Fright club

One of the biggest bands to have emerged from the much-maligned emo genre are Las Vegas quartet Panic At The Disco. Having been together for just four years, the group – whose youth (all members are in their early twenties) and pin-up looks haven’t exactly hindered their swift ascent – have enjoyed a huge amount of success.

Their debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, went double platinum in the US, whilst their recently released second LP, Pretty. Odd., reached No. 2 on both the US and UK charts, and was also a top ten hit in Ireland. Although their music certainly isn’t my cup of Barry's, Panic At The Disco’s singer, Brendon Urie, turns out to be a humorous and likeable interviewee.
I start by asking him about the new influences PATD have incorporated on Pretty. Odd., which is more indebted to classic rock acts such as The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Kinks than the band’s debut. Does he feel Panic did those influences justice?
“Well, we didn’t want to copy any of their sounds, so hopefully that didn’t happen,” says Brendon on the transatlantic blower from Ruston, Louisiana, where Panic are tonight headlining the latest date on the 2008 Honda Civic Tour. “We definitely are very happy with the album, and I guess we’re a little bit more confident musically this time around. We’ve grown as musicians over the past three or four years, which isn’t to say we know that much at all – we really don’t, ’cos we’re still pretty young guys – but we’re playing and singing about what we know.”
Panic’s Beatles fixation certainly seems to be quite serious, with parts of Pretty. Odd. being recorded in Abbey Road. What was it like working in the legendary studios?
“It was great,” Brendon enthuses. “We recorded the strings and the horns there, and got to go there for ten days to mix the record. Being there, and seeing the nostalgic materials on the walls, the pictures and the records, it’s like, ‘Man, there’s a lot of history here.’ It was great to go to certain spots and hear the stories about The Beatles. I’d recommend it to any Beatles fan.
“But it’s interesting, we didn’t actually think about that at all; we just wanted to do everything in Vegas. We recorded the record in Vegas, and we thought we were going to do strings there as well. But our producer, Rob Mathes, who’s a great musician and composer, he actually really wanted to do them in Abbey Road. He fought for it, he said, ‘Strings really sound the best there.’
“We didn’t want to fight him, so we said, ‘Yeah man, let’s go to Abbey Road.’ It was great, he knew people there, so were able to get one of the best engineers.”
Going back to when Panic At The Disco started out, were the band acquainted with fellow Las Vegas act The Killers in their early days?
“You know, the Vegas music scene is so bad, that honestly you wouldn’t be aware of too many bands coming through,” explains Brendon. “I had no clue who The Killers were until they had gotten popular. I had seen them on a couple of local billboards, but it never really struck my mind until they had gotten big, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s pretty interesting’. But the Vegas music scene isn’t too friendly, so it wasn’t very common that we would bump into each other. But we have met them since they’ve become popular, and they’re very nice guys.”
Panic At The Disco have had some very elaborate and extravagant music videos, none more so than the circus-themed clip for ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’, which scooped the Video of the Year gong at the 2006 VMAs. It seems to be an area that the band pay quite a bit of attention to.
“We like to stay involved in as many aspects as we can,” affirms Brendon. “Anything that we’re going to be showing or be in, we want to have at least some kind of control over. Especially with videos, we like to have fun with those and vent some of our other ideas. We like to dress up and do some theatrical stuff. It’s never a dull moment with us, we’ll put ourselves in weird costumes and so on. It’s cool.”
Did the band find it startling to be rubbing shoulders with the glitterati at the VMAs just a couple of years after starting out?
“Yeah, we didn’t expect to be there, let alone win,” acknowledges Brendon. “That was a pretty surreal moment. We’re not huge fans, in the sense that we don’t really freak out over celebrities, but it’s pretty weird to be walking going, ‘Oh, there’s Paris Hilton, I’ve seen you naked in nightvision’. (Laughs) Do you know what I mean? Certain circumstances are pretty funny, and we’re very fortunate. We realise that, so we’re just having as much fun with it as we can.”
Brendon was recently quoted as saying that “Emo is bullshit”, which is a fair enough statement, even if the addendum (“We want to be the new Radiohead”) was slightly more cringeworthy. Is he now completely sick of the “emo” tag?
“It’s funny, I’ve just stopped yelling out stuff, because sometimes it doesn’t print very well (laughs). So when I say stuff like ‘Emo’s bullshit’ and then I see it, it’s like, ‘Oh crap! Everybody’s going to take me seriously!’ That was definitely taken out of context. I think what we meant by that was that the whole idea of labelling something as emo because it comes from a certain place is kind of narrow-minded. That’s what we were trying to say, but we really don’t really spend too much of our time thinking about it.”
Panic At The Disco’s first album contained a couple of lyrical references to the works of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk. Was this influence directly attributable to Brendon, or were all of the group fans?
“When we were 16 or 17, Chuck Palahniuk was definitely one of our favourite authors. He’s a very interesting writer, and on the first album, we wrote a song based on one of his books, and then we stole another quote of his for a different track. We just thought he was a very clever, sarcastic writer, and those quotes are pretty funny, and we wanted to emphasise those a little bit.”
Do you know if he’s heard the album?
“I think that he has, and we’ve actually been trying to get in contact with him recently, so we’ll see what happens with that.”
Are there any similar literary or filmic references on this album?
“I can’t say that there’s that similarity,” replies Brendon. “A lot of the lyrics are more honest this time around; there’s a lot from personal experience. Some of them that are made-up are kind of fantastical, fairytale-type lyrics. But for the most part, they’re
about what we were feeling when we were writing at that moment in time.”
And what we were you feeling?
“We were just feeling happy to be in a band. We were having a lot of fun writing songs and had a lot of good experiences. It was great.”

Pretty. Odd. is out now on Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen