Eight years ago, Sydney producer Nick Littlemore and I sat down in a sunny Darlinghurst office to pore over his latest Empire of the Sun record,The third album from the duo – which is completed by Perth’s Luke Steele – was an exciting moment, of course, but what was more exciting was some information that the tall, silver-haired Littlemore had let slip during the interview.
There were other battles to be dealt with as well. In 2019, Littlemore was forced to take six months off to recover from Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a neurological illness that affects facial nerves. The illness paralysed half his face and fixed one eye open for months. “It did change me physically,” Littlemore says. “My hearing is not the same, definitely not. It can distort. I can get fatigued quite easily, so I used to play fairly loud and now not at all.
The track raked in more than a billion streams and scored John his first UK #1 in more than 15 years. While Pnau were overjoyed, the massive success took an unexpected toll.’s aftermath. “It’s a really strange thing … being faced with success. I think it took some time for us internally in the band to get through it. Success is a great thing, but it changes the way everything’s perceived and it’s such a delicate ecosystem being in a band, especially being in a band for quite a while.