With their exuberant take on ‘90s dance music, Confidence Man are invariably the hottest live act in town. They’re not for everyone, though, as the band discovered when they took up Noel Gallagher’s invitation to support him on his 2022 High Flying Birds tour.
Speaking to The Standard, Confidence Man frontwoman Janet Planet says that their friendship with Gallagher goes back to 2019, when the band enjoyed a night out in Melbourne with the Oasis guitarist, Bono and The Edge. “Bono’s actually a naughtier boy than you would expect,” says Planet. “I was very impressed. He drank twice as much as I did.”
Back to Gallagher, though, who was clearly enough of a Confidence Man fan to extend the invitation to open for him. Sadly, though, Noel’s fans weren’t as willing to accept Planet and her fellow Confidence people - co-lead vocalist Sugar Bones and producers Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie (not their real names) - as he was.
“They were mad,” Planet admits. “At this show in Margate we finished this song and there were 5,000 angry geezers standing there just… dead silence,” adds Bones.
Despite this setback, though - unsurprisingly, Confidence Man won’t be supporting the reformed Oasis next year - Planet is grateful for the opportunity.
“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,’” she says.
Happily, other British audiences have taken Confidence Man to their hearts. It certainly helps that the band’s sound is at least partially rooted in the UK rave scene, but Bones says that the band’s distance from it (they hail from Australia) has also worked to their advantage.
“Getting pieces of it but not getting the whole story is probably a good thing because we can then really destroy it and break all the rules,” he says.
Despite forming in 2016 and having three albums under their belts, Confidence Man have been longlisted for the BBC’s Sound Of 2025 award, which is typically given to an artist or band that’s tipped for a breakthrough. They wrap up the UK leg of their current tour with three shows in London this weekend.
