More than Mr Nice Guy
The music industry is full of undiscerning people, who are always keen to favour what is new and shiny over true talent. The fact that you can name all four Spice Girls strongly suggests this. Those who refuse to play ball with the marketing machine risk limiting their audience to those who like to seek out music, rather than those who let music find them, via repeated airplay on MTV. However good a band is, if they can't make tabloid headlines, they won't sell out Wembley Arena. Neil Finn, former lead singer with Crowded House, has been forced to accept this.
"Crowded House weren't controversially quotable in the newspapers. I didn't have any great desire to attract their attention in many ways. We were reasonably friendly, agreeable people. We didn't stick out. You're damned if people say you're nice out there - you can be anything but nice in terms of people wanting to be interested in you - strange or aggressive or arseholes or all things of interest to the machine that's built up around the music industry. I'm not saying we're just nice - we're capable of being arseholes as well. We just didn't choose to be in public."
Neil Finn is a genius. Described by The Times' chief pop tart Caitlin Moran as, "this generation's most consistently brilliant songwriter", he has written some of the finest pop melodies since - although he hates the comparison - The Beatles. He formed Crowded House in 1986 with drummer Paul Hester and bassist Nick Seymour. The band achieved great initial success, with Don't Dream It's Over reaching number two in the US chart. However, the lack of a public image to go with the music prevented them from sustaining their success.
Then, in 1991, the band's record company Capitol gave the band £100,000 to make a video for Chocolate Cake, the first single to be released from the album Woodface. It was a costly mistake; the song flopped in the USA, partly due to the lyric: "The excess of fat on your American bones will cushion the impact as you sink like a stone".
Finn admits, "We've made a few errors of judgement possibly. We stumbled along on our own way. Chocolate Cake probably wasn't a great move in America. It was a bold and wonderful blunder, really. Very unrepresentative of the rest of the album. There's always a thrill when you have something that is really different from what people expect; a perverse part of you that makes you want to surprise people. The fact that it wasn't a good idea should have been taken into account."
He also had to deal with the role of his brother Tim, who had joined the band after successfully writing songs with Neil for Woodface. Finn recognises: "We had gone into it with the best of intentions but it just didn't work on stage and we had to acknowledge it. That required a degree of soul-searching. Our relationship has never been bad."
Unusually for a band popularly regarded as boring, their live shows were always entertaining. Finn developed an on-stage chemistry with Hester and Seymour which he describes as "loose and off-the-cuff. Sometimes it was a pain in the arse but it had humour and drew the audience in."
On one occasion, Hester addressed the audience from the front of stage naked. However, "by about half way back no one knew he was even naked, such is the nature of the male genitalia when terrified".
Although he is a great theorist on the art of songwriting, he refuses to answer when asked which of his own songs is his favourite. "I don't really like that question," he admits. "I find it really hard. It's like picking a favourite child. I can't say." However, he quotes Tom Waits in comparing songwriting with bird-watching. "If you don't know what you're doing, you can spend all day and not find a thing. Because it's mysterious you have to be quite sensitive to picking up when they're around and honing them and not letting them go." His songs do include a lyrical fascination with certain themes, especially kitchens and, in his debut solo album Try Whistling This, there are several references to hanging.
"The 'hanging' one is purely coincidental. Pretty strange thing to pick up on really. No one had pointed that out until you," he says, with a mocking tone. He acknowledges the significance of the other repeated lyric. "Kitchens are my favourite places. I hang in the kitchen at home most of the time. It's where visitors come first of all because you're making a cup of tea and a lot of your best interacting goes on there, certainly not the lounge because once the TV come on you become socially useless." He pauses. "I'm just waffling on about it really. I haven't used kitchens for a while and I will certainly not be using hanging on the next album."
Finn decided to end Crowded House in 1996 shortly after the release of their compilation album Recurring Dream. An effective advertising slogan "You know more Crowded House songs than you think you do" was launched, which helped to define the power of Finn's songs and sell over 2.5 million copies of the album worldwide.
Many people felt the band was on the brink of breaking through internationally, a belief which Finn does not share. He felt that Hester's decision to leave the band had irretrievably interfered with their chemistry and also that "I had been in bands for twenty years and I really just wanted to have the experience of working with musicians from different sides of the track. I felt like I had led a sheltered life and it was time for me to broaden. You can't be an island."
The band did perform a final concert to 250,000 people on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, the largest concert of the year. The reason for its success? "There's nothing like a free event to pull Australians out. There was talk about doing the show before the band decided to break up. It just seemed to dovetail neatly as an idea for a last bash. It seemed like quite a grandiose gesture but it was an amazing night."
His main plan for the coming year is to record his second solo album. He admits, however: "I am only really happy when I have three or four ideas brewing. I've had an up and down career in terms of success, partly because there are too many entities - Split Enz, Crowded House, Finn brothers, solo album. People don't know who I am half the time. I think they think I'm Tim Finn." Indeed, the first interview he did in the UK to plug Try Whistling This was on Capital Radio where the DJ said to him: "This isn't first time you've been in here; you were here with Hit the Ground Running". And Finn said: "No, actually, that was my brother."
If there were any justice, Finn would be one of the most famous musicians in the world. But part of his appeal is the fact that he doesn't crave the media spotlight or the trappings of a celebrity lifestyle. Family is more important to him than press coverage, which has led to him mistakingly labelled "boring". He writes pop music that is catchy without ever being irritating and is at times deeply emotional. In the end he will be remembered for this. As his mother Mary said to him: "You'll always do all right, a good tune is always in short supply".