When Crowded House mainman Neil Finn invited a host of big names to spend their Christmas holidays at his New Zealand studio to make an album, he didn’t quite know what to expect. He had been down this road before in 2002 under the banner of 7 Worlds Collide (the title of a Crowded House song), when he recorded a live album featuring lots of musical guests.

But this time around, he’s upped the ante. Along with Johnny Marr, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway of Radiohead, who appeared on the first 7 Worlds Collide album he managed to persuade most of Wilco to appear, in addition to Lisa Germano, KT Tunstall and Bic Runga. He even roped in his son Liam and his wife Sharon, who made her vocal debut.
The result is The Sun Came Out, an album featuring new songs from all of the above, most of them collaborations and all written during the recording sessions. And yet, despite the stellar cast of talent at his disposal, Finn was worried that they mightn’t come up with the goods.
“It was fraught with the possibility of failure,” he admits. “It was one thing for everyone to have a nice holiday, but there had to be a good record at the end of it all.”
Asked how he got such a disparate bunch of musicians to travel so far, he shrugs.
“I sent off wishful e-mails for the most part. With Ed O’Brien, we kept running into each other over the years and became friends out of mutual respect. With Wilco we just loved their records as a family. So I e-mailed Jeff. You learn to trust your instincts when it comes to people you’d like to work with. The fact that we all had a level of success and weren’t launching a career for ourselves helped. I think it’s unique, a genuine collaboration by a community of people. It has a vibe. It’s a soulful thing.”
Meanwhile, he reveals that Crowded House are working on a new album, the second since they reformed after more than a decade apart.
“It’s a real band record,” he divulges. “The last album had a schizophrenic quality to it mainly because it started out as my own solo record. We haven’t made plans to tour yet but we’ll probably get over to Ireland at some stage. You’re so fucking far away (laughs). I’ll never forget the time we did Feile. We flew from Melbourne to Tipperary arriving on the morning of the gig. I don’t know how we played that night but we felt fully justified in doing, ‘It’s A Long Way To Tipperary’. It was for us.”