Photos courtesy of Panchiko
It’s one of the internet’s most beloved music stories: a CD from the year 2000, D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L, found at a charity shop in 2016. A four year search for the mysterious identities of the long-defunct “Panchiko” followed, with a community of dedicated fans eventually helping to bring the band back together. Starting with the release of their demo compilation Ferric Oxide (Demos 1997–2001) in 2020, the band then released Failed at Math(s) last year, their debut album over 26 years in the making! It’s been a whirlwind of a career for Panchiko, who approach their transition from day jobs to rock stardom with both shocking grace and dry humor.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with the band about their upcoming tour, why they call themselves “pop music,” and their interactions with Destroy Lonely.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Ethan Kung
Ethan Kung: Do you guys ever get tired of being asked the story behind D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L, or is it like “Mr. Brightside,” and it never gets old?
Shaun Ferreday: Our drummer [John Schofield] would argue about “Mr. Brightside” getting old!
Andy Wright: Yeah, he’s had enough of that song. Anyways, it doesn’t get boring because we change it every time – we just change the whole story. We made it all up, so…. *group laughs* Ok, we didn’t really make it up!
Owain Davies: It’s like… how much detail do you need? ‘Cause I go through loads of detail on it sometimes. So how do we shorten it into bite-sized chunks of each member finding out about it? Like, “I found out about it first, then contacted Andy… then what’s Shaun’s reaction to it?” Then it goes down the chain of (tiredly) “How did you feel… where were you at the time…” But it’s a really wonderful thing, innit? It’s lovely to be asked about it. We just want to do it justice and not bang on about it too much, I think!
Andy: It’s quite easy to become a bit like, “Yeah… and then it was super exciting, and blah, blah, blah,” but it is genuinely amazing every time we tell the story. It’s a crazy position for us all to be in. We’re all over the moon about it!
Shaun: It’s nice that people still ask, to be honest – that they’ve cared for long enough to ask loads of times!
Ethan: And it’s such a great story, which is probably why people think it’s made up! It’s great – we’re living in the only time that it could have happened, with how obsessed people are with things like lost media.
Andy: Yeah, it feels like a lot aligned for us to crawl out of the woodwork again. Here we are – to make little sad songs for you… enjoy!
Ethan: Well, it’s good to know that it doesn’t get old, because that means I can ask more questions about D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L! *group laughs* It’s been 24 years now since that EP originally came out, and I’ve heard some musicians say that it can be kind of hard to connect with the music that they made when they were younger. Do you guys ever feel that way when you listen to or perform those songs now?
Owain: We perform it differently, though! When we first were going to tour and do gigs, we weren’t sure how people were gonna react to it, so we worked on a different way of playing the songs. We definitely didn’t try to play them like they were on the demos, because that couldn’t really happen! I don’t know if people agree with that, but it was fun to work out different bits for the songs.
Shaun: It’s a very different feel. It’s more of a rock show now, isn’t it?
Andy: I think that’s the trick. It doesn’t get boring, because I don’t think it’s the same. I don’t think it’ll ever be boring to play in front of loads of people who seem genuinely happy to see you!
Ethan: On those original versions of your songs and the demos that you were talking about, I feel like there’s a real Radiohead and Nirvana influence behind them. Are those influences still present with you guys, and do they still resonate with you? Or have your influences and what you listen to changed a lot over time?
Owain: For me, Nirvana never gets old and Radiohead is always good! I’ll just say things have expanded, though I tend to like most of the bands that I liked as a teenager. There are a few I wouldn’t listen to as much now, but it’s expanded to more genres! I listen to loads of neoclassical stuff now. At home, I’ll listen to whatever to mix it up, just so that it’s not only indie all the time.
Andy: I only listen to sine waves. Sometimes I’ll listen to a triangle wave, just to mix it up.
Shaun: That’s not even that unbelievable! I’ve fully embraced my old age, and I do still listen to the same stuff that I listened to then. But like Owain said, you’ve got more stuff available to you now. You don’t have to go out and spend all your money on one album, in case you like it. You can think of anything, or hear a clip of something somewhere, and instantly it’ll be at your fingertips. You’ve got a much wider palette to draw from now.
