Stick around in pop long enough and your past will come back to haunt you. For ‘Good Morning To The Night’, Australian dance duo Pnau (aka Empire Of The Sun) were given access to the master tapes of what many see as Elton John’s peak creative period, 1970-76 (although this leaves out gems such as 1978’s ‘A Single Man’ and 1981’s ‘The Fox’), and encouraged to construct new compositions from them. The results range from danceable (‘Phoenix’, ‘Sad’) to unnerving (‘Telegraph To The Afterlife’, ‘Sixty’) and give off an atmosphere of ghostly melancholy that subtly subverts Elton’s reputation as a cosy British institution.
Joseph Stannard