Crowded House Warming!

Crowded House Warming!

Vicki Arkoff

“Once Neil came home from the studio and I had all these people there,” says Crowded House’s Nick Seymour. “We were sliding down the hallway stairs in cardboard boxes.”

Yes, things got very crowded when the Australian-based Crowded House was temporarily displaced to Hollywood last year. There, the trio—leader Neil Finn, drummer Paul Hester and bassist Seymour—shared a chaotic household while recording their self-titled debut.

“It had its moments,” grins Firth, the band’s songwriter, guitarist and benevolent dictator. “But we wanted to be committed to the band and to live together. For a band that’s hoping to be around for awhile, it’s important to know each other.”

Crowded House is a new structure for Finn—a new group constructed from the ashes of New Zealand's Split Enz. Finn and his brother Tim put eight years into the Enz—with Paul Hester and Crowded House’s temporary keyboardist, Eddie Raynor, also doing time. But within a week of the Split Enz break-up, Finn was busy recording ^demos that soon became the Crowded House repertoire

“Crowded House is Neil Finn’s best erection since Split Enz stopped getting ft up from down under,” is the sort ofstate, ment the, band has to tolerate since their name lends ftsteifto a truck-load of dumb puns, and—face it—that’s often all it takes to got mega-press. But that hasn’t exactly

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somehow appropriate. As Neil sings in “I Walk Away," they believe in doing thlr backwards.

“I find it difficult to do anything properly! That’s the truth of it,” Neil says backstage as Rowdy Roddy’s bagpipers rev up. “We approach this whole band in a bit of a backwards way. jflb went straight for the jugular—for the record deal—before we did gigs, found a manager or anything like that. As the year progressecfpve worked the band into shape. So we weren’t really a band when we got the deal at all. We made ourselves into a band Ip that ensuing year. I didn’t want to sit on my ass for too long after Split Enz, and brood on everything. I wanted to get on with it."

He decided against going solo “because then I’d be missing put on the benefit of the conflict that a band creates. The last thing I want is to be surrounded by yes men,”

“Yes, that’s right, Neil,” Hester concurs.

“I wanted to have more control,” Finn continues. “In Split Enz, there were six people and everybody had to have a say.”

The compact Crowded House trio (almost named Largest Living Things or Barbara Stanwyck’s Chest) gives Finn a forum for his backlog of songs, offers a desperately-needed divorce from eight years of Enz tunes (“That’s an extremely tremendous advantage to this band.”), j|l§|jp|t'of all, “allows us to fit into one rentalcar.”

Sometimes quirky, often bittersweet and always infectious, the band’s sing-along tunes have so firmly set their hooks into audiences that Crowded House's first American tour (bringing nightly food fights coast-to-coast) is SRO: full-houses, packed to the rafters. Though optimistic overall, the album’s dark edge reflects Finn’s post-Enz confusion, marital strife (“Love You ’Til The Day I Die”) and such personal tragedies as his aunt’s suicide (“Hole In The River”).

“I make a real effort to make the songs mean something and hopefully have them connect emotionally to people,” Finn explains. “But the upshot to that is sometimes quite scary. You can connect too much with people—they can become too obsessive about ft.”

Hence, “Mean To Me,” a brutal story about an American fan who trailed Finn across the globe. ‘‘I just got a letter from her,” Finn tells the wide-eyed Hester. “She was just blistered that I wrote a song about her!”

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Although—or perhaps because—Finn is clearly the nucleus, Hester teasingly claims to have masterminded the whole enchilada: “First I joined Split Enz and split them up. See, Tim, the singer, had the best house, so I moved in and took that over...” He then convinced Tim to leave the country so now he’s even driving Tim’s car. Hester didn’t manage to adopt any kids in the package, “but I did get Neil, who’s the youngest, and the best songwriter, and the most moldable...”

“Everybody gets a chance to slag everybody else off,” laughs Finn, “but they really don’t get to contribute anything!”

Despite Finn’s vast song catalog, Hester did manage to contribute to one album track (but only one, Seymour points out, because “his other songs are revolting”) and Seymour used his artistic skills to design the group’s wardrobe, stage backdrops and video sets (“He’s good at that,” Hester deadpans. “He can’t really sing or play, you see.”).

The set that Seymour designed for the “Don’t Dream It’s Over” video helps bring the Crowded House concept full-circle. It shows them in a series of rooms that represent their respective childhoods. Finn’s room centers around his boyhood telescope. Seymour’s is a pious missionary’s room that belonged to his aunt, a nun. And for Hester?

“The ‘dream kitchen’ was applicable to Paul because he’s so anally retentive,” bites Seymour.

It must have been cramped quarters, to be sure. At least it’s reassuring that the foundation is solid. ®