panic interview

panic! interview

kay, well i found this in the panic forum thingy here on buzznet. and dont ask me what mag, cause i have no idea. lol. but if anyone of you know, that would be great if you could tell me :D

Let's thanks Drew8890 for writing all of this! Thank you so much!

This interview will tell u a lot about Panic!, trust me it will.

Under the sweltering twilight of a toronto summer sky twinkles a fairy light-strewn windmill and a grinning top-hatted ringmaster, flanker by a pair of beautiful burlesque dancers who pout and preen at the 8,500-strong crowd. Part Broadway glitz, part cabaret sass, part full-steam ahead rock show, undeniably it's one of the most unashamedly joyful spectacles anyone will witness this year. And its all thanks to the four young dandies at the centre of this meticuously organised chaos who are hell-bent on tearing down the boundaries of what todays rock shows are supposed to entail.

Ten months ago no one had heard of Panic! at the Disco. They had no deal, theyd never played live, and they were on the verge of losing their singer to a career in hairdressing. Today, headlining their biggest show yet, they've got a platinum album under their belts (a million and a half copies shifted and counting), three nights at Brixton Academy coming up (two sold out, the third well on the way) and a gleaming future ahead of them. Theirs is a shooting star in the ascent and their peers are scrambling to keep up.

"I've done a lot of things that I never thought I would do,"understates guitarist Ryan Ross after the show. "This has been the most exciting year of my life.

The seeds of Panic! at the Disco were sown in the suburbs of Las Vegas, where the bright lights and seedy thrills of the city fade into a drab routine. It was here, living on the same street, that drummer Spencer Smith and guitarist Ryan Ross met as children. They became best friends, playing little league baseball, street hockeyand skate boarding -badly- together.

Smith's childhood was, he says, "super normal." He took up drums at 12 -when fellow Blink 182 fan Ross got his first guitar- and his parenst have supported his ambitions since the pair started rehearsing in their garage.

Ross, meanwhile, found growing up a more tricky prospect. As fragile as a porcelain doll - as if a strong gust of wind or the wrong words would crush him to dust- he writes the clever lyrics that frontman Brendon Urie sings. He was outgoing as a small child, but somewhere along the line he became crippilingly shy. Keen to give his son a good start in life, his father, an ex-marine, worked to send him to a private Catholic school -although Ross is an atheist- hoping to provide the education he never got. Ross found he had little in common with his wealthy classmates.

Meanwhile, his home life was falling apart. His parents split up when he was young; he hardly ever speaks to his mother and rarely sees his two brothers. Which meant he was left alone to deal with his father's growing problems with alcohol -as beautifully portrayed in the song "Nails for Breakfast, Tacks for Snacks". Ross' fights with his father were exacerbated by Ross' decision to concentrate on the rather than going to college.

"He was pretty much dead set on me going to college and I got a scholarship," he says quietly. "He thought i was tupid for thrwoing that away. His problems with alcohol magnified and skewed things even further. I was not staying at home for weeks at a time. I was staying with my girlfriend, staying with other guys in the band. There were times when i almost had to sleep at our rehearsal space cos i didnt have anywhere to go. Obviously I loved him and I cared about him but when you're getting kind of abused by that person, at the same time its really hard to try to help him"

Across town was tussling with his own, vastly different,upbringing. Born into the ultra-conservative Mormon religion, which required himto go to church everyday before school, at the age of 16he began to question the teachings hed been forced to live by.

"I started thinking more and realised that you dont have to do this," he says, chewing on a packet of Gushers, fairly disgusting sweets he's addicted to that explode in your mouth like bugs on a windscreen. "It's a great upbringing for younger children cos its so tight-knit, everybody's so welcoming and loving. But when i got older there were so many restrictions, and they wouldnt ever really explain it to me. Theres a lot fo double standards, like the whole dietary thing - you cant drink caffeine but you can eat a bunch of meat. It didnt make sense.

How did you rebel?

