The ARIAs' terrifying version of A Christmas Carol. Image: sweded.

The ARIA Awards routinely assumes that Australian music’s talent pool is decidedly shallow. Last year Gabriella Cilmi won all six ARIAs for which she had been nominated, Silverchair won five out of seven in 2007, Missy Higgins won five of eight in 2005, Jet won six of eight in 2004 and so on.

Even away from the major winners, the runners-up in the main categories are likely to be a jumble of the same artists. This year theatrical fantasy electro-pop duo Empire Of The Sun got to be the ones dominating the nominations and wins, having seven savage pyramids brought unto them. But do they actually exist any more?

The acceptance speeches were treated with an appropriate level of apprehension, because singer and more flamboyant of the Emperors, Luke Steele, is weird. Genuinely weird. He thanked the Heavenly Father more than sane people do, he and wife Jodi (aka Snappy Dolphin) dressed like villains from some pan-dimensional black and white movie, each sentence in his speech seemed wholly unconnected to the last.

But that wasn’t the weirdest bit. Why wasn’t the other half of this solar oligarchy, Nick Littlemore, up there with him?

It’s a more convoluted question than it first seems. The company line was that Littlemore was merely recording the next album for his first love, electronic act Pnau, collaborating with Elton John and hitting studios in London, Atlanta and New York. But the rumours were more nefarious.

Littlemore wasn’t around for the first live performances of Empire Of the Sun, because he either didn’t want to tour, was unnecessary (since he didn’t supply any vocals), or because he and Steele had a massive falling out when Steele discovered all Littlemore’s material for EOTS was stolen from Sneaky Sound System producer Donnie Sloan.

Sloan claimed that he had given unproduced music to Littlemore in 2005 for remix consideration and Littlemore had brought some of it to Steele as his own work. It’s strange, since Steele’s A&R at EMI introduced them in 2000, Littlemore collaborated on material for the Sleepy Jackson’s 2003 album Lovers, and they had been worked on a duo project since 2004.

Sloan later said that his comments in the above article were taken out of context and he is happy with the credit that he has been given on the EOTS album Walking On A Dream. Steele thanked Sloan often during his multiple acceptance speeches at the ARIAs.

In September, Steele told NME that Littlemore had “disappeared” and had been out of contact for five months. When asked by The West Australian in September whether Littlemore was still part of the group, Steele said, “I really don’t know, hey, he’s just left me with the baby.”

It doesn’t seem like there are as many hard feelings as music cynics would like to believe. On his mostly barren Twitter (which we’re willing to bet is real just because the five entries are too mundane to be fake), Littlemore noted on 4 October, “Drying my phone out while working my fingers to the bone. My heart is with Luke but my hands are on the Cs80. Writing, writing, writing.” And Steele included Littlemore in his speeches, saying ”Nick’s disappeared. He is still overseas so this is the invisible Nick – ‘Say hi’.”

What is more intriguing about the whole mystery is just how big Empire Of The Sun has become. They’re well-loved by hipsters in the US and the UK, being name-dropped by luminaries including Brandon Flowers of the Killers, Kanye West, Drew Barrymore and Barack Obama. Steele guested on Jay-Z’s Blueprint 3. The album was fourth in the BBC’s ‘Sound Of 2009′ poll. It has gone gold in the UK and platinum here.

Yet the group was always destined to be a side project of sorts. While Littlemore works on the next Pnau album, Steele has suggested that he might go back to working on a third Sleepy Jackson album or even a collaboration with fellow eye make-up enthusiast and megalomaniac Daniel Johns.

Whatever the future holds for the music of Littlemore and Steele, be it together or apart, the result will surely be flamboyant and shamanistic enough to turn our brains into fairy floss. So at least they’ll have that in common, under the dying light of the Empire or not.