On Sunday, November 24, 1996, 150,000 fans gathered in Sydney to see Crowded House play their final show. In a series of frank, in-depth interviews exclusive to MOJO, each member tells David Hepworth of the passions and resentments that fuelled their brilliant
but turbulent career. Es folgt die Einleitung und das Interview mit Paul.
Interviewteil mit Mark und Nick
Interviewteil mit Neil From my position in the wings, it's possible to see this show the way Crowded House see it. They have taken the stage just as the blue of the night is meeting the gold of the day and the view that confronts them has to be the most enthralling that ever a band gazed out on.
Straight in front of them is the building once likened to a number of nuns caught in a sudden gust of wind, the Sydney Opera House. Over to the right, a host of boats, ranging from the modest messing-about variety to tall masts that bespeak serious money, bob on the waters of Sydney Harbour between the city and the North Shore. Look left
and you can see huge ferry boats ploughing in and out of Circular Quay. Light on water generally has a magic. This much light on this much water has a good deal more. Looming over everything, never further away than the corner of your eye, is the 52,000 tons of steel that comprise the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And in every nook and
cranny of this breathtaking panorama, from the Botanic Gardens at the top of the cliff directly behind the stage - where you can watch the view but not the band - to the main seating area on the Opera House steps up past the very peaks of that building's sails, where some foolhardy souls have climbed, to distant pockets the best part of a mile away across the water where there is a good view of the giant video screens and room to stretch out, there are people. Estimates of crowd size tend to
be politically motivated but most sources agree that more than I 50,000 people have trooped down to Bennelong Point for this free farewell show, framed with TV in some people's minds and history in others. For some of those people down in the crush, the journey has been longer than for others. Those who've come from Melbourne figure
they should get a badge. Those who've flown from Perth feel even more special. Those true believers who've flown for four hours across the Tasman from New Zealand are used to making sacrifices for their national institution. But it is the thousand plus who have taken 24-hour flights from the US and Britain, scrunched up in cattle class, tickets paid for out of their own pockets, who ignore the crowd surfing, keep their own counsel and stand jet-lagged, sun-burned and rapt, unsure whether to
take in the view, the music or the event. Similar thoughts are going through the minds of Neil Finn, Nick Seymour, Mark Hart and Paul Hester of Crowded House, the men whose almost amicable divorce after 10 years has brought them all to precisely this place. The last time I reported on Crowded House for MOJO was in 1994 from midway
through an American tour, a tour which was clearly failing to ignite their Together Alone record in that territory. Their US label Capitol had not enjoyed the same success with Woodfce as its British arm Parlophone, and was sufficiently cool about Together Alone to suggest to Neil Finn that he add a couple of catchy singles to it, a request he refused. The four of them had just gone through a testing time making the record with British producer Youth in the isolated environment of beach on
the North Island of New Zealand and were proud of it, with some justification. Two days after I left Crowded House in Norfolk, Virginia, drummer Paul Hester, whose "mood swings" - the group's common euphemism for his periods of black depression - had been an issue ever since he formed the group with Neil Finn in 1986,
announced he was leaving. The other three completed the tour using a variety of drummers before recruiting old friend Peter Jones for dates in Europe and Australia. Upon their return home, Neil finished work on Finn, his collaboration with brother Tim, visited London to play showcases, and then abruptly canceled plans to return for a
full tour. Finn was well reviewed but failed to produce any hits. Capitol in the States didn't even release it. In response to Parlophone pressure, they planned their best of, Recurring Dream, for release earlier this year and added three new songs recorded with Hester and old producer Mitchell Froom in order to round out that phase
of the band's life. A few weeks prior to Recurring Dream's release, Neil talked about the next chapter possibly involving an enhanced line-up and different textures, but there was no indication that Crowded House would not continue to trade. The group, with Peter Jones on drums, arrived in London to play a showcase and informed Parlophone that this would be their last UK show. The three-hour marathon at the Hanover Grand was more of an exorcism for the men on-stage than an entertainment for
the audience, who seemed strangely removed from an act of closure which sparked only intermittently. Hardcore Crowded House fans were of a mind that, without Hester, the group had lost some of its surge, and it was clear to every-one that the new group didn't make you laugh anything like as much. A few later, they did another,
happier farewell show in the basement studio of n radio station GLR before travelling to Toronto to play once more. Dream has since sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK alone, making it one of the best-selling albums of the year and causing EMI execs to weep at Neil Finn's decision to give up an apparently winning hand.