"I was probably the most rebellious out of all my siblings, like in the seventh grade you smoke weed for the first time or ninth grade you just go to a party and get wasted for the first time. I think thats how it is for a lot Mormons when they hit puberty."

While Urie was busy going off the rails, Smith's former classmate Brent Wilson transferred to his school. Future frontman Urie had recently walked out of the school's marching band ("our teacher just was blatantly an asshole"), and stuck up a friendship with the new boy in guitar class. A couple of weeks later, he was fronting Panic! Shortly after that, life, famously, took on a bizzare fairy tale quality when Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz heard 'Time To Dance' and Nails for Breakfast...' and signed the band -then yet to play a single gig- to his Decaydence label. Suddenly Panic! meant everything, but to Urie and Ross' parents it looked like they were throwing their lives away. Both found themselves unwelcome in their own homes.

"That was really rough," says Brendon. Ryan was going through the same thing, getting kicked out. I had only this shitty Smoothie Hut job that had to pay for practice space rent and an apartment. That was was just really tense for a while. Then we finally left for recording and it just got lifted. It was freedom and independence again."

After five weeks sharing a one-bed apartment -and a minor incident where Urie lost his mind and decided to quit the band to go to hairdressing school in Arizona ("I was sitting at the door with everybody just looking at me like "ur an idiot," he remembers)- they left the studio with 'A Fever You Can't Sweat Out', an unclassifiable debut fizzing with life and youth , the irresistible tunes thrown into sharp contrast with the cynicism and anger of Ross' precocious lyircs. Everything from the elitism of the rock scene, to a cheating ex-girlfriend and his relationship with his father is a target sugared by the unashamed pop of the music but still as potent.

Of the four, its Ross who seems the least equipped to deal with the pressure of fame. Quiet, tiny and mature beyond his years, he only really looks comfortabel onstage, where the smiles that flit between him and Smith illustrate just what hes in this for.

"I'm kind of an introverted person," he admits. "I keep to myself a lot. Its part of the reason I dress how I dress onstage. I'll wear make-op to put on a costume so I'll feel like I'm not so much myself as I am a storyteller or an actor. It definitely helps my confidence."

Watching them pull off another flawless performance in Montreal, it's hard to believe that Panic! have only been playing live for nine months. At their first ever show, in Vegas, the buzz around their album had already spread so quickly that 300 people showed up.

"We were the worst band ever," grins Urie. "We were horrible!"

By spring they were in the UK supporting The Academy Is..., and it was here that -while never exactly in Motley Crue league of debauchery- Brendon Urie became the band's designated booze hound.

"I got to the point one night where I was just sloppy," he remembers. "I got three hours of sleep that night. I woke up still drunk and felt like I was going to throw up. I like to have a good time, its just the way i feel afterwards, when i wake up and feel sick to my stomach. I just couldn't handle that. I've been an ass in many senses of the word. Understandably given his backgorund, It's something that upset his bandmate, Ross.

"Thats tough," he says. "I dont drink and Spencer doesnt drink and its hard for me to see people I care about drinking. It upsets me just because I dont like how people act when theyre drunk. I didnt want to be around it. It's still something I'm trying to figure out how to deal with in other people."

Urie, a case of ADHD if ever there was one, is a born frontman. The youngest child of five, he's always been an incurable show off who thrives on attention -hes costanly singing, wisecracking, and talking 19 to the dpzen about nothing at all.

"I've always been an outgoing, hyperactive kind of kid," he says. "When I'm in a crowd I feel comfortable."

The combination of personalities - the serious, poetic Ross, the grounded Smith, the hyper Urie- was a winner, with one small chink in the armour. By now, their relationship with the bassist Brent Wilson had crumbled. He was fired, via telephone, a couple of months later.

"Having Brent in the band was bringing us all down because he was so detached from all of us," Ross reveals, "Uninterested in anything to do with the band or any creative ideas. It felt really unhealthy. We weren't getting along to the point where we weren't talking."

"There'd be days where the only time I would see Brent would be onstage," adds Urie. "I would only see him for 40 minutes that we played. It was horrible. We weren't sure if he was going to show up to anything. Jon's [Walker, their new bassist] first show with us happened because we couldnt get hold of Brent."

