Storytellers: The Panics

ANDREW MCMILLEN revisits our occasional “Storytellers” series, whose premise is simple: one song by one artist, discussed at length. This week it’s The Panics Jae Laffer talking about ‘Cash’, a song from their 2003 EP ‘Crack In The Wall’.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Four years before striking it big with their breakout, ARIA-nominated single ‘Don’t Fight It’ in 2008, Perth-based rock band The Panics released their third EP, Crack In The Wall. A stopgap between their 2003 debut LP House on a Street in a Town I'm From and 2005’s Sleeps Like A Curse, its seven tracks saw the still-young band yearning to find a sound of their own. Chief songwriter and singer Jae Laffer is the first to admit that their previous releases sounded like “guys imitating their heroes”, while doing a good job of it.

Crack In The Wall’s second track, ‘Cash’, is instantly appealing. The song opens with a finger-picked acoustic guitar riff, which remains a central motif even while Laffer’s bandmates build around that earworm riff. I meet with Laffer at The Hi-Fi in Brisbane in late 2011 after their soundcheck. In a few hours’ time, he’ll lead his band through a set which focuses largely on their 2011 release Rain On The Humming Wire and its precursor, 2007’s ARIA-winning Cruel Guards.

For the moment, though, Laffer is happy to cast his mind back seven years and relive ‘Cash’, a song he demonstrates and narrates for a few minutes while I film him near atop the venue’s staircase. After being interrupted by a couple of Hi-Fi staff, we relocate downstairs, where he continues to strum his guitar while we talk, eking out all manner of half-formed ideas and subconscious melodic curiosities. At one point I pull out my phone to play ‘Cash’ and jog his memory about a particular sound effect; he admits he hasn’t listened to it in a while.

Jae Laffer on ‘Cash’

‘Cash’ was off Crack in the Wall. I wrote it in 2004. We call it an album; it’s got seven tracks, and it feels like an album. But ‘Cash’ is a good example of what was on the record at the time. I’m trying to think of what we were listening to at the time. There was definitely a little bit of Radiohead in our life, that kind of thing. We’ve been big fans of English music for a long time. I can just remember simply doing that [guitar riff].

The title ‘Cash’ came because Johnny Cash died around the time we were rehearsing the words and writing the tune … At the time, I think because we were so into the Johnny Cash stuff that he was doing – the American Recordings stuff – we started calling the song ‘Cash’ because it had a country feel to it … It wasn’t about him; it was about his kind of character. It’s kind of autobiographical. It’s a hazy song but there was that uncompromising kind of spirit of someone like Johnny. The lyrics started to pour out like [sings], “He took his own life in a fire/To warm his hands, to feel it right.” … [It’s about] the people who give all for art, or for life, or whatever it is. That whole song kind of drifts along that. It’s just the timing of his death, what we were listening to, and just coming up with a riff that had a vague country feel.

Were you surprised when I asked to talk to you about this song?
Yeah, because I’ve never talked about that, apart from at the time when … it was on the radio a little bitt. It’s nice. People still request it. It’s a hazy kind of subject but it also seems to be full of purpose, and it’s catchy as hell. There's something intriguing about the whole thing. I like it for that reason.

I think of it as the ultimate Panics song, in some ways. It sums the band up well, lyrically and musically. Do you agree with that?
I don’t know. Because we’ve had a bunch of albums now I could probably think of half a dozen songs which sum up maybe that time, or a couple of years. It is quintessential and I think it’s the style of lyric and also it’s the soft-meets-really-thumping sound as well. We’re known for a few ballads, but at the same time the guys are all-out rockers as well … When we mix them together with my voice, which is – I’m not Tom Jones, I kind of rap along like that. That’s just how I sing. You’re right.

What do you recall about how the song came together? Was it that guitar bit that started it off?
Definitely. I can’t remember what we were listening to at the time, but it seemed to be very “of the moment”. I remember thinking that about the riff … It was one of the ones where you start playing it and realise you want to finish the song quick because you want to get it on the radio. It had one of those feels to it. It was cool like that.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

What are those chords?
I don’t know. We’ve got a bunch of songs where we always seem to play on that kind of thing. We started moving around as we go. It’s very simple. I’ve had a few songs in similar places [on the guitar neck]. [He plays another riff from a Panics song] I don’t know where that’s from, but something very early on. It’s that kind of thing. We used to have the chance to miss religious class at school if you were to do classical guitar. Five of us went to play flamenco guitar when we were 10. It’s come back to help me out a lot.