Owain: I like that when we were first contacted by people, we learned about a lot of music that I hadn’t really listened to before. So a lot of people in our Discord group would be like, “Oh, do you like this band? Because you sound like them!” And sometimes I’d be like, “I’ve never heard of them,” but finding out about loads of new artists – that was brilliant. I thought it was really cool to fight against becoming stuck in my ways about what I liked, and keeping an open mind about what the younger generations are listening to. I’d never heard of Alex G before! People like listening to Alex G and Mits-
Andy: Mitski. 100 gecs…
Owain: I really got into 100 gecs, yeah! I genuinely feel really grateful for those interactions, and people letting us know about what they like about music now. Or how they thought it might sound a bit like what we do, which… I’m not sure it actually does!
Ethan: On Failed at Math(s), there’s a bunch of finished demos, some of which sound totally different from their original versions. How did you guys approach the mental process of going back to those tracks – making whole new instrumentals and sometimes lyrics for them?
Owain: It was an interesting process. Some of the lyrics were done, and it was just about producing them again.
Andy: We had a pretty good idea of how we wanted the songs to be, those years ago. But it was difficult, because none of us had really tried to… well, I don’t suppose a lot of people have really tried to think of how to finish a song that they thought of 25 years ago! We were all pretty busy as well, so it was a bit of a blur for us. We just kept on messing around until it seemed like “a thing.” I think it worked, up to a point.
But I don’t know if there was a particularly concise thought process involved, because that’s only sort of starting to become a thing now, when we started writing again. Whereas before, we would all be hopping around our jobs, trying to squeeze in a few minutes whilst everyone was running around like crazy in the real world. But now we’ve got a bit more time because we don’t do the real world stuff as much! We just sit around thinking about chords. “Oh, I like this chord… that’s a nice one… oh, that’s a lovely chord… lovely.”
Owain: Maybe I’m digressing a bit, but it feels liberating now – we can do some new stuff. Whether or not people like that… well, sometimes revisiting things can just be daunting. Don’t know if that’s fair to say, but you can probably never get it quite right. You can do your best! But you probably can’t ever get it to be what people thought it would sound like, or what you thought it might sound like in your head.
Andy: Yeah, it’s never quite how you want it to be. But if it was, that’d be weird as well. “I’ve just done this, and it sounds exactly how I imagined!”
Owain: But you know what? I think if I’d heard what we did recently when I was 20, I’d probably be like, “Oh yeah, this is amazing – I love it!”
Andy: Aw, definitely! Twenty year old you…
Owain: He’d be like, “Well done mate!” *group laughs*
Ethan: I can’t imagine the expectations that people must have had for hearing those Ferric Oxide demos be finished. Even though “Gwen Everest” and “Think That’s Too Wise” sound so different from their demos, I love them so much. So I think you guys did a great job of finishing the demos up!
Owain: That’s really nice of you to say, I appreciate it! Sometimes it feels like you just can’t meet everybody’s expectations, so that makes my day!
Ethan: Honestly, it’s always hard to pick which versions to listen to. Especially “Rocking with Keith.” I can never decide which one I like more, because the demo and the new version are both really good.
Andy: “Rocking with Keith” is the only one that we have the stems for from back in the day because you had your old multitrack, didn’t you Owain?
Owain: Yeah, it was on my multitrack. It was the only thing that still had some stuff because it had been buried away. So you were able to actually put it through the computer-
Andy: And give it a little spruce. But I think it really kept a lot of what it was supposed to be. It was lovely to be able to revisit stuff with so much detail – to have the capacity to go into the drum beats and the guitars. On other stuff off of Ferric Oxide, you can’t even really make out the guitars because it’s so lo-fi. I love all that stuff – the less notes the better, sometimes! But it was nice to approach things as more of a full rock band kind of thing, and to think about how people might enjoy it when it’s a thousand people staring at you, expecting it to be fun. Like, “Make it fun. Make me have fun now!”
Ethan: On the topic of making songs, you guys have been playing some unreleased material recently. When you’re making new music, are the expectations of fans ever on your mind?
Andy: I think it’s in the back of your mind. But we just have fun when we’re producing stuff. That’s how we did it before, and that seems to have worked! You can’t really make everyone happy with everything you do. So long as you make yourself happy, that’s probably enough, isn’t it? Everyone else is along for the ride!
Owain: If whatever you’re making is coming from a good place, it’s sincere, and you mean whatever sentiment is behind your song, then it’ll mean something to someone.
But for me, what songs people like and what they’re expecting more of… I really like what you were saying, Ethan – that sometimes it’s hard to choose which one you want to listen to. I really like hearing that, because there’s definitely albums that I like where I only go back to three songs on it! That’s quite good to know when you’re making stuff, because it means that someone likes it… and then you might write another version that someone else likes! It’s like a box of Quality Streets – loads of different stuff, with something for everyone in the end.
