As Crowded House release a return-to-form album and announce a national summer tour, Neil Finn sits down to talk about the new songs, how he’s sold his old ones for millions, and his time on the road with Fleetwood Mac.
Fragments of the new Crowded House album are leaking from the control room of Roundhead Studios and wandering the halls. Arriving from a meeting elsewhere in the building, Neil Finn – black jersey, black jeans, black framed glasses in one hand, silver hair impressively as bird’s-nest as ever – hastens to close the doors to the sound before sitting down with the Listener.
The album, the band’s eighth studio effort, Gravity Stairs, is actually finished. A preview copy suggests it’s the best Crowded House album of their two 21st-century reunions. But today, it’s going through more tweaking because Apple Music needs a Dolby surround-sound mix for its “Spatial Audio” streaming format. Finn makes a grumpy noise about who is paying for the extra mix, although he’s probably on mates’ rates with the studio manager.
Across the main room from where we are talking is the Steinway grand, at which Finn was seated a few nights earlier for a live-streamed show, a tag team of voices including himself, Reb Fountain, Finn Andrews, old mate Jimmy Barnes and Barnes’ Auckland-based daughter Eliza-Jane “EJ” Barnes.
Backed by an eight-piece string section conducted by Finn’s regular arranger Victoria Kelly, the performance, like the many “live at Roundhead” sessions by the many domestic and imported artists before it, reminded of how the studio has become something of a mecca.
Since Finn bought the 1928 building in 2003 and turned it into a bespoke recording facility five years later, it’s become Auckland’s own Abbey Road. Or possibly Paisley Park, in a black jersey.
“It’s in fine shape and it’s breaking even, which is all I ever hoped for,” Finn says about the place, which sits like a soundproof kauri-floored Tardis on Auckland’s otherwise bleak Newton Rd. It also keeps him in touch with the next generation of local music. “The studio makes me extremely optimistic and grateful about New Zealand because I keep seeing this run of really talented young people come through.”
If Roundhead isn’t making great profits, Finn does have other income streams. He will turn 66 at the end of May, so he’s been a gold card-carrying pensioner for a year now. In 2018-19, he joined Fleetwood Mac on a farewell tour, which grossed some US$170 million. And with U2 covering Don’t Dream It’s Over during their recent Las Vegas residency, among many other airings of Finn classics, the royalties keep ticking over. Not that he’ll need to read those statements as much any more.
Last month, Finn became another veteran hit-making writer to cash up his songbook when he sold his publishing catalogue to leading independent American music publisher Primary Wave in what was officially announced as a “multimillion-dollar deal”. It includes all his songs on some two dozen studio albums since he joined Split Enz as an 18-year-old in 1977.
“It’s been good, and good for everybody in the band,” he says of the deal. “I liked the idea of shedding the business of it. It’s quite an involved and convoluted thing to manage a whole catalogue with my accountants. It’s a liberating feeling.”
The partnership, he says, will open up other income streams. The Crowded House business is also in good hands with the US-based Shelter Music Group, whose other clients include Fleetwood Mac.
“We’ve got really good management, really good accountants, great lawyers. All of the business is really good, finally. I’ve been through a lot of different scenarios and had a few mishaps along the road … I think I’ve had 10 managers, but none have ripped me off. So, I’m pretty lucky in that regard.”
But neither the windfall, nor his pension, has led to any thoughts of retirement. As well as a new album, for much of the rest of this year Finn will be on tour in the UK and US with Crowded House version 3.0, playing in venues ranging from The Eden Project in Cornwall to castles in Wales and outdoor festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s an intimate show at Beatles ground zero, the Cavern Club in Liverpool – the new album’s loudest Beatles-esque touch is its Revolver-influenced artwork.
Then it’s home to NZ in November for a run of arena and theatre shows.
After Finn first called it quits on the band in 1996, he, Australian bassist Nick Seymour and American guitarist-keyboardist Mark Hart reunited in 2007 without original drummer Paul Hester, who took his own life in 2005. They delivered two albums but after another world tour, that was it.
“I don’t want to disparage version two [of the band] because at the time, it was a really good rejuvenation but I reached a sort of dead end, in the sense that we tried to record another album and I just got to a point where I just wasn’t feeling it with that line-up. A kind of inertia had set in.”
