The first thing he did when we met him in London was give us the multitracks of all his albums, saying, ‘do whatever you want with them. We ended up signing with his management company and moving to London. “Elton bought a hundred copies of the album, and sent them to friends. The band’s third album also caught the attention of Elton John, and he became a huge fan. It saw the active involvement of Nick Littlemore’s older brother, Sam, as producer and co-writer. Although Pnau’s second album, Again (2003), didn’t set the world on fire, but their self-titled third album (2007) was a major success. Major record labels in Australia at that time did not have electronic dance music acts.”ĭespite the sampling setback, Pnau have since gone on to become “one of Australia’s most loved electronic music acts”. We had never hidden the fact that we used samples, but the process was new for Australian labels at the time. The day we won the Aria Award the album was pulled off the shelves, because the label had not cleared the samples.
#Cold heart Pc#
“We did the record on a PC with Cubase VST 3.5, and used tons of samples. It won an Aria Award for Best Dance Release! Our first album, ‘ Sambanova’ was released in 1999, and it was great because we got signed to Warners and did a bunch of shows, and it became a big thing in Australia. After school I went to work in a music story for a couple of years, and Pnau began to happen. “Nick and I decided to form a band, Pnau, and managed to get a record deal with a small indie label, Peking Duck. Our school had a studio, so we also got used to working with a Mackie desk and a couple of Tascam DA88 recorders. Next we acquired things like the Roland TR-808 drum machine, the Roland TB-303 Bass Line, and my first serious synth, the Roland JX-3P. “We bought a Roland SH-101 for A$200 in 1993, and Nick had a garden shed in which we’d sit making weird sounds playing the 101 through a guitar or keyboard amp, and recording ourselves onto a cassette recorder. It was largely instrumental stuff with lots of layers and textures but not a lot of melody. We were into European rave and industrial stuff, and crossover acts like Meat Beat Manifesto and Thomas Techman. Nick and I became friends at high school, when we were 13, and we really bonded over music. “My older sister and I both received classical piano lessons from an early age, and I started playing the guitar when I was seven. Mayes grew up in the ’80s in Sydney with parents who were “very supportive of music”, he explains. It’s a story that’s intimately interwoven with the close ties that Pnau has had with Elton John for many years, and with Mayes’ own musical background.
He was happy to spill the beans on how exactly ‘Cold Heart’ came into being. Talking via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, Peter Mayes clearly feels on top of the world, with the success of ‘Cold Heart’ catapulting Pnau back into the limelight. The resulting track was released in August 2021, and as we all know, it became one of the biggest hits of the year and lead single on Elton John’s album ‘ The Lockdown Sessions’. Elton loved it, and arranged for Dua Lipa to add another vocal.” I started to develop that, and before long I got a result that everybody was very excited by. Mayes remembers, “It was a cut-up he’d made of the chorus vocals of the Elton John song ‘Sacrifice’, and Nick had added a basic beat and some chords. It was at this point that Peter Mayes, Pnau’s all-round computer and production whizz, received some files from the band’s main singer and songwriter, Nick Littlemore. Sometime in March of 2021, each member of the Australian trio was stuck in his respective home and studio, not quite sure what to do with himself and what the future would hold. The pandemic and the associated lockdowns have been a major challenge to the vast majority of people, but a lucky few have fared exceptionally well, often completely unexpectedly so.
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