Imagine the encroaching sense of mortification. You’re the frontman of a band
known for the intensity of the bond they have with their fans – and a week
before the release of your Greatest Hits album, you decide to call it a day.
Time passes. You record an album under your own name. It’s OK. But there’s
an uncomfortable thought that you are finding increasingly hard to ignore.
It dawns upon you that what you had actually wanted was a holiday, not to
split up the band.
All of which would be fine, were it not for that fact that you split by
playing hits such as Weather With You, Distant Sun and an emotional Don’t
Dream it’s Over on the steps of the Sydney Opera House to 120,000
fans. Crowded House’s Neil Finn remembers the period well. “When did I first
realise that I missed being in a band? Hmm, let’s see. The first photo
session? The first interview? You leave a band and you relish the freedom of
making whatever record you want, but somewhere along the way some of the
character of what you did gets lost. So I’m not sure that more options are
an altogether good thing. Anyone who has walked into a room with five remote
controls on the coffee table will know what I’m talking about.”
Seated beneath a straw gazebo at a Palm Springs boutique hotel, the
49-year-old Finn is something of a sore thumb amid the MTV Beach Party
ambience, scribbling song titles on a piece of cardboard in advance of the
group’s set at the Coachella Festival. While seminaked orange women sip
rainbow-coloured drinks at the pool-side, the singer pours Earl Grey and
expresses mild amazement that the Armani-clad “beauty police” at the front
allowed him in.
Other members of the band seem more comfortable in such environs. Having
discovered that this place has a hair salon, the bassist Nick Seymour isn’t
about to let his lack of hair stop him going for a haircut.
“It’s funny that we’re currently in the midst of a reunion glut,” Finn
continues, “because it’s the first time Crowded House have been part of a
movement. The first time around we always seemed to be out of sync with what
other bands were doing – although that never felt like a handicap.”
Far from being a handicap, it had a lot to do with what people loved about
them. After forming the band from the ashes of the New Zealand art-rockers
Split Enz in 1986, Finn remembers the summer that he – along with Seymour
and the drummer Paul Hester – went to Los Angeles in the hope of securing a
deal. “Our thing was that we were literally able to turn up in the offices
of a record company and play our songs. Perhaps in Britain it might not have
seemed so weird. But in the States people would look at you as though this
was some sort of far-out concept.”
If Crowded House’s ability to, um, play their songs seemed outré at the time,
that didn’t stop America briefly taking to them. Don’t Dream it’s
Over topped the charts there, but as Finn’s reluctance to repeat the
formula arrested their Stateside progress, Britain belatedly tapped into the
autumnal melancholia that underpinned the Finn oeuvre. For a few months
before Britpop made it mandatory for all frontmen to take an interest in
football and talk a good song, they even made the cover of NME.
Neil Finn might have enjoyed the critical and commercial acclaim were it not
for the volatile chemistry that threatened to undermine his band. Twelve
years after his older brother Tim had asked him to join Split Enz, Neil
returned the favour. But Tim’s tendency to dominate precipitated his
departure after less than a year.
Far harder to manage though, were the mood swings of Paul Hester. Maverick,
attention-seeking drummers have always been something of a mixed blessing
for the people who have to live and work around them and Hester’s penchant
for surreal monologues (Finn: “He certainly had a talent for talking about
masturbating in front of 20,000 people”) and stripping down to his socks
betrayed a volatility that portended darker times ahead.
When Hester finally left the rest of Crowded House were relieved. “The day he
said he wanted to leave,” says Neil Finn, “it was like an end to some
horrible tension.”
“Oh God, he was an emotional guy,” says the multi-instrumentalist Mark Hart.
“Some days you just wanted to stay away from him. Paul was never mean to me
but in certain situations with other people – interviewers, record company
representatives – he was not pleasant to be around.”
Even so, he was missed when he left. Finn says the resulting burden of
responsibility, especially on stage, took some of the fun out of being in
Crowded House.
