Dream Big, Rock Hard: Empire of The Sun

Exotic, gaudy and lavish, Empire Of The Sun brings together two unlikely collaborators from Australian pop. LukeSteele, the enigmatic wunderkind behind The Sleepy Jackson, first met Pnau’s NickLittlemore via a mundane hook-up instigated by the latter’s record company.

Thus began a friendship which Luke describes as “this fireball of electricity”, and which eventually resulted in ‘Walking On A Dream’ – a bold, visionary and quite brilliant album, which manages to sound exhilaratingly contemporary, audaciously forward-looking, yet also curiously archaic all at once. (pull)“It has lot going on beneath the surface,” Luke admitted. “Nick wrote half of the lyrics. Some of them are like, if you had that last minute to live, they’re what you’d say to that girl whose heart you broke. It’s a project that’s gone from strength to strength without even having to do any work. It’s got God’s hand in it. It’s how music is meant to be.”(/pull) From Nick and Luke’s collective unconscious arose a rare marriage of rock and electronica, immediacy and depth, futurism and tradition, hi-tech production and creative spontaneity, pop melody and the cinematic. “We met in Darlinghurst, Sydney,” Nick remembers of the duo’s first encounter circa 2000. “Luke was quite striking. He was carrying a suitcase, and I wasn’t sure exactly what was in it. Every time I saw him from then on, he would have the suitcase, but he’d have a different object inside of it, which was thrilling. The next day, we went straight up to my folks’ place where I had a studio, and wrote a song.” Not long afterwards, Luke sang on Pnau’s single, ‘With You Forever’. Luke then garnered global acclaim with his two guitar-baed albums as The Sleepy Jackson (2003’s ‘Lovers’ and 2006’s ‘Personality: One Was A Spider, One Was A Bird’), while Pnau became one of the brightest exports from Australia’s burgeoning dance scene, most recently working with multi-platinum indie-rockers, The Killers. Somehow, despite all the madness of their separate trajectories, Luke and Nick’s relationship grew deeper, and more creative. “As an artist,” says Luke, “you look for a connection, and there isn’t really that many musicians that you have lightning connection with. It was kind of one in a million for us to meet, and strike. The really great duos – the Steely Dans, the Daft Punks, Air – there’s only a few of them around.” Thus, in 2007, they eventually got around to recording together, in the paltry spare time in their respective schedules. The brief, intense sessions would be driven by Nick and Luke, with PeterMayes, Nick’s partner in Pnau, taking on a recording/engineering role at their studio in Sydney.

Band Illustrations by Debaser

Luke: “Most of the record was done when I’d be in town for a day, so we’d have to finish a whole song in a night. Then, two months later, I’m back, and we’d do it again. So it was spontaneous writing, which was good. A lot of the Sleepy [Jackson] stuff was quite laboured. This was the first record where I could have a bit of a break. It all just happened.” Above and beyond actual music-making, the duo bonded over shared outlooks and inspirations from other artforms. Movies were a major passion. They would eventually take their name from the Spielberg-directed movie version of JGBallard’s novel, Empire of the Sun, which is set in occupied Shanghai during the Second World War. However, a pivotal moment arrived when the duo watched AlejandroJodorowsky’s legendary avant-garde masterpiece from 1973, ‘The Holy Mountain’, in which a Christ-like character withdraws from society with a flock of disciples to quest for eternal life. Nick: “About a quarter of the way into recording, we actually wrote a treatment for a film that we’ll make for the album. We wrote the whole script, so then we just wrote songs to fit into places within the script. It’s a journey of discovery, like a road movie, but one you’re not seeing on the road.” Thus, the album which eventually emerged from their collaboration, ‘Walking On A Dream’, was inextricably filmic in its conception. Just as its synthesized pop sound harks back in some measure to the early 1980’s New Romanticism of Gary Numan and DuranDuran, so Empire Of The Sun harbours a similar ambition to transcend the mundanity of pop in the MP3 age. Though their music is packed with catchy hooks, which grab you right off the bat, it also has conceptual coherence. Perhaps the most positive sign that Empire Of The Sun are onto something good, is that they’re hard to pin down with easy reference points. For a fleeting moment, you might hear an echo of Chic’s hi-tech disco, or Fleetwood Mac’s sheeny pop, or even the dream-like phantasmagoria of Mercury Rev…but then it’s gone, and other sound and images coalesce in its place “We’re like vessels to bring music back to the future, back to entertainment and colour and and all the otherworldly kind of things. A lot of the record is us out in the galaxy, looking back at the world. We wanted to talk about much more prophetic things than just cars and girls. (pull)There’s one word that Luke uses through the whole record – surrender. We really wanted to surrender to the higher calling, to the project as being the motivator.(/pull) We wanted to put something back into the world that people could really believe in, and we will not let them down on any level.” So, in the months ahead, the duo are preparing to carry through on their audio-visual vision for their band, their creation. They have already shot a video for their album’s title track in Shanghai (location of Spielberg’s movie). Luke: “It was pretty technicolour. It was done pretty renegade style, it’s illegal to film there. We had to do the make-up in the car.” Their exotic costumes naturally weren’t best suited to such undercover work, and at one point they nearly got arrested. There are now plans to film further clips in Mexico, Iceland and Las Vegas, with the ultimate goal of using them all as a backdrop for the duo’s debut live extravaganza, which should kick off some time in 2009. Given the unusual track records of both the band’s constituent members – not to mention the jaw-dropping magnificence of their debut album together – it’s safe to assume that those shows will bring entertainment, colour and all the otherworldly things in abundance.