Running For The Thrill Of It... Empire Of The Sun

Ambition, it’s a big word in music. For stadium sized bands it is the stick with which they are beaten whilst anyone repeating themselves two albums in a row is seen to lack it and tossed mercilessly upon a pile of rejects.  Perhaps it’s the idea of what ambition actually is, is it the ability to transcend sticky floored toilet venues and make music that touches large numbers? Or is it to do something beyond the confines of the norm, to have a vision that can’t be confined to an 18 month campaign of re-releases, key festival slots and TV montage scenes.

Empire Of The Sun are a band who have ambition, they are a band who see a lack of magic in the music ‘industry’ and want to inject it with a shot of surreal beauty. There vision is, according to Nick Littlemore, “The one joining emotion that binds all humanity together from the enlightened to the ignorant. Until life itself is questioning its continuation, for humanities lessons are contrary to the world. For me the term greed is led by it’s failings since the dawn of time and we must turn humanity against itself like a jealous angel. There are heroes, Empire Of The Sun, who must make sacrifices in order to save the free world. Our heroes the wise travelled, having assimilated civilisations from all four corners of the globe, to gain a depth of understanding and enlightened path to give up their mortal dreams and become animals, taking the form of a flock of black cockatoos”. To put this in context this writer asked a member of Franz Ferdinand a similar question last week and he said “Well we just want to make things a bit more dance orientated.” Empire of The Sun certainly have ambition.

“That’s pretty much what it’s about. We (Luke Steel of The Sleepy Jackson comprises the other half of Empire...) were basically just travelling around the world and the one binding emotion that seemed to be coming up in humanity was sadness. So many of us are not doing what is vital to our existence. I met Luke back in 2000, we met in a bar and at that point Luke was always carrying around a suitcase and every time you saw him he had something different in there like an umbrella or a kid’s doll, bricks from a chimney or just full of parking tickets. Anyway the day after we met I took him to the bush just North of Sydney and we wrote three or four songs. It’s incredible to meet a mind that you connect with so quickly and strongly. We didn’t get to record anything for another six or seven years though, perhaps because it took us meeting about fifty other people before we realised our connection was so strong and we needed to explore it further.”