Finn turned to more solo albums and side projects. That included the Lightsleeper album recorded with Liam, the elder of his and wife Sharon’s two musical sons. Liam was three albums into his own solo career, having spent his teens and early 20s leading his own band, Betchadupa, all the way to London.
Drumming on some of Lightsleeper at Neil’s invitation was one Mick Fleetwood, with whom Neil had become friends a few years earlier. The connection led to Finn being invited to replace singer-guitarist Lindsey Buckingham on Fleetwood Mac’s final tour (see below).
The Fleetwood Mac experience, in which he performed his I Got You and Don’t Dream It’s Over most nights, and in the setlist, helped give Finn a second wind.
“Afterwards, I was really hankering to do my own thing because I wasn’t as fully occupied as I normally would be. It also made me think I’ve got my own classic band, maybe not at the same level as Fleetwood Mac in terms of global domination. But still …”
Having got the thumbs up from Ireland-based Seymour, he asked Liam and his younger brother, drummer Elroy, to join a revived Crowded House. Both spent much of their boyhoods on tour with the original line-up. The invitation also went out to Mitchell Froom, the American producer of the band’s first three albums, to join on keyboards.
“If you want it to devise a way of making a new line-up feel like it’s always been there, then that’s what this line-up feels like, because it has always been.
“Mitchell was right there at the beginning. Liam and Elroy grew up through it – it’s in their bones and in their blood. And they’ve amassed enough experience to bring lots of their own aesthetic and vibe into it as well. There are elements of what both do that are slightly within the Finn canon, but they are also completely different – or they feel different to us. I don’t see any reason why, in the future, they shouldn’t be producing two or three songs an album. Then I only have to come up with three or four.”
Dreamers Are Waiting, the 2021 album the line-up delivered in the depths of the pandemic, suggested this wasn’t another Finn solo album under a different guise. Mostly well-received, it got into the top fives in the band’s traditional strongholds of NZ, Australia and Britain. But finally playing together as a band on a Covid-delayed world tour, says Finn, helped the new album, which has had greater input from the two youngest members
“Initially, for them it was, ‘Well, this is Dad and Nick’s band to some extent. We’re going to do our part, but we’ll be hanging back a little bit.’ Now it feels like when they step into a rehearsal, they’re fully fledged and free to say anything.”
Liam’s voice is prominent on some songs, and sometimes doubled with his father’s. Elroy’s drumming, especially on the irrepressible Teenage Summer with its Simon and Garfunkel-esque harmonies, brings an exuberance that may remind old fans of Hester.
Other tracks, like the opening Magic Piano, echo with baroque touches Froom brought to those early albums on the likes of Four Seasons in One Day.
There’s some Finn family history among the songs, too. Some Greater Plan (For Claire), a song co-written and sung with Tim Finn, was inspired by their father Dick’s wartime diaries and a brief romance in liberated Italy.
“He’d been out on the lash with his mates and they’d snuck into the officers’ club and there was a dance band playing jazz. He saw this woman across the other side who, as he wrote in his diary, was out of his league – she was very glamorous, a diplomat’s daughter – but he went and asked her to dance anyway.
“So, they had a glorious two- or three-week romance, and it became a mythological thing in the family, with my mother wryly raising her eyebrows any time Dad spoke about Italy.”
Elsewhere, All That I Can Ever Own, delivered from the perspective of a new parent – or possibly grandparent, as Liam is now the father of two – is, for its writer, an unusually personal lyric. “I don’t often write that direct a sentiment and I’m usually couching it in all sorts of abstract thoughts, but it just came out that way. I’ve always found it hard to be direct.”
It helps make Gravity Stairs possibly the first Crowded House record that touches the spots their early albums did, though Finn says he’s being realistic about how it might be received.
“I really deliberately under-expect these days with everything to do with records. But there’s a nice little buzz on the new one and you never know. I think it’ll have a better life than the last record … we might have a nice little surprise – a late bloom does seem to happen from time to time.”
Finn will be spending most of his 67th year on the road. “You become aware of little aches and pains as you go on, but it doesn’t bother me on stage. I can still jump around a little bit.”
Last year, his long career became a book, Don’t Dream It’s Over: The Remarkable Life of Neil Finn, a largely complimentary biography by Australian music journalist Jeff Apter who had earlier written one about the Finn brothers. He hasn’t read it. As for doing his own memoir, Finn isn’t considering one. And if he did, it would be a non-chronological episodic one, something like Bob Dylan did in his Chronicles: Volume One, which 20 years later is still awaiting a part two.
“If I ever dipped into a memoir, it would be that kind of thing, I would be tempted to make it not even truthful and let my mind wander. Because it doesn’t matter. It’s all about entertainment to me.”
No sir, not for me: Neil Finn on turning down the Queen
He may be one of New Zealand music’s best-known elder statesmen, one who, alongside brother Tim, was awarded an OBE in 1993, but there will never be a “Sir Neil”. He already turned down a knighthood a few years back. It was a combination of things, he tells the Listener, among them, his views on the royal family. “I think it’s a symbol of something quite rotten in the core of our society, not them personally, just the institution and the way that the world is organised. So I didn’t want to be slagging off the royal family at any point and for that to seem hypocritical.”
Also, the letter saying he had been nominated for the honour listed his achievements in a way he thought was a bit curious. “I read it and I went, ‘Well, you know, I don’t even think those are the best things I’ve ever done.’ They’d cherry-picked a few things, like I’d done in Australia for some charity, and that was one day in my life.
“I’m very grateful for being thought of but it didn’t resonate why they were giving it to me.
“The other thing, when I watch the Oscars or the Grammys – and this may well be because I haven’t had a Grammy – there’s something not quite right about people who’ve had more glory on Earth than anyone could possibly imagine, getting yet another bit of glory and then thanking God for not choosing everybody else and choosing them. It seems like the height of vanity.
“Of course, it’ll all change if I get offered a Grammy at some point. I’ll go, ‘Yeah, this is fantastic,’” he says with a laugh.
“So, I thought there’s something about not taking a knighthood that’s also just keeping it real.”
Finn’s father, Richard (Dick) Finn, who died in 2019, supported his son’s decision.
“And no, I don’t think it was just because Tim hadn’t got the offer, too, but he was really pleased that I turned it down, which was interesting because he was an old-school dude and a World War II veteran. But he was pretty suspicious of the Crown.”
In the meantime, Finn’s OBE is in a drawer somewhere, he’s in the hall of fame at Te Awamutu College, Spilt Enz and Crowded House are in the Aria Hall of Fame across the Tasman, but the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame remains curiously Finn-free.
The stuff of dreams
Neil Finn looks back on his time as a Fleetwood Mac ring-in with affection.
“I was treated like a fully-fledged Fleetwood Mac member, and it was a joy getting to know them all.
“They’ve been through unimaginable heights of fame and fallen off the edge into all sorts of drug abuse – they’ve lived the life. But they weren’t like that when I was there.
“Having said that, they still enjoyed having a good time. It started off without anybody drinking – Mick was always going to have one – but it didn’t finish like that, exactly. One got drawn in because it looked like we were having too much fun down the back of the plane.”
Yes, it was a private plane.
“And I did pay off my carbon credits, he says, quite guiltily. But it was pretty amazing.
“It’s deeply sad to have lost Christine McVie [who died in 2022]. She was a real golden person, a great songwriter and just wonderful company.
“I feel double-lucky that I got to sing with her and be part of that vocal blend and stand in front of Mick [Fleetwood] and John [McVie] in full flight.”
Crowded House NZ tour 2024
After spending the southern winter months Up Over, Crowded House return to New Zealand and Australia for national tours in November and December.
Tickets go on sale on midday Wednesday May 29 (via Live Nation Pre-Sale at livenation.co.nz) then on general from Thursday May 30, the day before new album Gravity Stairs is released on May 31.
The tour dates are:
- TSB Arena, Wellington, Nov 9
- Dunedin Town Hall, Nov 12
- Wolfbrook Arena, Christchurch, Nov 13
- Regent Theatre, Palmerston North, Nov 19
- Mercury Arena, Tauranga Nov 20
- Globox Arena, Hamilton Nov 22
- Spark Arena, Auckland, Nov 23