If there’s one thing Facebook is good for, it’s provoking a very acute sense of envy.
After all, if you want any evidence that there are people out there having a much, much better time than you, simply scroll through the public profile of Chris Pillot, AKA Colour Castle. The young producer’s social media presence is a never-ending barrage of excellent encounters – videos of him crowdsurfing through adoring audiences are as common on Pillot’s Facebook page as photos of last night’s sad pasta are on yours and mine.
Even more infuriatingly, in conversation Pillot is resolutely laid-back about the life he’s found himself in the middle of. When conversation turns to his recent tour, he lists off the shows as though they are merely requirements of an enjoyable, if not particularly taxing, job.
“I just finished touring a bit,” he says. “The first weekend was up in Queensland – in Airlie Beach and Magnetic Island. They were huge parties – there were a couple of thousand people there. So it was a pretty good start to the tour. The crowd was just absolutely crazy.”
Nonetheless, as chill as Pillot might be, he’s worked extraordinarily hard to earn the audiences who flock to his shows. “I’ve always loved music,” he says. “I was always terrible at it. I really had to knuckle down in the last few years, particularly when it comes to musical notation and theory. I got pretty much booted out of music when I was in high school. It’s definitely something that I’ve always liked and enjoyed but certainly something that I’ve had to put in the effort to really excel at.”
Pillot started off his career as a DJ, a job he describes with typical understatement. “I’m from Melbourne, and then I moved to North Queensland when I was 18,” he says. “I just fell into DJing. I just started doing it, mostly for fun and to make a bit of money, but I just never stopped after that.”
It was only after Pillot had been DJing for a few years that he built up the courage to swap roles and begin his career as a producer, adopting the Colour Castle moniker in the process. Determined to make it in what is an infamously cut-throat industry, Pillot recruited help from a number of outside sources. “Learning a lot of the production just took hours and hours,” he says. “I’ve had a piano teacher over the last couple of years as well, and I guess I’ve been learning off a lot of friends. Just tips and tricks.”
Luckily for Pillot, he has some very well-connected friends. The young musician doesn’t work in isolation, and he relies heavily upon an entire community of experienced well-wishers. “I definitely have a lot of producers I talk to,” he says. “There’s a pool of us who just throw our songs around to each other. It’s really helpful – when you listen to your own song that many times you can miss an aspect that someone else can pick up straight away. There are a bunch of DJs I talk to as well – sometimes I’ll flick something over to them and they’re really good because they have an idea of what they want to play on the dancefloor.”
It was this community that Pillot turned to while writing his most recent hit, the ARIA Club Chart-topping ‘Walk Right In’. The very definition of a banger, the track samples Loleatta Holloway’s classic soul anthem ‘Love Sensation’ to singular effect. And yet despite the song’s success, it wasn’t a simple one to write.
“That was probably the fifth project I had actually started on using the [‘Love Sensation’] vocal,” Pillot explains. “I think I sent the first few to a bunch of friends and I didn’t really get a hit back, but then I sent the version that’s out now to one of my friends. And he just called me, and the first thing he said was just like, ‘Brahhhhhhh!’ So that was good feedback.”
Even though it’s the ‘Love Sensation’ sample that really takes ‘Walk Right In’ to the next level, Pillot’s no soul music buff, and his discovery of the track was inspired by his interest in a rather different genre. “I’ve been a really big fan of producers and DJs who use really old samples. People like Fatboy Slim and, I don’t know, a lot of those house guys. They’ve gone through and found all of these nice samples and just made a good version of it. That original tune was just a case of going through all these a capellas. That original tune, it’s quite a big vocal, so I kinda knew that was going to work.”
Pillot was right. ‘Walk Right In’ has worked on the kind of scale that seems ready to catapult him to further success. You don’t need to tell Pillot that, however – he has his own unique way of describing what makes a track work. “The shows that I have played so far, you can tell the songs that people are really digging – the ones that they really like – ’cause they start chucking up their hands in the air.” He laughs. “And you can tell the ones they definitely don’t like ’cause they all leave the dancefloor and go get a beer.”
Colour Castle, along with Angelz and Wongo, plays Chinese Laundry on Saturday August 20.
