High Above The Kitchen: A Bit About Neil Finn (part 2)
- jamesgeraghty
- Aug 2
- 9 min read
We pick up the story of Neil Finn from Part 1. Split Enz is done with, and now aged 27, Finn is ready for his next project. He has formed The Mullanes with fellow ex-Enz bandmate Paul Hester, bassist Nick Seymour and second guitarist Craig Hooper.
The first intention was to have the new band as a three piece before they decided to entice the in-demand Hooper into the fold. Finn would tell Australian radio station Triple J in 1985, “We’re glad to have him on board, I’ve always admired Craig’s guitar playing. I think all the other bands blew it by asking him to play keyboards for them. He’s sick of playing keyboards now, he’s sick of machines. He felt like having a blatt on guitar, which is what we wanted him to do. We were lucky to get Craig. He’s a good musician.”
The Mullanes toured Australia to relatively small audiences, despite the cache of Finn and Hester’s previous job. Despite the small crowds, they were liking the music they were working on - “I was excited by the new material… We were a good band” he recalled later.
They were getting nearer to committing their new material to record, but wanted to make sure they were with the right record label and had a good producer lined up. They ended up signing to Capitol Records, with Mitchell Froom lined up to sit in the producer’s chair.
The Mullanes: Now We're Getting Somewhere (audio only - early - and different - version of a future Crowded House favourite)
Off they went - Los Angeles the destination for creating their debut record. Except, the quartet was now back down to a trio, as Hooper didn’t go with them. They also wanted a new name, as Finn was worried about the way Mullanes might be twisted into ‘Dullanes’ or ‘Mundanes’ by the headline writers, if the music wasn’t well received.
The Largest Living Things was on the cards as a name, as, allegedly, was Barbara Stanwyck’s Chest. In fact, the record was all but mixed before the new name was finally settled upon. Finn went to a library in desperation and looked through books for words that could become a name - finally, he found the book Crowded House. This resonated, as at the time, the band were living in a pretty small house in L.A., that seemed constantly full of people coming and going.
Don’t Dream It's Over:
He was at Tim’s house in Melbourne, where Hester was staying at the time. With people visiting, and he was not feeling all that sociable, he took himself off to the piano, and Don’t Dream was born. “I did a demo using a matchbox as a snare drum and my foot as a bass drum” (to triple j in 2011).
It was Froom, once in the studio, who suggested the middle eight with the Hammond organ solo, something Finn states he would never have considered. The slow, melancholic feel to it is even slower than first intended, as it turns out the tape recorder taping it was going a bit slow.
Crowded House: Don't Dream (live in Melbourne, 1986)
Mean to Me:
This was written while Finn was touring New Zealand with fellow Kiwi musician Dave Dobbyn. They were in Palmerston North for a gig, Finn was feeling unwell, and a young girl from the States showed up. She had been a massive Enz fan, even writing to Neil’s parents to tell them of her trip. In the end, she showed up in Palmerston, but with him feeling sick, he could only chat to her for ten minutes. He later saw her dancing with poet Gary McCormick, providing him with the line, “I saw you lying in the arms of a poet, I heard him tell you tantalising lies.” The chorus was from an older bit of song, which Mitchell Froom decided would be good pasted together into Mean To Me.
Hole In The River:
This is one of only a few songs that are very directly about actual events in his life. The song is perhaps the most poignant he ever wrote, about the tragic death of his father’s sister. It wasn’t, perhaps understandably, all that well received in family circles, but it is a beautiful and elegiac tribute to his aunt.
Something So Strong:
Having always had the English influence when in Split Enz, there was now some American focus going on, with Froom at the helm. “He suggested making Something So Strong into something that resembled a soul tune.” It had started as more of a ballad, but Finn took the suggestions on board and enjoyed the transformation into a full on pop song.
Crowded House: Something So Strong (official music video)
It was all a slow start. Six months after the album came out, nothing much was happening, but then Don’t Dream started to build momentum. The band was finally getting some attention, albeit focused on one particular song. “You have to be smart enough to enjoy those moments when they happen. A lot of people recoil in horror at the sudden amount of attention and focus on one particular song, which is kind of like having one of your children picked out and feeling a little upset for your others.”
In the Temple of Low Men:
Work on album number two started with two months of rehearsals and sessions in Melbourne, before moving onto Hollywood for the main work, again with Mitchell Froom. After the success of the first record, the working title was the self-mocking Mediocre Follow-Up. What we got was anything but mediocre; by now a tighter than ever band, with Finn’s songwriting only growing in maturity - with Temple Of Low Men, they assembled a set of songs that were perhaps not as catchy as before, but had tons of atmosphere.
Finn would note, that as someone from NZ who had moved to Australia and also lived in L.A., that the songs “don’t have a sense of place, particularly, because I’ve been uprooted from my home country for so long… the album kind of deals with the low end of human experience.” He struggled to call the album done, constantly feeling that it could be better, but he eventually let go and the album came out. “I don’t want to rush into it thinking this is the greatest thing that’s ever been recorded and at some point go through the agony of realisation that I was kidding myself.”
Into Temptation:
This is a song that is full of personal experience for Finn, yet he was not singing about himself. He had been staying in a hotel where a netball and rugby team were also staying. They all ended one night by pairing up and having a sing-song - the result, a provocative song that many thought was him admitting to his own indiscretions.