Shaun: And there’s a lot more people expecting stuff now.
Ethan: About a million of them – you just hit a million listeners on Spotify today!
Shaun: Which is about a million more than anything expected previously! So it’s a little more pressure, isn’t it? But I don’t think we really think about that…
Andy: We very much know our own little bubble. If you thought about what everybody else wanted, then you’d drive yourself mad, wouldn’t you? That’s probably not a good idea. You can’t make the song that’s going to make everyone go, “that’s the one – that’s great.” It’s not gonna happen. But maybe people can find little bits that they love. Every band that I love, probably half of their back catalog I don’t listen to, but the other half I just truly love.
Shaun: Like Andy said, you can’t really write what comes into your heads. You can’t really set out and go, “I’m going to make this specific song that’s going to sound like this!” It doesn’t really work like that, does it? You can only write what comes out, and if people don’t like it, well… that’s a bit tough. You just have to wait for the next one! *laughs*
Andy: Wait for another one – there’ll be more!
Owain: We’ve enjoyed playing the new songs, anyway. They’ve been received quite well from what I’ve seen, and people seem to have a good time hearing them. So it’s been a lot of fun going down that route!
Ethan: Speaking of playing your songs, can you give us any info about the upcoming tour? Are there going to be any more new songs to play, or old songs getting added to the setlist?
Andy: There’s going to be old songs and songs that people have asked us to do over and over again. We’re always like, “yeah, we’ll do that next time,” but we’re quite lazy. Learning a song… that sounds terribly involved! So we’ve been concentrating more on newer songs, but I think this time, there’ll be a couple of older ones too.
Owain: Cannot confirm nor deny! Like Andy’s highlighted, there’s definitely something about our situation where it’s always important to have a good listen to what people are asking for. There are certain things that stick out that people say, like “I really want to hear this one, or that one.” And we think, “Well yeah, sounds good.” So maybe we’ll do one more old one that hasn’t been played live? Is that a good target for us? Not two, that’s too much… let’s negotiate now!
Andy: I would say two. We can do two, can’t we? It’s only a bunch of chords at the end of the day.
Shaun: Probably not that many chords. We might have to get rid of some of the other songs though – we can’t get all of that in our heads in one go!
Andy: Yeah, my mind… it didn’t used to be very good, and now it’s really, really bad. *group laughs*
Ethan: For your tour promotions, you guys have taken to calling your shows “pop music shows,” and your songs “pop songs.” You recently posted the chords for “Gwen Everest” on your Instagram, and were like, “This is a pop song with pop chords!” What’s up with that?!
Andy: “Why do you keep on saying fucking pop songs?!,” that’s what you’re asking, innit? *group laughs* I normally do the posts, and I pretty much refer to every genre as pop. So I’ll refer to Panchiko likewise. I’m sure Owain loves that.
Owain: I love it! It makes it not-so-easy to understand, right?
Shaun: People weren’t sure what genre we were, and pop covers loads of stuff!
Andy: You don’t want to be too specific about things. We’re definitely not a pop band, so it’s more fun to call our songs pop songs.
Shaun: Welcome to the pop show! It’s just our idiocy, really. That’s all it is.
Andy: Yeah. We’re just stupid.
Ethan: Well, it’s funny to me, because people are always trying to categorize you guys. I’ve even seen you guys be called vaporwave for some reason. So why not just completely ditch the idea of categorization entirely, and just say “pop?”
Andy: Yeah, people call us vaporwave… shoegaze… I don’t know if we really like to stick too closely to any genre, but I’m pretty sure we’re not shoegaze! It’s just arbitrary nonsense, and I think this highlights it. Call it pop. It’s just some songs that people can listen to and hopefully enjoy.
Ethan: It’s been about four years since you guys performed your first show, post-reunion. Do you guys feel like you’ve acclimated to life as full-time musicians now?
Andy: No, I don’t think I have. Certainly not! It’s good though, because we have a bit more time.
Owain: It’s a privilege. It’s crazy that people want to come see us! I definitely feel more comfortable playing now, and that’s a real joy. So hopefully people get a better experience when they come see us, because we’re not absolutely bricking it!
Andy: I don’t know if any of us were destined to be on stage. *group laughs* But we do it anyways, because it’s super fun. We keep getting ourselves in situations: the venues just get bigger and bigger, and we just get more scared! Like, “oh, that’s not good, is it? How many thousands of people is it this time?” Yeah, I don’t think we’ve got used to it. There’s so much stuff that we all have to do in the real world as well. Me and Shaun are parents! I have to change nappies – I have to do that!
