Nick Littlemore On The Heady Heights And Recent Resurrection Of Teenager

“This is going to sound batshit crazy,” warns a smiling Nick Littlemore on my Zoom screen. “But a few years ago the mushrooms told me there was going to be a time when you couldn’t fly anymore.”

Fifty-something days into Sydney’s latest lockdown, I’ve connected with one of Australia’s busiest producers in his second home of Los Angeles. The man best known from PNAU and Empire of the Sun is sitting in his back garden against a backdrop of lush green foliage. Over his shoulder is a shaded path that leads down to the shed-turned-studio where he spent much of the 2020 pandemic tinkering away.

Lanky with a sweep of silver hair and fashionably double-layered in blue and black, Littlemore is instantly a great talker. The abundant greenery, he tells me, is a defence against LA pollution and “all the nasty chemicals that pervade the United States.” Spending time in this oasis while COVID-19 ravaged the US was, he admits, “kind of brilliant.”

There could be any number of reasons for our interview, from Littlemore’s work this year on Holiday Sidewinder’s second album Face Of God to PNAU’s new chart-climbing remix of Elton John and Dua Lipa. However, we’re here to talk about Littlemore’s surprise return to Teenager, his cult art-rock project that’s been dormant since 2007.

Teenager 2.0 launched this month with ‘Before The End’, a brooding new ballad featuring Littlemore’s unvarnished vocals up close like a whisper. In its DIY feel, the song picks up right where Teenager left off 14 years ago.

What’s unusual about ‘Before The End’ is the company it’s keeping. The song closes out Lab78 Dimensions, a new ‘sampler’ from Lab78, the fledgling imprint Littlemore and his PNAU partner Peter Mayes run in conjunction with their longtime label etcetc. Lab78 Dimensions opens with the bright tropical strut of Mi Filosophia and m4life’s ‘Sun Opener’, followed by Rami’s ‘Nothing Left to Do’ and Djanaba’s ‘Big Titties’. While Mayes mixed the rest of the sampler, Littlemore took ‘Before The End’ to post-punk veteran Gavin MacKillop.

Following such fresh-faced, peppy talent, ‘Before The End’ sounds like crawling blearily into bed after an all-nighter. Or, as Littlemore puts it, “‘Big Titties’ feels like a full record, whereas Teenager is an adolescent looking up at that record.”

So, with a lot of life lived between 2007 and now, why is adolescence pulling Nick Littlemore back?

Teenager Grows Up

Littlemore started Teenager in 2004 as a swerve from PNAU’s rave roots. By then, his main gig was a solid success, with two albums out and prime dance stage billing at festivals like Homebake and Big Day Out. Teenager, by contrast, was rougher and spikier, nodding to the art-rock and post-punk that was part of Littlemore’s arts college ethos.

The music video for Teenager’s 2006 single, ‘Pony’, holds on a close-up of the frontman caked in white paint and singing maniacally through a missing front tooth. (More on the tooth later.) Teenager’s debut album, Thirteen, followed through the storied Sydney indie label Timberyard Records. On its original cover, Teenager’s other half Pip Brown, later known as Ladyhawke, looks every bit the mid-2000s rock star next to a gaunt and shirtless Littlemore with his jeans pulled alarmingly low. “I could not find my belt, hence the pubes,” Littlemore told inthemix at the time.

Teenager, by contrast, was rougher and spikier, nodding to the art-rock and post-punk that was part of Littlemore arts college ethos.

Thirteen featured input from a cast of indie heroes, including Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Littlemore’s future Empire of the Sun collaborator Luke Steele and the late, great Rowland S. Howard. In myriad ways, it’s as pure a document of that exact moment in Australian music as you’ll find.

With singles ‘Bound and Gagged’ and ‘Alone Again’ finding their people, Teenager set out on a 2007 tour with Damn Arms, exclusively hitting small, sticky-floored venues. At the same time, PNAU was finalising its most polished music to date. Released in December 2007, PNAU’s self-titled third album featured the candy-coloured hits ‘Wild Strawberries’, ‘Embrace’, and ‘Baby’.

The weirdness of this double life was not lost on Littlemore. “I remember that time,” he tells me now. “And loving that I could switch night to night from the worst, shittiest stage you could find to a festival in a tent with thousands of people jumping up and down. It’s a perfect pairing for an artist to have a highly unsuccessful project and a successful one together.”

As the story goes, none other than Sir Elton John loved the self-titled album and shepherded PNAU to a new phase of their career, leaving Teenager’s punky spirit in the dust. Which brings us back to the subject of the tooth that Littlemore lost in “a bit of scuffle” outside the Annandale Hotel.

“I could not find my belt, hence the pubes,” Littlemore told inthemix at the time.

“I think it was the night the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were playing, and I had been drinking a lot of tequila,” he recalls. “A friend of mine peeled me off the asphalt out the front. I was still in a delusionary phase where I thought that anything that happened had some kind of greater meaning and this was a way of paying back all the karma for being precocious in my early 20s. So I decided not to fix it. Then at the end of our first meeting with Sir Elton I was walking out and he said, ‘Oh, and get that tooth fixed.’”