Crowded House: Into Temptation (official music video)
Better Be Home Soon:
This one was felt to be a sure fire hit, but struggled for airtime, especially in the US, and so didn’t make much of a dent. Finn would say that he wasn’t as sure as others, especially at the record label, that it was a definitive hit - “not because I don’t like the
song but because I feel it’s not representative of the rest of the record.”
Crowded House: Sister Madly (live in Sydney, 1988)
There was the briefest of personnel changes in 1989, when Seymour left the band, well, as Finn admits, “I kinda booted him out for a while, to be blunt”. Back in Melbourne after the Temple tour, and things just didn’t seem to be clicking. Finn wasn’t liking the bass sounds for the new songs they were working on, and was doing a lot of the bass stuff himself. Luckily it lasted just a few weeks before Seymour pointed out that he was an integral part of the band and their success, and Finn let him back in again.
Woodface:
Neil Finn had seven songs in a decent place ready for a third Crowdies album, but not quite enough for a full record. Simultaneously, he was writing material with Tim, and that threw up an interesting development - join the two projects together.
In response to the suggestion that the album was basically Crowded House featuring Tim Finn, rather than an all joined together band, Finn acknowledges that but says that “it was an easy way to finish the record and get great songs on board.” He would admit that the chemistry never quite worked though, as “Tim wasn’t part of what we’d built… Tim and I are capable of that kind of chemistry. He’s a frontman, who wasn’t a frontman enough in Crowded House, because there was another one.”
Four Seasons In One Day:
This was another co-write with Tim, although the music originally came from a session where he also wrote Into Temptation (from previous album, Temple), with the two essentially being parts of the same song to begin with. Fast forward to what would be sessions for Woodface, and Neil introduced the music before he and Tim traded lyrics with each other.
Crowded House: Fall At Your Feet (with Tim live on The Tonight Show, 1991)
Weather With You:
The song that Neil and Tim wrote together in the first batch for what would be Woodface. “It was a pretty good first day. He had the title, the chorus line and the very first line of the verse. Then we put the rest of it together in one crack.” Their English record company persuaded them to move the chorus forward - they wanted it to arrive a bit quicker, so the radio edit had that change to it.
Fall At Your Feet:
This song began as a chorus with some verses that were considered failures. “Eventually it was a session down in Melbourne, I played a very, very old song which I had written when I was about 19-years old. Mitchell Froom said ‘Well, try that with the chorus’ and it was one of those revelations at the time…. Sometimes you have to work really hard to find what sounds the most natural, obvious thing that seems like it must’ve just fallen out
so easily.”
Crowded House: Weather With You (live in Melbourne, a warm up for the Opera House, 1996)
Four Seasons In One Day:
This was written in East St Kilda in that bounteous session between Neil and Tim. Melbourne apparently is famous for “extremely hot temperatures and then big, black clouds roll in and the weather suddenly changes 20 degrees in about ten minutes.” Tim provided the key phrase and Neil pulled together the melody and chords - a very freeform composition.
Of course, the Tim experiment didn’t last long. They were doing a promotional tour in the UK, and by the time they hit Glasgow, they had a meeting, decided it wasn’t working out, and Tim walked away.
Together Alone:
It was a bit of a case of all change for album four. Gone was the boring old studio, replaced by recording on location, and also gone was Mitchell Froom, the steady hand that had guided the first three records. Instead, they rented a house owned by family friends of the Finn’s, out at the remote Karekare beach, where they were joined by Killing Joke bassist Youth (Martin Glover), as the producer.
Youth was a keen proponent of experimentalism, which fitted in with Finn’s desire to take a bit of turn and do something a little “looser, sprawling, and a bit more psychedelic.” What we ended up with was Together Alone, a great and ambitious record, full of texture, complexity, atmosphere and even Maori log drummers. Fourth player Mark Hart (once of Supertramp) was now officially a band member too
Distant Sun:
“I got the lines in the chorus, as I often do, purely by accident. I really don’t know what they meant.” And thus one of their great singles was born, a song about the mysteries of relationships and chemistry - and the killer line, “I don’t pretend to know what you want, but I offer love.”
Crowded House: Distant Sun (official music video)
Locked Out:
This one came from a book that Finn had been reading, a Peter Carey novel called Bliss. Finn had read it and latched onto its themes of rejection and a desperate attempt to win back a love.
Crowded House: Catherine Wheel (live on MuchMusic, Canada)
The next big upheaval was coming too, again mid-tour. It was April 1994, the band were half way around the US, when Paul Hester upped sticks and returned to Australia. He had clearly been unhappy for a while, so in the end it didn’t phase the band quite as much as it could have done - it was probably more of a shock to the fans.
The First Finale:
Not so long after that Together Alone tour had concluded, Finn was deciding on the future for him and the band. By early 1996, it was clear he was ready for something new and he split the band up. They tidied up some loose ends, they put out a greatest hits record, Recurring Dream, and announced one final hurrah to end 1996 - with Paul. And what a hurrah it would be…
Not content with an arena show or something, they held a free concert on the steps of Sydney Opera House; 24 November 1996, with over 100,000 people showing up for the swansong. Finn would recount to Double J, “The show itself was very auspicious and memorable. We were all just really concentrating on playing as well as we could. In some ways there was less messing around than normal and more just focusing on being a really good band. I think we did play really well.”
Crowded House: Mean To Me (the first song at that 'final' Opera House gig)
Crowded House: Locked Out (another great one from that 'last' show)
Crowded House was over, well for now - what would come next?
Tune in whenever I get around to publishing part 3.....
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