And now categorically the last goodbye, their so-called Farewell To World. This Sydney show started as the brainchild of their manager Grant Thomas, who had long been keen to see them play in front of the Opera House if the authorities could be persuaded. The band had resisted an apparently grand gesture. But once they had decided to split,
the notion of a sponsored final show (a benefit for the Sydney Children's Hospital) in such a sublime setting with the possibility of worldwide TV exposure as a bonus made it a certainty. The concert was scheduled for Saturday, November 2 3, the beginning of Australia's summer. Bill Clinton was in town, the West Indies were laying
the first test at the Gabba, Michael Jackson had just gone to Adelaide with his new bride, it was Australian music month and the most picturesque city on earth awaited its crowning moment. Unfortunately, the band arrived from a week's rehearsals and warm-up shows in Melbourne to find Sydney suffering under 24 hours of steady in. It's
so bad that the riggers aren't allowed to continue their cabling for fear of electrocution and the whole vast enterprise has to be put back 24 hours.
PAUL HESTER BURSTS INTO THE BAR OF THE SEBEL TOWN House, Sydney's legendary showbiz retreat - Kiefer Sutherland is also in residence - to announce that he's just been told by
Channel Nine that is show is postponed until the morrow. Slight, bigheaded and with an antic countenance that would make him a natural Shakespearean mechanical, Hester is the most charismatic member of the group. His conversation is peppered with noises, mimicry, mime, all manner of mugging. He could easily make a crust as a stand-up
or in talk radio. Leading with his chin, flexing his body like Norman Wisdom, he casts himself as the small, puzzled individual against the world. Earlier that same afternoon, he and the rest of the group ad played a short acoustic set in a lecture theatre at the Sydney Children's Hospital, the chief beneficiary of this weekend's
show. It was a strange spectacle for the band as looked out. Some of the nodding heads were wearing ER style skull-caps, having come straight from the operating. Here and there were children who had been wheeled carried, either in chairs or in beds. The group tried to put me spirit into their greatest hits but their faces betrayed their unease at singing pop songs under the curious gaze of a five-year-old made bald by chemotherapy or the nurse wheel the cot containing a two-week-old baby
connected up to drip and an electronic monitor. After finishing, they posed for pictures. Hester bolted as on as he decently could and was found moments later crying his eyes out in a corner of a supervisor's office. The following afternoon he is fully recovered, ordering tea and cakes in the suite he's sharing with his girlfriend
and all daughter, and settling down to talk for the first time out his flight from Crowded House. Your relationship with Neil seems to be at the core of this group. How would you describe it? I hooked up with Neil in Split Enz back in 1982 and I considered myself under his wing. I just watched him and Tim. That relationship carried on through the Crowdies but by Together Alone I didn't feel like that anymore. We were all equal and had similar things about us and we all had our Achilles' heels. We just knew all about each other. There weren't any surprises and what we did at Kare Kare was we set up a really strange
situation without knowing it. We lived together, worked together, cooked together and it was just insane. Neil had this stomach problem and Youth and these engineers had flown direct from Brixton to Kare Kare where there were no shops or smokes or people or trains, and there were these Dickensian waif-like boys sitting in this room just freaking. Youth was so much like Neil in The Young Ones. If you shut your eyes in that house it was like The Young Ones in the South Pacific. Neil and I had come to a point where I felt like Rudolf Hess, I wasn't sure I could stay with it. Youth was at least trying to make it fun - (Cockney accent) 'Here's a circle of rocks, get in it and play your guitar. Here's a crystal, stick it up your arse and sing.' It was fun but fraught. I thought that was really the end of Crowded House in a funny way. The personal relationships between me, Neil and Nick really took a beating. We really put each other through it. It took a toll on everything, people fell by the wayside and you thought, Jesus Christ, it's just for a bloody record, should this be happening? I