That chord progression, you said it reminded you of a few other songs.
I can’t remember what that is, but it’s the nature of that “carving” kind of sound. I was still big on Radiohead at the time. It’s that, mixed with a country feel, as well. It was a bunch of things that came together in terms of subject. Johnny Cash dying at the time got our attention and we were listening to a lot of him. I think that’s why I went off on some lyrics there that kind of seemed to be – not evil, but had kind of that dark character. That’s all I wanted, was some kind of dark character.

Menacing.
That’s the word, yeah.

Is it always the case that the music comes before the words?
Not always, but we just write a lot of music so there’s always stuff there. It’s more likely to happen that way, we just write music a lot quicker than we write words. It’s not always the case. In fact, it’s a genuine pleasure if I’ve come up with some words first because it’s a lot easier to finish something. It’s always been a little bit different formula when people ask sometimes, but it just depends where I am, what ideas come around.

I’ve met some songwriters who are quite guarded when it comes to discussing lyrics. Are you OK discussing certain phrases in the song?
Yeah, of course, but like I say, it was a hazy time. Sometimes it can just be a long train of thought.

Lyrically it’s quite compact, or laconic. Looking at the lyrics printed out, they’re all really short lines. Were you trying to use as few syllables as possible?
I don’t know, I think I was just starting to get into that idea of how good it felt when you rapped on a song. It’s biting, it was so rhythmic; it was a lot of fun. I didn’t think about it too much, but you could hear the song happening before it happened. You just wanted to hear that voice that was just kind of rolling along with the riff at the same time.

It’s almost like a travelling vibe.
I think that was evidenced straight away. You feel like you’re rolling along. You’re instantly outdoors, or you’re in a car. It’s just that kind of thing, that “stranger on the motorway”-type thing.

I don’t know if you’ll take this as a compliment or not, but I get that in quite a few of your songs.
I do, because it’s conscious in my head that that exists. It always feels like a road movie, a lot of this stuff that I write.

You told M+N a few months ago, “I’m not the greatest fucking singer in the world, but I can always go back and listen to my voice and tell what I was feeling.” Can you tell what you were feeling in this particular song?
Yeah, this was a time when I was still getting to know my voice, though. I could hear it at the time. It’s not overly strong and confident but it does sit back with the music. I haven’t listened to it in a while. I don’t remember it coming out as hard-hitting as perhaps I’d liked … The Crack in the Wall stuff is all very sparse and atmospheric. I think ‘Cash’ went a bit that way, even though it’s a really outward pop song.

I’m not sure what your protocol is concerning writing songs, but did the guys write their own parts for ‘Cash’?
Yeah, I think, but they all followed that main riff. Drew [Wootton, lead guitar] did a riff that was kind of the same, he wrote the bit that was kind of countering what I was doing. I can’t remember what Paul [Otway, bassist] plays, but he’s doing something over the top that is very similar to mine but he’s kind of going against the grain. That worked very well, too. Jules [Douglas, guitar] is doing his slide stuff. That was when he was discovering he could do the slide and he was very happy because suddenly he had this new role within the group …

We were starting to get into Neil Young and cool, slightly country but folky slide guitar and all that. It was exciting. We were trying to be dramatic as we could … Our first album was guys imitating their heroes, like most bands do, doing a pretty good job of it but also I think we wanted to be a bit more hard-hitting, dramatic. We just wanted to be taken seriously, I think. So a bit of a shadow started came across a lot of the music.

There’s a spacey sound effect going through the whole song, which comes to the fore at the end. Do you remember what that was from?
I can’t remember; it was a piece of outboard gear, just something that fucks with sound. It’s the engineer getting really involved. It’s this beautiful studio in Perth, a big Masonic lodge [called Kingdom Studio]. It was a lot of fun. I don’t really know much about audio gear, but I remember it wasn’t working very well, the whole recording of it. Then all of a sudden that was a nice way [to end it] … [the engineer] just wanted to come in and drift off with it in a way. It went a lot better after that.

That vocal melody at the end, it sounds like you’re all singing along. Is that the whole band, or just your vocals overdubbed?
It’s me and Jules at the time, I think. It could have been all of us. We were doing a lot of that at the time, where we would stand around [a microphone] and clap together … It’s not really in tune. [Laughs] But it’s cool.

