CityLife

Empire Of The Sun - a scattering of Ziggy's stardust

Empire Of The Sun

CRIBBING their name from a JG Ballard novel (and subsequent 1987 Stephen Spielberg movie), Empire Of The Sun are pop at its most escapist, fantastical and brilliantly preposterous.

They hark back to the Ziggy Stardust ideal where its stars seemed like emissaries from outer space.

“This whole project is about imagination,” grins singer Luke Steele, an artist so unfailingly eccentric, he makes Patrick Wolf look like a NatWest MoneySense adviser.

“It’s not about trying to be cool or fashionable or to sell loads of records. It’s about joy and colour and that’s what the world needs right now. They don’t need another set of guys in cardigans singing about how bad the City is.”

Strident ambition

Resembling a pair of indie Time Lords, it’s fair to say they’re a duo that radiate a strident ambition.

Take the video for their opening gambit, Walking On A Dream, for example, which sees the dressing up box-favouring pair striking a series of overblown end-of-the-world poses against a Shanghai skyline and features, in the words of Mr Steele, ‘more colours than Hendrix on drugs’. 

“We were like, ‘This has to be special. It’s the first video’, he remembers.

“I got my jacket made by a guy on the third floor of a Shanghai fabric makers and he had three fingers and it was, like, the best jacket I’ve ever seen.

Completely bizarre

 “And I found my headpiece in a dingy market in this alleyway. You know, the whole thing was completely bizarre and sort of unexplainable how it happened.

“It wasn’t like we sat down with Kylie Minogue’s fashion designer and talked about how much appeal we could have if I wore a leotard and swung around on a trapeze like Pink or something.”  

Listening to Walking On A Dream – an elegant, effortlessly glorious pop song that comes on like Daft Punk producing Fleetwood Mac – you may recognise the vocals.

That’s because Luke Steele is the singer-songwriter behind The Sleepy Jackson, whose two albums (2003’s Lovers and 2006’s Personality: One Was a Spider, One Was a Bird) saw him tagged as Australia’s answer to Brian Wilson. 

Having fun

Empire of the Sun is the sound of two serious musicians cutting loose and having fun. 

In 2006, Steele (the one with the Adam Ant splash of make-up) was introduced by his record label, EMI, to production wunderkind Nick Littlemore, who won plaudits from Elton John as one half of Pnau (think: an Antipodean Chemical Brothers) and was formerly in the electronic outfit Teenager with Pip Brown, aka Ladyhawke. 

While an unlikely combination, Steele insists it was creative love at first sight. 

“This has been a record we’ve been waiting to make for a lot of years,” he says. “It’s like when you have a relationship with a girl and it’s just a matter of time before you have sex.”

Intense sessions

With Steele living in Perth and Littlemore based in Sydney, recording took place in brief, intense sessions whenever breaks in their respective schedules would allow. 

“It was like meeting up with an old friend when you haven’t seen them for years,” says Steele. “You say ‘come to dinner’ and then you’re like ‘wow, what am I going to cook?’

“And you want to make is special because they’re a really good friend. That’s why our collaboration works.” 

Although there have been myriad comparisons to space cadets MGMT and their debut LP – also called Walking On A Dream – is 2009’s first real contender for album of the year, it’s fair to say the lovingly-crafted music is baffling all who try to describe it.

Euphoric and sad

Like pop’s Willy Wonka, they take us on a magical mystery tour through the gloss and sheen of '80s pop, the dream-like phantasmagoria of Mercury Rev, Prince funk and Ibiza beats – songs that are simultaneously both euphoric and sad, retro and futuristic.

Alas, Steele isn’t much help on pinning down their influences. 

“I think the older you get, you take inspiration from everywhere,” he shrugs.

“Like when I went to New York and saw this transvestite singing solo and then in Germany, there was this DJ that had shopping trolley samples. It’s like you take those ingredients and you store them up for when you write songs.”

Spiritual road movie

Cinematic’ is a word to describe their sound. So it’s little surprise Walking on a Dream is the soundtrack to a spiritual road movie. 

“We wrote five songs and then half-way through the album, it was kind of like ‘Let’s write a film script to finish the record’,” recalls Steele.

“So there’s some kind of vision to it. And that worked great, because visually it was like somewhere to go.

“The plot is like Flight of the Navigator. We go to a portal and are transported to travel the world and meet all these cultures, and it’s kind of like what we’re doing in real time.

Childlike awe

“We went to Shanghai for this first clip, and Mexico for the second (for the single, We Are The People), and we want to go to Africa, Iceland and Las Vegas.”

Engaged to a magazine editor, Jodi, Steele attributes the childlike awe that runs through Walking On A Dream to the couple having their first child, daughter Sunny Tiger in 2008 (there’s even a track called Tiger By My Side).

You get the feeling that what with his current ‘Emperor Steele’ superhero look, and the fact that for the last Sleepy Jackson record, he adopted the persona of Luke Blonde, donning a wig and mask and speaking through a squeaky vocoder, he’s someone intrigued by the possibilities of alter-egos in pop. 

“The fascination for me is that you can live more than one person in your life,” he says.  “Actors have it good. A lot of them get paid millions to live these different characters.

Bottomless well

“It’s like being this human that can live many lives. With us, we can become actors but we can control it the whole time, rather than directors controlling it.” 

Steele has a bottomless well of ideas for Empire of the Sun. “I really want to get dolls of us made,” he says.

“Where you press a button to make it say “(Sings) Walking on a dream!. All that kind of stuff.”

God bless Empire Of The Sun – it’s fair to say they’ll never be mistaken for The Fray.

The album, Walking On A Dream, is released by EMI on February 16.  A limited-edition 7-inch of the single, also called Walking On A Dream, is out the same day.