Charlie Amter Australian electronic music purveyors Pnau are no strangers to hits in their native country. But the trio still remains lesser-known in the rest of the world — a fact which has started to change this winter, thanks to the now global smash “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix),” a re-working of several Elton John songs, which also features vocals from Dua Lipa.
The remix hit No. 1 on radio in the U.K. and many other countries last year, and it just cracked the Top 10 in the United States earlier this month.“It’s a massive moment for us at this stage in our career….
we’ve been doing this for a while now, and it’s so nice to be recognized,” says the act’s co-founder Peter Mayes from Sydney, where he is riding out the pandemic temporarily before planning a return this spring to Los Angeles, where he now lives.
So how did Pnau, a long-established group down under with its own following among electronic music fans, get the opportunity to work with Elton John and update his classic songs “Rocket Man,” “Kiss the Bride,” and “Sacrifice” via a remix (which also uses elements of another more obscure John tune) to turn it into an entirely new composition?Says Mayes: “We’ve been working with Elton for about 15 years now,” says Mayes, 43. “He first discovered us in Australia around 2007, and we even moved to London and then took up with his management company at the time. … We did an album with Elton that came out in 2012 [Elton John vs Pnau “Good Morning to the Night”] and it went No.
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