Getting cooked with Confidence Man

Heavenly helped kick the door down for the move to the UK, a path well-trodden by the likes of Kylie and Saz from Peep Show. For years from Clapham to Clapton, Australians and New Zealanders have frothed on London, enamoured by its lax laws around drinking on the street, ‘pub culture’ and cheap drugs. Although it’s safe to say two-year-stay Sally from Manly isn’t playing Glastonbury as soon as she gets out of the gate at Heathrow. It was the one-two punch of playing the Park Stage in 2022 and then releasing their album ‘Tilt’ that catapulted Confidence Man into the British clubbing consciousness, turning tunes like ‘Holiday’ and ‘Feels Like A Different Thing’ (tracks that mined the heady vibes of Primal Scream’s acid house era and Dee-Lite’s flower power) into certified festival bangers that simply had to be heard in an open field. It solidified a move that felt pre-destined… kinda.

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“Jeff [from Heavenly] was like, ‘You’ve got to come to the UK, you’re gonna be huge.’ And we’re like, ‘what the fuck are you on about?’,” says Sugar taking another drag. “They just embraced us with open arms. There’s some underlying connection with that. It was never intentional.”

“It also makes me wonder if we did start tailoring what we were doing in the music we were writing to the UK because of that influence of how open they were to us,” contemplates Janet. “It makes me wonder if we were going to do it anyway, or if we did it because we were loved and accepted by these people, and we thought we were understood by them.”