NICK LITTLEMORE and PETE MAYES of Aussie electronic act PNAU tell ALASDAIR DUNCAN about the heartbreak that led to their new album, Soft Universe, and hint at the imminent return of the Empire Of The Sun project.

At the beginning of this year, shortly after catching PNAU’s storming set at Big Day Out, I interviewed the duo’s Pete Mayes, and he was brimming with enthusiasm for their then-upcoming fourth album, Soft Universe. “It’s more song-based,” he said at the time. “A lot of the lyrics on the record are very personal for Nick. He went through a break-up and spent a lot of time feeling heartbroken, so that comes through a lot in the songs, but what we really wanted to do was merge the darker lyrics with really positive, happy music. I really like the juxtaposition of those two elements. This album’s also going to be quite different from anything that we’ve done before, in that it’s all about Nick’s voice – he sings on every song. If you like what you saw at Big Day Out, then I think you’re really going to like this.”

Six months later, Soft Universe has finally arrived, and it’s everything Mayes promised and more. The pulsing synths and dance floor-ready beats that defined their earlier releases are still very much there, but something feels different – the first thing that strikes you upon listening is that PNAU seem to have evolved from a club duo into a full-fledged rock band. Mayes, though, insists that those band elements were always there if you knew were to look. “Early on, people saw us as more of a club outfit,” he says, “but it’s never really felt that way for us. When we made our first record, we were listening to a lot of club music, but we’ve never felt tied down to that – we make the music that we want to. The last PNAU album was quite clubby and electronic, but then we did the Empire Of The Sun record, and you could hear the changes starting to happen. These days, we really are just obsessed with great songs, great melodies, and hopefully that’s what you hear on the new album.”

If you’ve caught singles The Truth or Solid Ground already, you’ll have a fair idea about the sheer stick-in-your-headedness that Soft Universe’s songs have to offer. Given that PNAU have prioritised hooks and melodies over beats this time around, I ask Mayes what ingredients, to him, go into making great songs. “I think the aim of music is to affect people emotionally and physically,” he says after a while. “Melody is important, because whether it’s a synthesiser or someone singing to you, that’s the focal point of the song. You can spend a lot of time working on a song, fleshing it out, producing it, and it might end up sounding amazing, but if you can strip it right back and play it on a piano or an acoustic guitar and it still sounds amazing, then to me, that’s a great song. That’s when you get most excited about your music, when you realise that it still works in that form, and we’ve really found that with this album.”

The hooks and melodies on Soft Universe are one thing, but there’s no getting away from the sadness at the album’s core – it was written during a time of great emotional upheaval for Nick Littlemore, and the lyrics reflect this. “Nick broke up with his girlfriend in the middle of making the record,” Mayes tells me. “Some of the songs are him longing for her and being apart from her, then you see songs when they’ve broken up.” I ask Nick himself is singing the lyrics he wrote throughout this time, and thereby reflecting on the pain he felt at the time is difficult.  “These songs are all about love and loss,” he says, “and they’re quite descriptive about certain things. Performing them for the first time, like at Big Day Out, was a bit tough. These days, though, I’m not emotionally attached to them in the same way – I feel the more euphoric side of them now.”

In making Soft Universe, the duo had help from one of the biggest names in the music business – Elton John. An avid fan of new music, he supposedly, he listens to five new albums every day, and the story goes that, when he heard PNAU’s self-titled album, he liked it so much that he just had to work with them. Elton John doesn’t actually appear on the record, but as Mayes tells it, he acted as a sort of mentor figure, listening to early versions of the songs and helping push them in the right direction.“We met with him every three to four months,” Littlemore says. “He’d sit down and we’d play him the record, and he’d sing along to the songs he knew and liked. Then we’d got through the other ones, work out which ones were working and which weren’t, and how we were going to frame the band. It was very generous of him to give that much time, and it was great to have a mentor work with us, someone who really cared.”

“If the songs weren’t hitting the mark, he’d let us know straight away,” Mayes adds. “He’s really honest, he’s willing to tell us whether something works or not. It’s quite intimidating having Elton John critique your record, and listen to it in rough, demo format. When we were in LA the last time, we played him the batch of songs that we’d recorded, and he just sat there, with his head almost in the speakers, just really, deeply focused on it.” Sitting in a room while Elton John listens to and critiques your music is quite an experience, Mayes says. “To think about it in the abstract, it seems surreal, but when you’re with him, it’s not like that – it’s not surreal at all, he’s just a good friend listening to our music and giving us pointers. I don’t think we would have lasted so long [in the UK] without his help.”

Nick Littlemore is known for having multiple projects on the go at once, and near the end of the interview, answering an unrelated question, he casually lets slip the fact that there will “probably” be another Empire Of The Sun album in the near future. I stop him, slightly dumbfounded. I thought the story with Empire was that, after the huge success of their first album, Littlemore cut his ties with Steele, effectively dissolving the band. “I remember there being some confusion there,” I say, “and Luke saying he’d fallen out of contact with you...”

“Yeah, there was quite a lot of confusion,” Littlemore replies, “but, you know, there’s no confusion now! It was weird. I saw him at the Brit Awards about three years ago and had an anxiety attack. I hadn’t been in contact before that, and things had been weird, but we got in contact again, started working on songs, and from there, we haven’t stopped. We did two days in New York about three weeks ago, and we made eight little ditties ... It’s been a beautiful and joyous experience. We’re all about accentuating the positive. We’re just going to make great music together and really enjoy it.”

PNAU play at Splendour In The Grass on Saturday Jul 30, alongside Pulp, Kanye West, Coldplay and countless others. SOFT UNIVERSE is out now through etcetc/Universal. www.myspace.com/pnau. Splendour In The Grass runs Jul 29–Aug 1 at Woodfordia. www.splendourinthegrass.com

Be first to comment on this article

Write Comment
Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Poster's IP addresses are logged.
Name:
Comment:
Code:*