Hey there!
It’s Monday again, that little creep, creeping up, being all Monday in our grill. Ignore it by diving into your weekly freebie edition of The New Cue. JUST PRETEND IT’S NOT HAPPENING.
Today we’ve got a chat with enduring pop renaissance man Nick Littlemore, he of PNAU, Empire Of The Sun, Elton-affiliated triumph and more. It’s a nice chat, but then we would say that, we wrote it.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Nick Littlemore
It is not common practice for a band who are 25 years into their career to produce a mega-smash super-hit for a pop legend 50 years into his, but that’s exactly what happened when Australian trio PNAU recalibrated a selection of Elton John classics for the 2021 dance banger Cold Heart. Melding bits of Sacrifice, Rocket Man, Kiss The Bride and lesser-known cut Where’s The Shoorah? and featuring Dua Lipa as a second singer, Cold Heart has been streamed on Spotify alone a whopping 1,272,439,034 times.
That number is too much, it hurts my head, but the success has opened doors to the executive floors for PNAU, led by Nick Littlemore and also featuring Peter Mayes and Nick’s older brother Sam in their number, and recently they signed a record deal with Sony with a view to lining up more high-profile collaborations. I’ve interviewed Nick (this is Niall, hello) a few times over the years and he’s a lovely, breezy and cosmic kind of guy who always has a few different plates spinning. I’ve met him when he’s been in his role as a member of synth-pop duo Empire Of The Sun (I actually went to an Empire Of The Sun gig with him once and watched him witness his own band live for the first time, which was a bit weird), I’ve interviewed him in front of a live audience discussing his stature as one of Australia’s most prominent musical exports, I’ve visited him making a PNAU record in a studio set underneath Elton John’s management offices and I’ve bumped into him in a venue foyer in Montreal, where he said he was working on Cirque Du Soleil. I didn’t question it, I think I just nodded and went, “Cool.”
Last week, PNAU unveiled a new single titled You Know What I Need, a team-up with fellow Australian and synth-pop superstar Troye Sivan. It’s a euphoric, summer anthem – hey, it’s summer down under. Also last week, Niall hopped on Zoom to speak to Nick about the state of pop in 2022, what it’s like being involved in a hit that’s been listened to by a billion people, the time he lived in Elton’s house, the future of Empire Of The Sun, PNAU’s new single and more. That interview is what follows now. That’s why you’re here. Perhaps you would like to listen to the chat instead of reading? Well, you can do that too, here you go:
Hey Nick, how’s it going?
Very well, how are you?
I’m good, thank you. Where are you at the moment?
I’m in Los Angeles.
What’s the vibe in Los Angeles on what I’m going to imagine is a nice sunny Thursday morning?
It is basically that, it’s a little chillier but still like summer in England on a really good day.
How long have you been in LA now?
I think it’s been close to 10 years.
Wow, so that Empire Of The Sun feature we did in New York was over 10 years ago?
Yeah, I have a feeling it was because I think I was still living in New York at the time. That was when we went to that festival, right?
A very strange festival in a car park, yes.
Yeah, that was fucked.
And I watched you watching your own band live for the first time.
Yes, that was strange. That was a strange one.
What’s your average day at the moment? Talk me through a day in the life of Nick Littlemore…
Well, at the moment, my wife’s expecting a baby so we’ve been spending a lot of time together not doing a lot.
Ah, congratulations.
Cheers. So it’s a lot of taking it easy and I am doing a few productions for various artists around the world and working on new Empire Of The Sun stuff, as well as new PNAU stuff. It’s an exciting time even though I’m mainly resting. I’m still working on various things, I like to keep busy.
From an outsider’s point of view, it feels very much like you’re on the crest of a wave at the moment. Does it feel like that from where you are?
Yeah, we have been fortunate enough in this band, or me just in music in general, to have ridden that wave on the highest highs and the lowest lows a few times. I feel like most artists get one round on that and we’ve had three or four, which has been extraordinary.
So do you feel like you come into it with lessons you’ve already learned?
Yeah, to a certain extent, but I think some of those lessons are irrelevant because every time you step back into the business, on a serious level, everything seems to have changed. The priorities for what a label need from an artist in terms of engagement is very different to what it would have been 10 or 15 years ago, or even maybe five years ago, which is probably pre-Tiktok and now that is a real legitimate concern of labels, like, ‘how are you going to tackle that?’. For an artist has been around a little while, it’s a completely different skill set that wasn’t required and now all of a sudden, in order to get a young audience, we need to somehow strategize as to not only make the records that sounds relevant to these people, but also find some visual aspects that we can engage with them.
How does that manifest in how you would approach a song, does it change it?
I think for songwriting, for me, a lot of it has been on the conceptual side and it’s always been that way. I look more to people like serious copywriters that will write those slogans for big brands and things like that, and how can you communicate an idea simply and strongly for the purposes of a song. I don’t know if that’s necessarily changed, because I feel like we were always pushing for those takeaway messages. But then the sound of records change, and what’s hot and what’s not changes, almost every month, I feel like the sounds shift again this way or that way. The pendulum just keeps shifting. When that Kate Bush record came out again, for the ninth time, I feel like a lot of people were jumping on that sound. And then there were all those trap edits of 90s Madonna records and all that sort of stuff. I think on a production level, it’s an exciting but difficult time for producers because there are so many ways you could go and you never want to be chasing the tail of something that’s just happened.
What do you think makes a pop hit right now?