Shaun: I don’t have to do that anymore.
Andy: I’m a guitarist! I’m the guitarist in Panchiko, I shouldn’t be changing nappies!
Shaun: Having children is a great way to bring you back down to earth again, because you can play to a couple thousand people, then walk through a door and get abused as soon as you get in! Then you know that you’re back in the real world again. It’s really good at grounding you.
Ethan: Do you think your careers outside of being performers have helped you ease into playing live shows and making new careers out of it?
Andy: Shaun did tree surgery.
Shaun: I can say with full confidence that it helped me… in no way whatsoever with doing live shows! Didn’t even help a little bit. But that’s not a bad thing, because it’s really nice after 25 years in one profession to have something new and fresh to work towards. It gives you goals again, and stops you from being complacent. So it didn’t help, but it made me appreciate being able to do music more.
Owain: You’re only comfortable if you’ve got a chainsaw on stage, Shaun? Is that what you want?
Andy: It would make a sense of impending possibilities. “Why has he got… why is he revving his chainsaw?”
Owain: Who’s he gonna take out? What’s gonna happen?
Ethan: One lucky member of the audience gets to be carved up at every show!
Owain: You can do some nice sculptures, Shaun! I mean, I used to be a teacher, so I worked with people in the age range of some of our fan base. I still like watching anime, reading graphic novels, and playing games. It’s not like you’re cool around people that age when you know about that stuff, but I became used to having conversations with people in their teenage years and their early twenties. So that might’ve helped with having chats with people after our shows.
Andy: I would literally have to google words, because I didn’t understand what people were saying.
Ethan: Yeah, I was watching an interview of you guys, and they were asking you some really funny questions. One of the questions was something like, “if you guys are Radiohead for twinks…” *group laughs* And you guys had no idea what this guy was saying! I laughed so hard at that, but you guys had a really good answer at the end of the day: twinks are welcome at Panchiko!
Owain: It’s good to learn about everything, isn’t it? Better than pretending you know about it – it’s helping everyone understand each other!
Andy: I got a message from Destroy Lonely after that interview just saying, “why did you call me a naughty boy?” *group laughs* ‘Cause you’re a naughty boy!
Owain: That’s what Andy does, he calls people naughty!
Andy: He seems like quite an imposing fellow… but he seemed quite hurt!
Ethan: That’s actually given me a lot of closure! I wasn’t sure if you guys ended up just ghosting each other, or…
Andy: No! Every six months or so, he’ll get in touch and say, “we should do a song together.” And I go, “Yeah, that’d be great!” Then he doesn’t speak to us for another year, and it’s really difficult to work at that rate! *laughs*
Ethan: Okay, we’ve got time for one more question! UCLA is a place where a lot of aspiring musicians are trying to start their careers. What advice would you guys give to them?
Andy: I would say to try your best for a while, then give it 20 years. Don’t bother doing anything, just wait. And leave a CD at a charity shop.
Owain: Certainly the thing with us is to record your music. Hopefully, that’s a lot easier to do nowadays. Also, do some weird stuff! Like when I had the Sega Saturn CD, put it in my CD player, and realized that there’s a sample in there that we can use in a song. Little did we know that it’d resonate with people. People are like, “what’s this sample? Why is it saying ‘don’t play the track?’” Where you make music from and where you find your inspiration from… it might not always be an instrument! It might be a piece of media, or a story, or something else that really means something to you.
I’m not saying it’s genius to talk about various anime in your songs, and to put video game soundtracks in them! But I’m really glad we did, and maybe that’s what resonates with people. So write what you know! What you’re going through, what it means you, what things that influence you, and what it is about your generation that makes you… you!
Shaun: And don’t get too stuck in your own head with thinking, “Oh, I really want to write… pop songs,” for instance.
Andy: Like we do.
Shaun: Don’t get hung up on trying to write a song in any certain genre. Just use whatever comes into your head! You might come up with an amazing symphony, or you might come up with some R&B, even if that’s not usually the sort of music that you like. Like Owain says – record everything and go with what comes to you. Don’t fight it!
Andy: Do what you want and you’ll find an audience. Whether it’s big or small, it doesn’t matter, so long as you’re having a good time and recording something that you care about. That’s the important thing in the end.
Check out Panchiko’s music and socials below:
