Through Thick And Finn

Neil Finn is brutally candid about his reasons for splitting up his much loved band, Crowded House, at the height of their popularity in 1996. “I was sick of it. It had to end,” he says.

When pressed on what exactly he was sick of, he makes no attempt at diplomacy. “The people,” he says. “Simply having to be in a bus, car, plane, studio or rehearsal room with the same people.”

The revelation is somehow disturbing, so much is it at odds with the friendly spirit projected by the band throughout their 10-year career. After all, Crowded House ended not with the usual gradual dissolution, bitter remarks and legal confrontations, but with a final free concert in Sydney where they joked and bantered, performing with all the zest and spirit that had earned them a reputation as one of the finest live bands of our times.

“I’m not in any way denying the power of the band when we were playing well,” Finn remarks, “and it may be that some people will always be hankering for Crowded House, but by letting it go I think my future is far more exciting to me.”

Therein, I think, lies the truth behind Finn’s casual dismissiveness of Crowded House. Mature, thoughtful, articulate, dryly amusing and refreshingly down-to-earth throughout our encounter, this was the only subject on which he displayed an almost complete lack of sensitivity. He has just released his first solo album, Try Whistling This (on Parlophone), and I suspect Finn feels the need to finally bury the past in order to concentrate people’s minds on his new career.

Finn chuckles warmly at this suggestion. “It seems people are a little bit pissed off about Crowded House breaking up,” he says. “It’s like ‘You were successful, we liked you, why would you break up? That’s really mean.’ So I sense some resistance to the solo version, no matter what its worth, because Paul (Hester) isn’t playing the drums and Nick (Seymour) isn’t doing his frilly bass lines anymore. But, you know, they’ll get over it.”

Anyone suffering from withdrawal symptoms since the group’s break-up may find Try Whistling This the perfect antidote. There are a sprinkling of off-beat, modern lo-fi touches, but the voice and the songs remain pretty much the same as ever. Only a couple of tracks, ‘Sinner’ and ‘Twisty Bass’, really take Finn into new territory, exploring sample-led rhythms and letting the groove shape the song. The rest might as well be a Crowded House album.

Which is no insult. Finn writes striking, catchy material, with evocative lyrics and insidious melodies. And the subtle arrangements highlight one of the most instantly appealing voices in pop. Finn has that indefinable catch in his throat that could make a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ sound heartbreaking. Nonetheless, the extent to which he has adhered to his established songwriting style is surprising. The other members of Crowded House will probably be scratching their heads and wondering if they were really that hard to put up with.

“At the beginning of the process I had visions of destroying everything I had once been and becoming something completely new,” Finn admits. “I went down some quite radical pathways and actually I was quite impressed by the results – but I didn’t feel an emotional connection to it. I found myself getting back that feeling of connectedness when I allowed some of what was familiar and some of what was good about what was inherent to me to emerge again. I don’t regard that as being a disappointment in any way at all. I just think I was able to rediscover what was precious and worth preserving in what I do.”

Lyrically, Finn’s imagery is always evocative but the content of the songs is often somewhat cryptic. He reveals this stems from a writing process in which music and lyrics emerge together, in an almost subconscious manner.

“A lot of the lines just come sailing out of my mouth. There’s not a conscious attempt to write about a particular subject, but I fashion them once I’ve figured out what the intent is. Some of them are the most disparate images one after the other and these days I tend to go with them even if they make no apparent sense, because they seem to be coming from the same space and describing a place or time or whatever. And they reveal themselves to me over a period of time as well.

“Some of the lines that don’t seem like much at the time sort of resonate quite a lot later on. And I trust that process. I always look at them as being like an internal conversation that you have with yourself late at night as you’re about to go to sleep, slightly askewed and the odd little pearl of wisdom pops through and then the next thought’s completely lateral, trivial. A one sided conversation.

“I don’t write narrative songs,” he continues. “I don’t know if I can. They don’t interest me that much. I sort of figure you can tell a story in a book. I think narrative songwriting has to sacrifice to some degree elegance and economy of melody because you have to fit the story in, whereas the lyrics I get always fit the melody exactly. They always come at the same time and every syllable has a rhythm and carries an important part of the melody so I’m stuck with that in a way. As soon as I try and put across some more elaborate idea or something, I’m trying to fit words in, it just doesn’t sound elegant to me. It doesn’t sound musical.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that his new album sounds like an extension of his Crowded House work, Finn reveals that he initially came under some pressure to release it under the band name. “The biggest thing the record company were worried about was the name,” he admits. “They said you can change everything but keep the name. In my idealistic state of mind at the time, I couldn’t even conceive of it. It’s not just a name, it’s a collection of individuals who made this sound.”

The record company’s concern probably stems from the long and unmemorable list of stars who leave successful bands then signally fail to reach the same heights as solo artists. In fact, apart from Rod Stewart, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, you’d be hard pressed to think of anyone whose solo career has surpassed that of their former band. Even the likes of Sting and Phil Collins, while unarguably successful, do not achieve sales that compare with The Police or Genesis. And then there are all those once glittering idols, from Debbie Harry to John Lydon, who have to reform their bands to provide for their pensions. If you think rock’n’roll is what keeps The Rolling Stones together, just check out the sales figures for Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richards’ solo albums.

“That’s a reassuring notion,” Finn dryly observes. “Solo artist is an awful term, really, isn’t it? It reeks of boredom. Nobody on their own is that interesting. But I’m really happy with my record and I think it at least points the way forward for me. It may not be the whole story yet, I was fishing and that’s the result but I sorta just got a glimpse of a few things while I was doing it and I enjoyed the freedom.

“Some people might say, well, you could’ve gone and done a solo record, got it out of your system and then got the band back together – but I can’t mentally allow for that. I think a band that sits around and waits to do something very rarely comes back better than it was. In fact, I can’t think of anyone. So while there are not many examples of people who have gone solo and done better than their band, there’s even fewer examples of bands that have stuck around forever and actually stayed good. U2 were pretty good at it for a while, but even they’re in a slightly vague place at the moment.”

Nostalgia for Crowded House may not be the only obstacle Finn has to overcome in launching his solo career. He was just 21 when he had an international hit singing ‘I Got You’ with Split Enz in 1979. Over the last two decades he has been responsible for a lot of memorable music, scoring countless major hit singles with Crowded House (including ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ and ‘Weather With You’). So, at the age of 40, you might think people would have worked out who he was by now. But apparently not. The morning of our interview he had been on London’s Capital Radio, where he was asked about an earlier solo album – actually the work of Tim Finn, his older brother.

“I swear it happens every day,” he says. “I’m kind of hoping that having an album with the name Neil Finn on it, maybe people won’t call me Tim anymore.”

To be fair, the Finn brothers have an unusually intense relationship, with careers that have always intertwined. Six years Neil’s senior, Tim was already a star in Australia and their native New Zealand when he invited his teenage sibling to join his band Split Enz. When Tim departed for a moderately successful solo career in 1985, Neil formed Crowded House and quickly achieved international acclaim. Tim subsequently joined and left his younger brother’s group (during which period they recorded 1992’s impressive Woodface album) and the brothers reunited again under the name of Finn for one album in 1995.

“Cain and Abel is one of the oldest stories in the Bible,” Neil dryly notes, “but we’ve had a really good relationship over the years, far less fractious and discordant than people might assume. There are big rivalries. The youngest grows up looking at the big brother as always having power. And there was a time, when Crowded House first happened, when there was this weird reversal of fortunes. Tim’s admitted it was quite hard for him, but it was difficult for me too. I felt really guilty. But we negotiated our way through it. We’re still capable of making music together and enjoying it, so that’s pretty good. Families are complex things.”

It is evident that the concept of the family is extremely important to Neil. It is apparent in the lyrics of his songs and in the longevity of his own relationship. He has been married for 15 years and has two sons, Liam (14) and Elroy (8), a new pair of Finn brothers who contributed photographs and drawings to dad’s album sleeve. Discussing the difference between recording solo and as part of a band, Neil comments: “I built my own studio at home, so my personal life and musical life were entwined instead of being separated, which I found very luxurious.”

This sense of domesticity casts Finn as an unusually sober sort of rock star. Yet, considering the value attached to hedonism in rock culture, many might imagine family life to be almost incompatible with a rock’n’roll career.

“It certainly makes it more complex,” says Neil. “But it’s worked for me. There’s a perception that only by exploring all of life’s darkest corners do you really uncover wisdom or the full richness of experience, but I think it can all happen in the confines of your own home. You can see everything in life within the dynamic of a family and what you end up with after all that shared experience is a bond that’s unshakeable and gives your existence total meaning. But to keep that together is a big struggle – and not only for me but my wife. We’ve maintained and endured, and I’m really proud of it.”

This opens up an interesting issue. There are many (including other band members) who felt Crowded House still had the potential to become one of the biggest groups in the world. And one would wonder if, in some perverse way, it was the promise (or threat) of this kind of success that led to the unabashedly domestic band leader halting his group in its tracks?

“It’s a complex thing,” he agrees. “I am really ambitious but I don’t know if I’m cut out to be in the razzmatazz of the rock business. I find it tiring and wearying far more than exciting and energising. I like the songs getting out there and becoming a part of the fabric of everyday life, but the level of attention that comes with that is daunting. Constantly talking about yourself, having photographs taken of yourself, people praising you effusively all the time, it kind of messes with your brain.

“I think sometimes it has the opposite effect of what you imagine. It fills people with self-loathing: they get sick of themselves. They should be glowing and luxuriating in the praise and the love and the attention but maybe underneath it all there’s an insecurity because they feel like they’ve conned people. I feel blessed with the way things have gone and in some ways I think it’s been the perfect career and I haven’t had to negotiate the dizzying heights of superstardom. My natural reaction to success is to slightly recoil in horror at what I’ve unleashed.”

So is it safe to assume he has no regrets about bringing Crowded House to what many would consider a premature end?

“This is probably the first time I’ve had to confront the decision,” he admits. “Maybe I’ve now made it really difficult for myself. But I’m inclined to go the hard way generally, take the long road. And I can only hope that as time goes on I’ll enjoy the scenery while I’m getting to wherever I’m going.”

Then he laughs, and, dropping his voice to a stage whisper, adds: “It’d be a bit of a sad thing if I have to get the band back together because I’m not having much of a run but, fuck, you know, maybe I will.”