Littlemore did as he was told, and these days he’s not one for drunken scuffles. Instead, the return to Teenager was the result of “a kind of pilgrimage to get well.”

In 2019, Littlemore took six months off to recover from Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a neurological disorder that kept one of his eyes fixed open for four months. That pilgrimage ended in Byron Bay — not, Littlemore is quick to clarify, “as a new age anti-vaxxer, but just because it’s pretty up there.”

While working on a possible remix project, he happened upon ‘Before The End’. “It was all done in a kitchen in Byron Bay, singing into a laptop,” he says. Through some strange vibrations in time and space, Teenager reared its head again.

PNAU Until Forever

In Australia’s boom and bust dance scene, PNAU have proven remarkably resilient. While Littlemore’s older brother Sam (aka Sam La More) joined the group in 2016, Nick and Peter’s special alchemy goes back to their own teen years. “We’ve hit our 10,000 hours a few times over at this point,” Littlemore quips.

PNAU’s first album, not so quipply titled Fractal Geometric Spaces Made of Light, never came out. Their actual debut, the deep and jazzy Sambanova, was yanked from record stores due to uncleared samples, then re-released in edited form. After an assured start, PNAU released a scrappy and unfocused follow-up, Again, that nevertheless featured a few evergreen bangers.

“We have found in our career that we had a pattern,” Littlemore says. “We’d do a pretty good record, and then a really confused, off the mark record. We’d do that consistently, one on, one off.”

True to this pattern, PNAU followed the serotonin rush of their self-titled album with the comedown of 2011’s Soft Universe, which featured a lot of Littlemore’s heartache. “My brother always gave me so much shit about that record,” he laughs now. “We never play any of the songs.”

Everything clicked again with the introduction of vocalist Kira Divine on 2017’s maximalist Changa, which took its cues from the DMT experience.

“That was incredibly influential to us; bringing us back to the source of our teenage years, when LSD and raves were all in together,” Littlemore recalls. “It was good to bring that back, especially after the mournful record of Soft Universe. To come back to the dancefloor, hedonism and pure joy.”

Since then, PNAU has moved to standalone releases, most recently ‘River’ with Ladyhawke and ‘Stranger Love’ with Budjerah, a born star from the Bundjalung nation.

While Littlemore only does mushrooms “once a year or so these days”, they’re vital to his creative charge. “A lot of creation comes down to confidence and positivity,” he says simply. “Psilocybin tops up the positivity battery.”

Sir Elton and the Summer of Love

Beyond PNAU, Littlemore is all about the work. Our conversation alights briefly on his collaborations with Houston-based singer-songwriter Ivy Rose and classically trained pianist Reuben James, plus a host of new projects still in the works.

Despite the forward motion, he’s a little hung up on Vlossom, his project with Cloud Control’s Alister Wright that should’ve had an ascendant 2020. “We had all these shows building up to Splendour and beyond, and COVID came right in and wiped it out,” he says. “I wanted audiences to experience Alister in Vlossom as the star that he rightly is.”

When he’s not working, the 43-year-old producer finds himself watching old rave footage on YouTube and yearning. “I fantasise about going back to raves when I was 14,” he laughs. “Weirdly in my messed-up head, I think that’s going to happen again somehow. I’ll have a plane ticket to Goa or something and have my Summer Of Love. I honestly think it’s a possibility. I find the whole thing very topsy-turvy. Time maybe isn’t so linear for me. It’s more round.”

“I fantasise about going back to raves when I was 14,” he laughs. “Weirdly in my messed-up head, I think that’s going to happen again somehow.

Back on our linear timeline, PNAU’s new remix of Elton John and Dua Lipa has rocketed to 12 million plays on Spotify. ‘Cold Heart’ combines John’s ‘Rocket Man’ from 1972 and ‘Sacrifice’ from 1989, which meant the trio was playing on hallowed ground.

“Sam, Peter and myself all had tracks from the master tapes and were just trying stuff every day,” Littlemore says. “Elton has always had an incredible voice, but those records in the early ‘70s are transcendent. Putting them in the context of dance music is a real challenge, because his records were so free and musically adept.”

On PNAU’s ​​2012 remix album, Good Morning to the Night, the legendary songwriter left them alone to make “Sambanova with Elton’s music”. With the ‘Cold Heart’ remix, Littlemore says, John had a clearer directive to create something “that could play on the same level as contemporary pop music.”

While he’s happy enough in the limelight, Littlemore sees his main role going forward as a facilitator for the next generation. The work he’s already done with young artists is leading to a whole lot more.

“I understand how nerve-wracking it is writing a song with another person, because I’ve felt imposter syndrome on a huge level,” he says. “But I do push the kids to be positive when they’re positive. When you’re in that moment connecting deeply, that’s where the great records come from.”

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Jack Tregoning is a Sydney-based music and culture writer for Billboard, the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs and Red Bull Music.