A tearful Hester returned to perform on that farewell show in 1996. But if
Finn was soon entertaining the notion of reforming the band some time in the
future it appeared to be nixed two years ago when news of Hester’s suicide
emerged, 24 hours before Neil and Tim Finn were due to play the Albert Hall.
Neil says that his initial instinct was to cancel and fly to Melbourne,
where Hester had lived. “I didn’t think I could possibly do anything, much
less play the Albert Hall. But then it seemed like, well . . . there were
these shows at the most beautiful venue in the world with a gathering of
people who would really be feeling it.”
By the evening of the show, Neil had been joined by Nick Seymour. “Backstage,
we had a wake,” recalls the bassist. “People we hadn’t seen for over a
decade had come from all around, just to be in the same place as us.”
I suggest to Neil that, far from closing the door on that chapter of his life,
playing with Seymour in front of an audience who still primarily knew them
for being in Crowded House planted a seed that has since germinated. Finn
looks a little uncomfortable with the notion that far from preventing the
band’s reunion, Hester’s death may have hastened it. “Well, it certainly
wasn’t conscious. But yes, it was part of the chronology that takes us to
this point.”
It’s a point that appears to have come quite suddenly. This time last year,
Neil Finn – now relocated to Bath – was working on a new set of songs. With
Seymour playing on most of them, Finn set about plucking Hart away from his
other life as de facto frontman of Supertramp, and the three set about
auditioning for a new drummer. Matt Sharrard left Beck’s band, and the
lineup was complete.
Somewhere along the way Finn’s third solo album mutated into Crowded House’s
fifth, Time on Earth, a record ripe with the brooding humanity and insidious
hooks that characterised the best moments of their earlier incarnation. And,
while Hester wasn’t around to contribute in person, his presence seems to
thicken the emotional air pressure in Nobody Wants To and the tumultuous
closer People are Like Suns.
While not wanting to deprecate the privilege of playing T he Logical Songto
audiences around the world, Hart explains why he was quick to jump back to
Crowded House. “It was a couple of things. The first thing is that any
decent songwriter will tell you what a difficult thing it is that Neil
does.”
And the second thing? The phlegmatic Californian begins by relating one of his
formative musical experiences. “Allen Ginsberg came to recite Howl at my
college. He wanted a guitarist to play alongside him, so I turned up. He was
playing a harmonium randomly and I played along. As a musician, you want to
fly by the seat of your pants.”
A few hours later, Hart gets his wish when Crowded House are faced with the
task of playing before a crowd predominantly comprised of Rage Against the
Machine fans as dusk descends upon the Coachella desert. A bottle thrown
from the front knocks Finn’s mike stand over. The singer commends his
assailant’s aim, but this only serves to trigger more throws.
It’s hard to work out if there is anything in Crowded House’s canon that
might placate restive RATM fans, and the fractious atmosphere serves to push
at least one person over the edge. Improbably, that person turns out to be a
member of the band. During Hart’s guitar solo in Locked Out, Finn’s
23-year-old son Liam puts down his guitar, runs to the front of the stage
and pretends to drop-kick his father. Then he runs over to an amused Hart
and starts thrashing wildly about Hart’s feet. The spectacle is weird enough
to abate the air of dissent among RATM fans.
Afterwards, Sharrard leads from the back with a hard, heavy version of Private
Universe, while the smouldering slow build of Silent House marks it out as a
song that should do for Time on Earth what Chasing Cars did for Snow
Patrol’s Eyes Open.
Encouragingly, the “character-building” aspects of this first major show for
the new Crowded House appear not to have damaged morale. “If we were looking
at a whole year of playing before Rage Against the Machine I think I’d be a
bit more uncertain,” Finn says. “But I don’t have any regrets. Not even
about the way we split up the first time. It’s like when you’re at a party
and you start to feel-tired. You say your goodbyes and get as far as the
front door only to remember that you left your keys behind. So you go back
and the party’s still going. By which time you have got your second wind.”
— The single Don’t Stop Now is released on June 25 by Parlophone . The album
Time On Earth is released on July 2. Crowded House play Hyde Park Calling on
June 23 and the Outsider Festival, Rothiemurchus, Scotland on June 24