You mentioned the Masonic lodge. What sticks in your mind when you go back to that period with the band’s career? You were between albums at the time.
The first album didn’t do too bad, but it wasn’t world-breaking. It was that time where you went, “What do you do now? Put an album out, go on national tour?” We were very happy because we were 20, and a band, finally. It was that thing like I was explaining before, that idea that we needed to start becoming more unique, or making something that was our own.

I felt like we hadn’t pulled off a lot of the grand ideas that we wanted to do on the first album … Like I said I think I wanted to step into subject matter that was a bit more deep in the heart. Some of the other stuff on Crack in the Wall; the title track was this strung out little thing, and ‘In Your Head’ was the first proper love song [I wrote]. I still play it [live] now. ‘Close Enough Ain’t Good Enough’; they’re cool tracks. I was very proud of them. I was just trying to start finding my own way, lyrically.

I remember feeling very confident at the time, but also kind of chilled out about the whole thing, not really knowing where we were going to go, but feeling very confident. I wouldn’t do [Crack In The Wall] now, because if I had seven songs to burn, I’d wait for an album. But at the time I was like, “Songs are easy! This is great!” I look back and laugh. It was only a few months later that we were putting together Sleeps Like A Curse, which I’m immensely proud of. That’s what I was thinking of at that time, let’s just do an album every three months. It was a really cool thing.

I could’ve just as easily asked you to talk about ‘This Day Last Year’, because I think it and ‘Cash’ both sum up The Panics’ sound.
Yeah, but they’re both all atmosphere, it’s all about that. It’s a feeling and an energy. It’s coming up with words that feel like they’re part of that environment and energy we’re trying to create with the song. ‘This Day Last Year’, it’s pretty vague but it just had a feeling, and we were throwing out images that matched that. I like that, because it was that typical thing of being young and just throwing it together like that. It was a great feeling, yet it’s still meant to exist, it’s not about anything too specific, but it’s like your brain finally creatively learning to work. It’s finally seeing all these pictures for the first time and just writing down what they are.

Did ‘Cash’ feel like a breakthrough for you at the time, in terms of songwriting? Or was it just building on top of your past work?
No, the whole batch of songs on Crack in the Wall felt like a breakthrough. It didn’t feel like it was going to take over the world - which it didn’t - but it did feel like we were expanding all of our knowledge of making songs. It was enjoyable watching them come together … I knew I wasn’t making an album, so I felt like I was trying a whole new way of being creative in subjects and things. Then I was making preparation for the next album, just by making an EP. So I remember thinking, “This is going very well”.

I’ve got a quote from you in 2003, an interview you did. You said, “The pressure we put on ourselves is greater than any other. We ignore the outside world and just get on with the job.”
Yeah, absolutely.

That’s pretty consistent. That’s eight years ago.
It is, but we’ve been good like that. That’s why we’ve got the same guys together [in the band], the same high school mates. We haven’t made the album we wish we’d made yet. We feel like we can make something far greater, but we keep trying different things and we always feel like our standard of what would make an amazing album in our eyes is higher than any journo we’ve met, or anything like that. It doesn’t matter and at the time, during these first albums, people were trying to occasionally bring you down a bit. That was new to us, but I think we came by really well just because of our faith in the future. People were kind of going, “Oh, your first album didn’t do that well,” and all that. I’m very proud of my younger self; I was shrugging at the time. I thought, “I’ve got at least five or six albums in me, so one of them’s going to hit home.” I just didn’t mind. It was just that confidence.

What advice would you give yourself as a songwriter seven years ago?
It’s a tough one, because I did quite well. I’ve learnt the right way, I think, slowly. I’m still learning now but I’d probably tell the younger self to live his life and not obsess all day, every day because there’s other things you can be doing with your time in the meantime, or you’ve got to live your life to get the songs out of it, and not just sit around. If you can’t write a song looking at the wall all week, go and meet some people. Have a nice time.

How do you rate ‘Cash’ in comparison to your newest material?
I haven’t bothered to compare. I find it not far off. It’s good, we’re playing some of the older stuff now and I realise we’re just as proud of some of our earlier stuff as we are of some of our stuff now, as well. Maybe I was a different person six or seven years ago, but I was still representing my thoughts honestly. That’s why I appreciate the songs. It’s very much the same thing; I’ve kept a similar level of sincerity. I appreciate that I was being playful and trying new things with that song, so I still think that’s what I should be doing now as well.

Will ‘Cash’ make a reappearance live eventually?
Yeah. In fact, we only stopped because we never missed it. We played it every gig, for four years. We just gave it a break a year ago. It’ll make another appearance, because it’s got great energy.