that because he must have known it wasn’t going to go down well, but he thought, ‘They can suck it up because I like them.’”
It looks like Gallagher learned from the experience too: Oasis’s support at next year’s reunion shows will come from meat and potatoes indie rock acts Cast and Richard Ashcroft. It’s Wembley’s loss.” This is a band on the up — “It’s not like we’re going out there aiming to be bigger than Beyoncé, even though, you know, it wouldn’t necessarily surprise me,” Planet says — though more realistically than Beyoncé-style world domination quite yet, they have future festival headline slots in their sights. “What else do you have to do to get to headline? Because we’re literally ripping our clothes off three times in a set. We’re falling back onto a bed behind us!” says Planet. “Who do we have to sleep with?” says Bones. I suspect it won’t be long before these lively adopted Londoners become the headline act.
