Road hogs get ready to start shifting gear

By REBECCA BARRY

PanAm drummer Cole Goodley looks puzzled. "What happened in Rotorua?"

"See," says bass player Jarrod Ross. "You can't even remember."

The penny drops. "Oh no. You can't say that."

Ross continues, smirking: "We were just being drunk with the video camera ... "

Frontman Paul Barrett pipes in: "Videoing our testicles."

The band's name, the aeroplane broach on Barrett's denim jacket and new songs Cigars in the Suitcase, Japanese Girls and Interstate Boy are further clues that PanAm's favourite place is on the road.

They have just finished their fourth national tour and are preparing for the next onslaught of gigs to promote their self-titled debut album.

Yet unlike his alter ego, Interstate Boy, Barrett admits he has never been to America. His family used to host Japanese girls but he's never visited Japan.

"I have no idea what it would be like. I'd love to go to Japan, the UK and America. That's pretty much the goal. I just see the New Zealand thing as a dress rehearsal for that, really."

It's been a successful practice run - plenty of airplay on local radio stations, big single Long Grass ending up on a Vodafone TV ad, favourable reviews of 2001 EP New Concepts in Sound Recording and an invitation to play South By Southwest, a huge music industry showcase held in Texas this year.

But producing the album themselves meant spending intense periods in the studio at Barrett's Mt Albert home, and they couldn't afford to take time out to do the Texas gig.

There was plenty of material to consider. Songs such as Supa Sam, Song 1 and Long Grass were written up to five years ago, when the band first got together.

Barrett and Goodley met at high school, a relationship forged out of a mutual love for their fathers' record collections.

Ross, originally a guitarist, joined later, despite never having played bass before, and the band, whose original name Barrett is too embarrassed to disclose, started playing old covers.

"I remember going: 'Shit, this really turns my crank. I've got 10 years' worth of listening right here.' I could listen to a Jimi Hendrix record 30 times and still get things out of it."

Their love for 60s music explains the album's tambourines, glockenspiels, "la-la-las" and "oh yeahs". The vocals were influenced by the Kinks and John Lennon, says Barrett.

"The challenge is turning something nasty into something good. With Supa Sam, I think of an ex-girlfriend, I think of being wasted, angry. For me, songwriting is about the good and the bad, it's not something you can be overly positive about."

Not everyone has been overly positive about PanAm, either.

"We have been told we could mix it up a bit," says Goodley.

So they sped up the last song on the album, made it grittier and more rock, and included a combination of their happy-go-lucky pop songs - Japanese Girls, Long Grass - with the darker melodic themes of Song 1 and Natural.

"I've always had this really strong desire to get something out into the world," says Barrett. "When we were in high school I thought, 'Gee it would be great to be signed to Flying Nun, but we'd never be cool enough.' Since then we've realised we deserve it."

Flying Nun's parent company, Festival Mushroom Records, will release the album in Australia and the band say they have heard murmurs of interest from further abroad.

Despite frequent touring in their own country, Barrett is the first to admit their songs "take the piss out of being New Zealanders". Even his cellphone's answerphone message is delivered in an exaggerated American accent.

"New Zealand is a beautiful environment to make music, to write music, to play it - but it's a pretty useless environment to make any money out of, to really get a solid career going. I think all the bands coming out of here do share a certain otherworldliness to their sound. You can't make music without being influenced already.

"There's this tendency to love America but hate it at the same time and what it stands for. It's not just a country with an idiot for a President and it's not all McDonald's and Burger King and bloody crap sitcoms on television.

"It's where rock'n'roll was born, it's where the great road trips have happened; it's the great powerhouse of the 20th century. It's kind of fascinating in that sense.

"It's just that ambivalence, like: 'You call yourselves PanAm but you're not even American. But that's kind of the point."

Performance

* Who: PanAm

* What: Debut album, PanAm

* When: Out Now