On the eve of Australian dance duo Pnau’s latest album, Elton John vs. Pnau: Good Morning to the Night, debuting at number one on the UK album charts Heidi Maier talked to Peter Mayes about making music since childhood, remixing Elton John and having one of their tracks chosen as an official song for the 2012 London Olympics.

At just after 8 o’clock in the evening, Los Angeles time, Peter Mayes, better known as one half of Pnau, is in a studio, excitedly half-shouting down the telephone line: “We’ve just found out it’s gone number one in the UK! How surreal is that? Two boys from Sydney met Elton John and now we’ve gone number one in the UK!”

Mayes’ excitement is, frankly, completely understandable. After all, who doesn’t dream of having a number one record or working with the man widely considered to be one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all-time?

Although Pnau has enjoyed considerable domestic success, both with their own studio albums – Sambanova (1999), Pnau (2007) and Soft Universe (2011) – and their side project with The Sleepy Jackson frontman Luke Steele, the ARIA-Award winning Empire of the Sun, international success has, until now, somehow eluded them.

“It is completely strange that Elton John even knows who we are. I mean, he found us in Sydney, he bought 100 copies of our last record and sent it to all of his friends. As you might imagine, he has some pretty influential friends – musicians, movie directors, artists – and soon thereafter we actually moved to the UK. We’d been planning on doing that, as a lot of Australians do in their 20s and 30s, we were a total cliché!” Mayes remembers, laughing.

“He took over our management soon after that and, literally, a couple of days later, we were told that we were being given all of Elton’s old masters spanning 1970 through 1976 and that we were going to make a record with them. That just completely blew our minds. Initially, we were just incredibly excited and completely over the moon and then the reality set in. We realised that we had to impress Elton John, this man who is not only an amazing musician himself but who knows more about music than anyone. I mean, he listens to, like, five new records every day! His CD collection and his musical knowledge are just insane!”

It was in 2010 that Mayes and his musical partner, Nick Littlemore, started the project and he says it is “probably the most challenging but rewarding thing we’ve ever done. We worked harder on this than anything else we’ve done before.”

Work on the project began with the pair receiving iPods loaded with more than 600 of John’s songs. From there, they had to decide which songs they wanted to use and what form they wanted the project to take, though he says they always knew “it would never be a straight-forward remix project.”

The pair met when they were only 10-years-old, both students in the same grade four class. As teenagers, they discovered a shared passion for both listening to and making music, something they’ve been doing together pretty much ever since. Mayes jokingly says he imagines they’ll “keep working together until we’re old and grey and can’t hear what sounds we’re making anymore!”

“We met so young! We were the class clowns, the real cheeky little bastards of our year and we were kind of competing for that role as kids, I think. We spent our teenage years locked in a shed in Nick’s garden making weird sounds with just a guitar amp and a four-track. That developed into Pnau and we did our first record when we were 16. That didn’t come out, thank God, because it was probably terrible, and then our first proper record came out when were about 18 and had just left school,” Mayes recalls.

“This whole experience has been amazing. We knew we didn’t want this to be a remix record. We didn’t want to cheapen Elton’s music in any way. We wanted to do the man and his back catalogue justice, you know? It was a huge process of absorbing all his material. We really wanted to make a new piece of music that would turn people on and help a whole different generation discover his talent and his music by presenting it in a different way. When he loved it, we were so thrilled and received. Really, that other people are now loving it just as much is such a bonus. Going number one and getting one of the official Olympics 2012 songs is really just a pretty heavy slab of icing on the cake.”

Pnau’s Elton John vs. Pnau: Good Morning to the Night is out now through Universal Music Australia.

Heidi Maier