It’s 9am in San Francisco and Confidence Man are having some creative differences. “Sugar wants to do a pantomime horse but there’s no way to do that in a hot way,” says frontwoman Janet Planet, talking through her bandmate’s plans to add more chaos to their already furiously fun live shows. She speaks a-mile-a-minute, hair wet from the shower, while her bandmate Sugar Bones lounges on the hotel bed. “People are really anti shooting lasers into the crowd, too. So if there’s some way that they can invent a laser that doesn’t burn out your retinas …”
A Confidence Man show lands somewhere between a school play and a rave. The Australian four-piece have been bubbling under since 2016 when they formed out of the ashes of various indie projects; getting drunk and writing pop tunes turned out to be much more enjoyable. Since then, every raucous festival set has won them new fans: even the most cynical, hardened “real music” nut would struggle not to be charmed by their irresistibly sugary Eurodance, or by Bones swinging Planet – often wearing a Madonna-style cone bra – over his shoulders. One writer accurately described them as “goth Aqua”: for all their slightly vampiric edge, with Bones topless and bleeding on stage at Glastonbury this year, they’re seasoned party-starters out to have fun, and fun is infectious.