I think that it has to sound extraordinary in some way and what I mean by that is it needs to sound different whilst also being familiar. Whether or not the people listening to it are recognising the familiarity, or it’s something that they have heard as infants, like in this case 20-year-olds have grown up listening to Eurotrance and other things that were around at the time, but they wouldn’t have been aware of that and now it’s coming back to them and they’re owning it as their own genre. I’ve always been interested in creating something that has or possesses a kind of instant nostalgia. Empire Of The Sun was a good example of that in that it sounds like an old record that was never discovered but there’s also something contemporary about it, and messing around with that. It’s almost like you’re messing around with people’s dreams.
If you were to apply the same sort of short, eloquent description to PNAU now, what would it be?
Well, PNAU has always been interested in the rave and that feeling of hedonism and ecstasy and those feelings I had as a kid on the dancefloor, those records that I couldn’t describe at the time. I’m sure I could hear them now and understand how they were made and everything else but it was a feeling when the light would burst through the cracked windows of a warehouse at five in the morning and everyone just felt lifted. I feel like that’s still the energy that we’re trying to capture in PNAU and that’s been a very consistent mission of ours. Of course, we started out for quite a while just making instrumental music long before we ever thought about bringing a vocalist and what that would even sound like against these techno or trance records and look at us now, we’re working with the biggest pop stars in the world and huge top liners. It’s a very different game right now but we still want to maintain that message, even if it gets dressed up and sounds totally different.
On that note, tell me about this new single with Troye Sivan.
That song, initially we created the demo of that with Reuben James, who is a pianist from Birmingham who lives in London. I’ve been working with him for years and he came downtown to the studio where Peter, Sam and I were working and brought Kevin Garrett, who’s a good mate of his and became a friend of ours and this song came together very quickly. We sat on it for about a year. It wasn’t until during lockdown we were thinking of other PNAU singles and where we could go with it and Peter pulled up the song we’d forgotten about. Peter and Sam started going back and forth on it, changing the production, shifting some chords around and it started to really come together. Then the Sony deal happened and changed PNAU’s whole trajectory and suddenly, we were able to get Troye on board who came in with Styalz Fuego, a very young, talented producer from Australia. The two of them rewrote the bridge, added all these backing vocals and really added the icing to the record.
Tell me about Cold Heart. What’s it like being inside one of those songs that just keeps getting bigger and bigger?
To me, it reminds me of what happened with Walking On A Dream. It just got so big that it really had very little to do with us anymore. The record was having its own life, its own relations and it’s a juggernaut. I love that you can be in a store or in a taxi or an airport and you hear your record and it takes you a moment to recognise it and then you’re like, ‘oh right, I know that record’. I always maintained that when one makes music, it’s not for the person who made it, it’s for the listener, but we’ve never had it to this degree where, you know, over a billion people listen to this Cold Heart record, it’s a crazy thing, it’s hard to fathom, it’s like understanding infinity.
It was a key piece in Elton John wanting to position himself as a relevant artist rather than just a heritage act. It must have meant more to you as your relationship with him goes back so many years now.
Yeah, that was the directive. On the first album we made with Elton [2012’s Good Morning To The Night], he said, “you have carte blanche, you can do whatever you want”, so we wanted to make him basically like a cool underground artist. But this time around, he was very clear. He said, “go straight for the hits and make me relevant, make me the biggest artist.” And we tried many times and then this one record came together and the rest is history. I feel like we really paid back Elton for all the kindnesses that he’s shown us, getting me the Cirque Du Soleil job and working with me on that, to mentoring us. And then suddenly, finally, I feel like we’ve paid that back by giving him I would say maybe one of the biggest records of all time currently, I feel like it’s probably in the top 50 of the biggest records of all time.
Didn’t you live in Elton’s house at one point?
Yeah I did! My wife and I lived in his place in London, which was amazing but it was a little nerve-wracking because it’s full of incredible priceless and fragile antiques. So whilst it’s wonderful to stay there, it’s also incredibly nerve-wracking that you’re going to bump into something in the middle of the night or if you’re hungover in the morning. It was wonderful but a little daunting.
Who puts the bins out at Elton’s place?
There’s all these secret passages where staff seem to just appear and disappear again. You leave a napkin out and 10 minutes later it’ll mysteriously disappear.
I didn’t know that he got you the Cirque Du Soleil job. I remember bumping into you at a venue in Montreal when you were doing that.
Yeah! Basically my manager at the time leveraged his name and got me the job and then Elton and I wrote a song which was in the show.
How much did the experience of doing that feed into what you brought back into both Empire Of The Sun and PNAU?
I was doing something on such a large scale with Cirque, and interfacing with a company, rather than PNAU and Empire had been largely just been dreamed up by the creators with no-one really weighing in too much in terms of what we should be doing or not doing. After Cirque, I had to have grown up, I had to deal with collaborating with a huge company and a director’s vision and trying to make sense of that. Post that experience, I feel I was a lot more confident doing large scale sessions, redoing songs, ‘okay, that’s not good enough, fine, we’ll just write five more until we get it right’. There’s a stamina that that you have to possess when you do these big jobs and to bring that back into the various musical projects has been very beneficial.
Where do your ambitions lie for next year?
I think the last few years, my ambition has largely been robbed and I think that’s probably very common for creatives and just people in general around the world. But I do feel like 2023 is going to be an extraordinary year for new music. I have a lot of music coming out next year. I’ve been holding on to a lot of stuff for about three or four years. I think I’ve just had a negative attitude towards putting out other stuff but I feel like it’s coming around, there is this wave we’re riding and it feels like a really good time to be sharing a lot of music. We’re going to break the drought of Empire next year and that is so exciting to me, Luke [Steele, EOTS co-founder] and I are in such a great place, talking all the time. That just feels like we’ve matured in a really special way together.
ND