Panic! at Bush Hall
Honouring the esthetics of "Fever Era" Panic! At the Disco
As I listen to music mostly through CDs, I find I’m more often of a fan of an individual project rather than those behind it. However, some projects which meld both auditory (music) and visual components (CD design) in such a way that creates tangible entity will intrigue me to delve further, rather than surface level enjoyment. Reading articles, watching live performances and so on. This melding of components, I believe, was the strength of pre-split Panic! At the Disco.
Panic! At the Disco is a rare case where I am a fan of not only the music but also the band members and the live performance aspect as well. For the sake of this page, when I say Panic! At the Disco (or Panic!), I’m speaking about pre-split, as from 2009 on it is a different entity with the same name.
You probably have heard a song by Panic!, you may know the band was creation of a then seventeen-year-old Ryan Ross with his childhood best friend Spencer Smith and demos caught the attention of Fall Out Boy’s bassist, Pete Wentz on LiveJournal and you may know of the creative split, those who wanted to go more minimal and those who wanted the theatrics. If you want to know more about the band, I recommend this article as a jumping off point.
Pretty. Odd. is my pre-teen sweetheart and will always be my Panic! album, but I have recently found a love for the band’s debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat out, that could rival it, due purely to the physicalness of the project. The band, with all the people who assisted them creatively, made such a specific being that the Fever era has become almost tangible, and that snapshot of time and album cover will forever be synonymous with the name Panic! At the Disco.
The crown jewel of this era were the tours, especially the tours from the summer of 2006 to the end of that same year. They were a spectacle. Highly choreographed right down to the stagegay. The panache, the extravagance, the theatricality: It was so sincerely weird, drawing from highly underutilised stylings and influences, but were substance with the style, with contemporary critics praising their covers of Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’ and The Smashing Pumpkin’s ‘Tonight, Tonight’. They were putting on a show so put together and yet had miraculously only been playing live for less than a year and were mostly in their late teens, putting their own money into it to put the show they wanted on.
I’ll be looking mostly at the “Summer Tour” (the band’s first headling tour) and the Nothing Rhymes with Circus tour with incidental mention to the shows in Brixton, which were the closest anywhere outside of America got to these legs.
Big thank you to whoever runs the prettyoddfever account on tumblr. I used her write-ups and collected primary sources, including video reuploads, as fact checking and images she had sourced are on this page. If an image which you took has been used on this page, please let me know so I may credit you or if you would like me to remove it. Any grammar errors, let me know. I'm dyslexic.
It’s impossible to talk about Panic! At the Disco during this era without talking about the impact the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque had on the look of the band. Founder Dream Rockwell directed the performance portions music video for ‘I Write Sins Not Tragedies’, which led to the band getting her and her troupe back to do the tour, with her directing the performance of the tour. She was key to how Panic! during this time is perceived.
Only Katie Kay was the consistent member of the troupe to perform alongside the band during the Summer Tour with Brent ‘Shrine’ Spears and Dream Rockwell being rotated out in the second half for Roger Fojas and Erin ‘Dusty’ Maxick so they could fulfil other projects.
Costuming for the Summer Tour was led by Jake Oliver (who spoke with prettyoddfever in 2020), with four other students from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, NY, working alongside him. Each was given a specialty in either vests, shirts, trousers, or jackets and three weeks from concept to sourcing to sewing and fittings.
Inspiration was drawn from the Baroque movement, musicals like Moulin Rouge, English Dandies and New Romanticism, with two complete outfits being made for each act of the performance for the band and back-up musicians, cellist Bartram Nason and keyboardist Eric Ronick. The stylist who took over, Anthony Franco, continued to take inspiration from the team that proceeded him, expanding on their ideas for the European and Circus tours.
Probably the most famous piece made for this tour is the Rose Vest, the red rose adorned waistcoat, worn by Ryan Ross in the second half of the show. I am especially fond of the asymmetric trousers designed for Ross for the first half, with the leg of green and white stripes and the unused waistcoat designed for Spencer Smith. I wish Jon wore more of the costume pieces designed for him during this tour so we had more reference photos of them, as he mostly wore whatever on stage.
As well as the costuming, the band wore makeup (apart from Jon) which was first done by Lucient Dossier, before eventually transitioning to doing their own. It was exaggerated and fantastical, especially in the case of Ryan, who drew birds (after photographer for Spin magazine Autumn de Wilde did them initially), Tim Burton-esque swirls, trees and other elaborate scenes on his face, as well as simplistic red strip across the eyes, that spanned to under the ear. They were supplied by MAC, which they mentioned in interviews and put on their website. It’s part the reason I own MAC’s Fluidwear Eyeliner and Sketch Eyeshadow. And though I’m not entirely sure the band used these items, it sure makes recreating the looks more visually accurate.
The set was influenced by The Smashing Pumpkins video for ‘Tonight, Tonight’ (1996), which itself was inspired by early silent films like that of Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902), and aestheticism of performance at the turn of the 20th century, utilising theatre-style backdrops and any turn-of-the-century props that hadn’t been coveted by the crew of Titanic (1997). Perhaps this is why the band covered ‘Tonight, Tonight’ during this leg. The band’s version can be watched here.
Some of the cooler features of the set were Spencer’s drum kit lit up, the giant windmill on stage (when it fit), and the papercut out styled moon and hanging band logo name. Otherwise the set was pretty stark with Spencer, Bartram and Eric sharing the riser.
This is likely the tour most people think of regarding Panic! at this time as a show in Denver was filmed and included in the Deluxe Boxset, which was themed much like the rest of the tour, with turn-of-the-century illustrations, tarot-styled cards, phenakistiscope and more.
I think the show I would go to would be the secret show at Bush Hall, purely for the intermate feel and so I could say “I was there man” like a side-character tucked away in the back of the bar who perks up when someone mentions some kind of cryptid in an eighties film.
Panic! at Bush Hall
Between the Summer and Circus tour was the international tour, which was a heavily scaled back affair. Only the Brixton dates had the same kind of character as the American tours, with manny of the stage pieces and performers from Lucent Dossier flown out for those shows. Dates kept on being added to Brixton as rhe event kept selling out. The residency spanned from the 21st to 24th of October.
The costumes were the October tour ones rather than the Summer ones as some key pieces had been lost, most notable being the rose vest which was lost in New Zealand. The Lucent Dossier member’s luggage lost on the way to England, so they had to hit up local charity shops for new pieces.
I would kill to have attended one of these shows. Brixton is such a cool venue and as it holds under five thousand people it would have been so intimate with that beautiful staging and theatre backdrop.
And now...
To add:
Just need to finish up the Circus tour section. Lots of reading for me :']
Video taken from here and hosted on this website as I cannot get Vimeo to work on my website
Roger Fojas recorded some behind the scenes during the Summer Tour. Somehow it only has ten thousand views.
Jon Walker was pretty much always wearing flipflops, even in November.
The Los Vegas Venue for the NRWC tour was where Ryan graduated high school. Yes, it was a casino.
Merch designs were done by the wonderful Eduardo Recife who would return to do work for the band during Pretty. Odd., most notably perhaps the CD insert.