What To Do When Tommy Lee Emails You

Nick Thayer has cut a rock/funk/hip hop track with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee – a childhood hero and now buddy. Fly Shit, featuring London (post-)grime MC Mikill Pane, will drop on Thayer’s eponymous label next month. “We’re releasing it right when Mötley Crüe are touring Australia and capitalising on all of that, if we can!” Thayer enthuses. The Melburnian travelled to Tokyo in February to shoot a Fly Shit video with Lee.

The veteran rocker first contacted Thayer some years ago, after he’d taken up DJing. Thayer was at the airport, chatting on the phone to his wife. “I’m like, ‘I just got an email from Tommy Lee!’” he recalls. “He said, ‘I very much like your music – I’m playing it in my DJ sets.’ I thought, ‘That’s awesome.’ So I replied back and I said, ‘I very much also like your music.’” Thayer told Lee how he and his teenage mates would request Mötley Crüe on the jukebox while playing pool. Later, he hung out with Lee in Melbourne. The pair collaborated on Optimize for Thayer’s 2013 Worlds Collide EP, issued by Skrillex’s OWSLA as the follow-up to his mega Like Boom.

Thayer himself played guitar in “a bunch of hair metal, shred metal, bands” prior to becoming a breaks DJ. But, ironically, when Lee began DJing in the early 2000s, many (wrongly) assumed it was a novelty. “Tommy’s just excited about music in general,” Thayer observes. “I think he comes to music from a very similar place as I do – which is we hear the emotion before we hear the genre.”

"Wouldn’t it be great if we did a Queen show on the Queen’s Birthday weekend?"

Lee has embraced EDM, yet Thayer is returning to rock. The DJ, known to sneak Queen into his sets, is occasionally axeman in a subversive tribute band, The Stormtroopers In Stilettos, alongside various local music identities. “It all came about ‘cause a friend of mine, Davey Lane, who plays guitar in You Am I and is a fantastic solo artist, he and I were just chatting about how much we loved Queen one day. Then he thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we did a Queen show on the Queen’s Birthday weekend?’”

Nonetheless, Thayer remains passionate about repping club music. Last year he launched Thayer Music with a free download EP, Dominion. “I sort of was getting frustrated with having to deal with other labels and other people’s release schedules.” When not touring abroad, the fierce quick-mix DJ is resident at Melbourne’s iconic Revolver. And he’s hitting another beloved club, Ambar, headlining Japan 4. Over time Thayer has developed a hybridised party sound. He is currently digging the underground ‘night bass’ ethos of AC Slater, summarising it as “essentially just really great house music”: “It’s not about big build-ups and big drops – it’s just about cool grooves and cool sounds. So I’ve found that very refreshing, bringing some of that back into what I do.” Thayer also rates Perth’s own Slumberjack. “I love what they’re doing at the moment.”