Hey Look Ma, I Made It

Every fortnight, we talk to an artist about some of their work. This time around, Panic! At The Disco’s Brendon Urie tells Kylie Klein-Nixon what it was like to be turned into a Muppetstyle-puppet.

Wanting tobea muppet had been in my psyche for a long time.

‘‘It was a dream come true. As a kid, muppets were my favourite things. I worshipped Jim Henson and Muppet Movie men. My favourite movie was Dark Crystal.

‘‘I think me wanting to be a muppet had been in my psyche for a long time and finally this was the chance to do it.

‘‘I was looking for the song [to Muppet up with], and I was sitting there listening to the demo and I immediately thought ‘I’m going to be a puppet, I’m going to tell the story of how all this got started, when the band first happened, my rise and fall, the story of a guy in a band’.

‘‘But I wanted to show a real sex scene. We can’t show that with real humans, so we might as well make a puppet.

‘‘I had 100 per cent say [in what the puppet looked like]. The production company showed us a couple of mock-ups, just designs drawn out and computer animated, and I got to pick100 different features. Twenty different eyebrows alone.

‘‘So I eventually showed them a picture of me in a gold jacket and they said ‘yes, let’s do that one’.

‘‘I said, ‘I know that the fans are going to say that my forehead’s not big enough – make sure you give me a big enough forehead, and OK lips. And maybe a scar on my eyebrow’.

‘‘Then I got a mock up and I thought, ‘I don’t know if the forehead’s big enough’. There wasn’t time to redo it, we were shooting the next day. But never mind, it’s OK.

‘‘There were four puppets made, two of the regular, healthy ones and two that got messed up. We take one of them on tour with us.

‘‘I love making videos. I come up with ideas for visuals all the time. I’m making a demo and I get an idea and I think it’s so great for this song, let’s do this. I revisit ideas all the time. But yeah, I’m very much into writing visual ideas as I am writing music for records.’’

❚ Panic! At The Disco, Brendon Urie and his puppet play Auckland’s Spark Area on Tuesday. Tickets at Ticketmaster.