Along with the internal fights, Panic! recently found themselves dragged into a feud with Vegas indie fops The Killers, whose attack on the band mirrors a venom they seem to attract as readily as the devotion displayed in the venue tonight.

"Emo, po-punk, whatever you want to call it, is dangerous," spat frontman Brandon Flowers. "There's a creature inside of me that wants to beat all those bands to death."

"I would highly doubt that any members of The Killers has been to one of our shows," says Smith calmly. " I doubt that they've listened to our CD straight through, like we have theirs. I've seen their band live, we're putting on more of a show than they have ever put on."

"I won't say that i hate them as people because I've never met them," says Urie, "And I'm still a fan of their album, but I'll say that it's very disheartening to hear that they don't like our band for these reasons, and that they talk so much shit. It'll come back and bite them in the ass."

Nevertheless, they are a band that polarise opinion like few others. To some, they simply haven't gone down the accepted path of "paying their dues". Why, the argument goes. should they reap the rewards without spending years in a stinking van? It's something they're actually aware of.

"I do feel like a lot of people do hate us before they like us," admits Chicago native Walker. "Even with me, there was defninitely preconceived notions of lumping them with Fall Out Boy. But as soon as i saw them live I didn't like this band before i had heard their songs."

"It seems like a lot of bands start out and it takes them a year of playing local shows and practising five times a week to get to the point where they have the creative ideas to write great songs and do great things," adds Smith sweetly but firnly. "That's fine, but we were just at that point before we played shows. If we did bad just because we were at that point before we had to go out and play endless shows then that sucks, sorry."

After the show, the screams emanating from the 200 fans waiting outside the tour bus are more piercing that the sirens wailing their way towards some unnamed emergency across town. After posing for pictures and sgning aitographs, Panic! escape to the aftershow wind-down consisting of little more than a burger and a round of dice game Cee-Lo.

"I don't drink or smoke, but me and Ryan have gambling problems," laughs Smith. "It's all chance, so nobody can actually be better. But Ryan lost a lot of money to me in ping pong. It started out a $20 game, double or nothing. It went back and forth, and we ended up playing a game for$2,000, and I won, and I've never seen him more mad in my life."

Outside, the crowd's not leaving, the most obsessive fans desperate for one more glimpse of their young idols.

"Brendon has the most," says Ross. "I think its strange to be idolised by anyone. We're just normal people."

"Yeah. I'll be hanging out with Ryan and I'll be thinking its weird that girls want to have sex with him, because hes not attractive," smirks Urie. "Just joking! There was a great one the other week. These girls paid $200 to airbrush my face onto XXX large shirts. They also got dog tags lasered in of my face. Then they came to another show with visors with a picture of me and Ryan on them It's flattering but then at a certain point it gets kind of eerie."

There has to be a bigger reason why this has happened than Fall Out Boy's patronage, otherwise Gym Class Heroes would be massive too. And with hundreds of pretty boys out there, it has to be about more than how they look. The fact is, with the exception of my Chemical Romance, ther's no one else in the rock world doing what Panic! are doing now, from the genre bending, literary pop-rock of their music to the sheer scale, ambition and fearlessness of their live shows. How many rising rock bands would dare turn down the guaranteed kudos of the Warped Tour to concentrate on the thetare of their own show? But it's working.

"We're not doing what we're supposed to do," reasons Ross. "But we're doing what we like to do. We just try to be different and to challenge ourselves. I'd like to think it was just because people are looking for something different, and music that's still inspired. Its boring going to shows now. Bands don't put on a show. They just play their songs and stand there, maybe throw their guitar around their head and then they go home. Cool, but I can sit in my room and listen to the Cd if I wanted that. I would like to have a new band trying to do stuff like this. i'd like a challenge, I'd like somebody to try and outdo us."

"Calling out to The Killers right now," grins Urie, with the expression of a boy who knows he has the world at his feet as the circus rolls on to the next town. "Why don't you guys step it up a notch?"