Adri Machado

Once the darlings of gloomy emo teens, Panic at the Disco have discovered the joys of 60s rock, love songs and 'orchestral' numbers. Dave Simpson finds out what cheered them up

In the calm of a Boston dressing room, Panic at the Disco preview their imminent Glastonbury appearance by bringing up their most notable performance at a British festival: at their Reading appearance in 2006, frontman Brendon Urie was knocked out by a bottle. "It hit me right on the temple and I just kinda blacked out," he says, recalling how he recovered to find his entourage fearing that he was dead. "I just said to the band, 'This is weird. Keep playing!'"

They did, the boos turned to cheers and the young band won over the crowd. All of which seems par for the course in Panic at the Disco's career: Kerrang! magazine once voted them best and worst band of the same year; NME dubbed them the worst band of 2007 but now likes them enough to put them on its cover.

Panic's latest challenge is to win over their own audience. Their debut album, A Fever You Can't Sweat Out, sold 2.2m copies following its 2005 release, establishing the Las Vegas quartet as the rising stars of emo. But the follow up, Pretty. Odd., has seen Panic take a curious career swerve into classic 60s rock. Though it entered the charts at No 2, and has sold 600,000 copies, it has sold more slowly than its predecessor on both sides of the Atlantic, suggesting that a youth subculture associated with self-harm and teenage alienation is struggling to come to terms with songs that owe more to the Beach Boys and the Beatles than to My Chemical Romance.

After initial confusion, perhaps the fans are coming round. Panic's recent British dates saw blue-haired teens plastered on alcopops rocking gently to their unlikely but effective cover of the Band's 1968 song, The Weight, while after we talk in Boston they will play to a crowd of 5,000 screaming girls. Still, although Pretty. Odd. sounds like it would be better appreciated by an older audience, Panic hope their fans - who guitarist Ryan Ross says "are impressionable, but open to things ... they really don't hate everything" - will follow their own trajectory. When the band made their debut, they were punky teenagers; now aged 21, they listen to "classic rock'n'roll".

"You don't realise how long three years is until you go away and write an album," ponders Ross, the reflective yin to Urie's livewire yang. Initially, faced with the pressure of following enormous success, they holed up in a Nevada cabin, ditched their guitars and drums and proceeded to make songs Urie describes as "orchestral", which sounds very like the scene in This Is Spinal Tap in which bassist Derek Smalls declares "hope you enjoy our new direction" as the band unveil Jazz Odyssey. Like the Tap, Panic decided to "come back to Earth before we lost it all".

The seeds of their musical shift were sown in 2006, when they began playing the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby in their live set. For Ross - Panic's main songwriter - discovering the Fab Four was a "mesmerising" moment, which led him to his current listening: the Beach Boys, Dylan, the Stones, the Who. Brendon Urie had a similar road-to-Damascus moment listening to his parents' records. "When you're in junior high school and into punk rock and skateboarding, you rebel," he says. "But then you hear those albums and it's, 'Fuck, this is really good.'"

It's debatable whether Panic were ever really "emo" in the first place. Modern emo fans, the stereotype holds, wear black and look depressed; Panic's early gigs featured vaudeville showgirls and people being fired from cannons. The emo tag stems from their association with Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, the impresario of emo, who discovered the band and signed them to his Decaydance label, and whose own fans provided Panic's initial audience. Nevertheless, the front pair of Panic have backgrounds that sound straight out of emo central casting. Like Brandon Flowers of the Killers, Urie grew up in a Mormon family in Las Vegas. He describes his childhood as a "suburban American life", but at the age of 12 he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and put on prescription drugs, which rendered him "a vegetable" for the best part of two years. He was also bullied at school. "I had a lot of fun talking to people," he shrugs, visibly uncomfortable. "I guess a lot of people don't like talking." Ross is more upfront, describing high school life as "vicious". Though the pair went to different schools, they were both picked on for being lower-middle class in schools where most of the children came from wealthier families.

Mormonism didn't set Urie apart from other kids - 70% of his schoolmates subscribed to the religion - but at 15 he drifted somewhat from the faith. He started smoking weed and listening to jazz and punk, and formed Panic with Ross and drummer Spencer Smith. When the band first started, Urie would have to skip rehearsals to go to church, but as he became more rebellious, he started rowing with his parents and staying away from home. However, the vivid anti-religious imagery of A Fever You Can't Sweat Out doesn't stem from Urie's life: it was Ross who wrote the lyrics, drawing on his experience in a Catholic high school. "They were trying to outsmart 17-year-old kids," he says. "I'd say, 'What about eastern religion? Are they going to hell?'"

Ross's parents split up when he was young - so young, in fact, that he can't remember them ever being together. His mother was "a free spirit, she moved around a lot", and he was brought up by his father, an ex-marine. "Sometimes I'm not as open to loving," he muses. "When my dad got mad, my mum wasn't there to say, 'You're OK, don't worry about him.'"

In Ross's teens, his father became an alcoholic, which the guitarist puts down to boredom and loneliness after leaving the military. His condition worsened when his son started going away touring. But though Ross admits he felt guilty about abandoning his father, he says his parents had told him not to stop his own life in order to fix theirs; by the time his father died in 2006, he and Ross had been reconciled. The experience brought the band closer together, too. They realised they didn't want to be a magnet for the gloom-laden their whole career, and chose a different approach to life: "enjoy it while we can". That shift is most apparent in Pretty. Odd.'s almost straightforwardly love-oriented lyrics - something of a turnaround following the first album's litany of apparently very bad women.

"One bad woman," corrects Ross, pointedly. He admits he hasn't had the greatest female role models, given his absent mother and his growing up around Sin City's showgirls. And the woman who inspired the likes of Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off was his girlfriend from home, who had cheated on him, ending their three-year relationship. "At the time it felt like the world had ended," he says. "I hated everything. It affected that whole album. I guess it's good that I wrote it down. I might have stabbed somebody."

The anger towards women in a lot of emo songs has led to accusations of misogyny. Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz responded: "We don't hate girls. We hate everybody." However, Andy Greenwald's book Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo notes that in emo songs females are never given names; their whole existence revolves around the impact they have on the guys singing the songs.

Urie ponders this for an age before conceding that Panic's older songs "are demeaning, in a way". "But only to one person," counters Ross. "It was meant to make her feel bad."

Panic's predominantly female audience seem to understand the difference. However, three years on, Ross is in a different mental place. He is in love - as are most of Panic (only Urie remains single, insisting he is "too busy being 21"). Meanwhile, outside the dressing room, a poster reminds Ross: "Don't forget to call your mother today. She loves you despite ... " After two decades of hurt, he recently buried the hatchet with his mother.

"We've all got more mature, because we had to," suggests Ross. "Otherwise we'd have broken up." "We had fights," says Urie. "Not fist fights, but verbal. Viciously verbal." He swears that this has changed, though he is grinning as he adds: "We're well behaved and get on really well with our parents. We're well-adjusted guys."


Source: guardian.co.uk