PNAU - Interview

PNAU – Interview

15 years into their creative relationship, PNAU’s Nick Littlemore (above, left) and Pete Hayes are only getting better with age. Having sent Australian party kids into a spin last summer with the party anthem surrealism of their self-titled third album and their unhinged, costume-clad live extravaganza, the Sydney duo have spent the last few months doing their best to conquer the UK.

With a Glastonbury slot and major plaudits from none other than Sir Elton John already behind them, you would think they were on easy street. But as Littlemore explains, life isn’t always so rosy for a fulltime party-starter.

Chatting over the phone from their current base in London, he tells us about creation, maintaining relationships and his inability to slow down.


So you guys just did Glastonbury. How was it?

It was long…it’s like going to war pretty much. The night we got there it was pissing down and the mud kind of set in, and then it rained most of Friday and then it kind of cleared up, but there was so much mud anyway. It’s a weird thing, man. It’s like twelve Big Day Outs over four days.

You’re sounding a tad hoarse.

Yeah, we played a show last night with A-Track and I was just screaming my fucking head off.

On that tip, do the machinations of PNAU’s success ever become a little too much like work for you?

Well, in terms of work, I enjoy work more than anything else in my life. So for it to become like work in a normal sense, I don’t think it ever does, because I’m always working if you know what I mean.

Certain shows come along and people say, you know, ‘This has to be a really good one’, or whatever. But everyone knows that when it comes down to a show, it’s really up to the gods or something.

Your live shows seem kind of like an ultimate escapism or something. Are they like that from your end?

I actually see it more as me being up there escaping for everyone else. I feel quite sacrificial when we play live. Like, when I broke my sternum last year, I felt like I was bearing a cross for the whole fucking audience, you know. If I kind of lose my mind and break my bones then everyone else can relax and have a good time.

Was the record’s conceptual bearing – with the imagery and the characters and so on – present from the start, or did it kind of emerge the further you went along?

It was probably at the end. Like, we were writing songs and doing good things and stuff, but it was really in the last two or three months, when we started putting the art together and working out the symbolism and all that, that it really started kicking in.

I mean, we’re doing the new album at the moment and we haven’t looked at any of that stuff as yet. First off, we definitely just write – write and write and write and write a lot of songs – and then try and make some links between those songs and make the songs better, and then start working on characterisation and back-stories and plots and all the rest of it.

Where does your initial creative impetus come from, do you feel?

Well, I mean, I’m writing three albums over here at the moment – I’m writing one with Martin Craft and one with this kid from Brighton and the new PNAU – and I must say that a lot of it comes from, at the moment, being away from my girl. So there are a lot of love songs, a lot of travelling, kind of on the road songs. You always get inspired by different things, and it can be as simple as the light, being hungover, being with a pretty girl, travelling, not understanding what someone said, or having a strange dream, or seeing a film, any of these things.

But with the Martin Craft project, we’re really trying to make a positive album, which sounds odd. But we’re trying not to be self-indulgent, which is pretty funny for two very self-indulgent artists, but it’s really great. And you know, you get really down when you’re away from the people you love and all that kind of stuff, and to make a song that’s positive makes you feel better. So we’ve been doing as kind of medicine.

Songs normally just come with putting a mic in my hand and just singing and not thinking about it, and then you just sort of cut it up from there and work out the meaning and connections. It’s more channelling, as a shaman would do, then you come back and recontextualise after the event as it were.

Tell me about your relationship with Pete. Having known each other for so long and been creating since high school, is it all pretty easy?

Easy (bursts out laughing)? It’s not that easy. We fight, obviously. Well, it’s more just me losing my mind and threatening to kill myself and shit like that, which happens quite a bit, and Pete just going, ‘Okay, I’ve seen this before’. So we kind of have blowouts.

I mean, at the moment, we’ve been over here for something like two and a half months and we’re sleeping on top of each other, which is just killing us. So, you know, it is easy in the sense that we’re brothers – I’ve known him since I was fucking 10 or 11 or something – so we can fight until the cows come home, but it doesn’t matter.

Pete often looks at me funny when I say this, but it doesn’t matter that we’re friends or not. I really don’t give a flying fuck, because the thing that’s a lot more important to me than friendship or any of the other stuff is making work, and we have a good union for making work. That’s our relationship; it’s a factory.

What about making relationships outside of the creative realm?

I’m not very good at that. No, to be honest, I’m terrible at that. Like, I have a few friends – I can’t name any of them at the moment – but yeah, I’m really not very sociable. My girlfriend is very sociable and in fact most people are, but I just like working.

I’m usually not really that happy. In social situations I generally just close up and freak out and run away. I don’t do dinner parties, you know. If there is no real purpose in being somewhere, then I’d rather be just writing notes or making something or just working.

There’s a real childlike aesthetic to the visual material on the last record. Is connecting with people on a kind of naïve, childlike level something that really interests you?

Well, Michael Jackson once said that children are the future (pauses, giggles). And we loved working with the Kids Choir on the last record, so it would be cool to do something that kids can relate to again.

I just love that idea of connecting with kids and making cool shit for kids, because there’s not that much stuff out there that’s really got any depth to it. There’s been a long history of fucked up things for kids, and I think it’s a great thing. Kids’ minds are so open to being expanded. They’ll make better citizens in the long-term.

Dan Rule

(Pic: Rob Thomas)

www.myspace.com/pnaupnau


PNAU’s ‘Embrace’ tour takes in Melbourne’s Palace Theatre on Friday August 1, Splendour in the Grass on August 2 and 3, Brisbane’s Tivoli Theatre on Thursday, August 7, and Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion on Friday August 8.




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