probably held Neil responsible and it wasn't his fault. He was just trying to make the bloody thing work. When we're trying to do a record it's just Neil trying to get his songs out and it must be a hell of a thing to go through. And the album budget was full of things like bridges which were built to deliver equipment over and
gravel was bought. The Americans looked at the budget and said, 'Gravel?' Lots of marijuana was bought and hidden in drawers and pillows and it was all gone in a couple of weeks. Dugald, this poor fella who was the one roadie we had with us, one day he had to go to town and drop off somebody's stool sample to a doctor, pick up an
Indian visa for Youth, several sticks of incense, several cartons of cigarettes, get some musical instruments, get some groceries and be back by three. When we went to mix it in Melbourne with Bob Clearmountain I think there was still an aura over those tapes because Bob was coming out saying (hysterical American mix specialist),
"I cannot mix this song because there's no track sheet, there's just pictures of mushrooms and crystals! Where are the drums?' How would you describe your state of mind going into this final show? Quite emotional. I don't know about the other boys but I'm not used to all this playing. I've been gardening for the lost couple of years. I'm like a home-grown bomb. I could go off at any point. I'm much better now we've had a gig or two this week to warm up. The other day
was the first time we'd actually played together in front of an audience in two years, so there were a few things hanging that were resolved that night, like are we going to be able to tap into this again, the spirit of it, so it could feel natural and like we were when we were on a roll. That for me was a big question because I haven't been around for a while. But once we got away and had a few chats it was incredibly familiar. Now this big show with all those Australian icons like the Opera
House and Harbour Bridge around you call up all these images that you wouldn't normally reference if you were playing in a room or a hall. What have you been up to since you left the group? I've got a recording studio called The Lodge which is strictly for gentlemen. I've learned to engineer and I've got into sonics. It's weird saying this when I've been in a band for 10 years, but I now know about sound. The Lodge is all analogue, valves and magnets. And I've got a little TV show which I've put together which ABC [Australia's's public broadcaster] say they want to do. It's a half-hour show where we get a singer to
sing with my combo. I've done a lot of gardening. I've built a retaining wall a few weeks ago with bricks and cement and it's still standing. I liken myself to the Peter Sellers character in Being There. I feel like Chauncey Gardener being put back in the band for one more round. People give you all this kudos and you think, Well,
I'm just here. When you're in this position, people read things into what you say and it's funny because I haven't had that for a while. The power of the microphone and the PA and the situation. We're all on-stage and the others look at me and they know I'm a loose cannon. There's an element of, We're all on board again and you're here too, aren't you, Paul? The other night I ended up jumping around and doing things I never thought I would do again. Did you realise what you'd been missing? Yes, I think the working thing of it. I really love the crew and the building of it all. I miss that camaraderie.
But when you were there you found it claustrophobic? Yes, I was wrestling with the boys in the band for the last year or two and I lost the bout. I wanted to take what we had,
which was a certain amount of success, and make it work for us in a lifestyle way. This was my pitch to the boys on the bus late at night. Let's have six months work and six months off. Let's work in the places where we're strong and stop trying to conquer all the new frontiers. That was my whole tack for the last two years. Depending on what had been going on I'd have the boys on side or not. In the cold light of day, a fox would come in or something would happen and we'd say, 'I don't know
what we were thinking of lost night. Let's get back on the road." The boys were more driven than I was, and I was thinking it was just pointless. Like in North America, we'd done more and more promotion and sold less and less with each album. I was saying, 'Why do we do this? It's killing us. It's killing me.' It was an equation
too difficult to be dealt with so I just dealt with it myself. What was the turning point? Just a week before, while we were in New York, Kurt
Cobain shot himself. And I'd never met him or anything but in a funny way it made me think of all that. I just thought, How can you do that with a kid and a girl? All right, your band thing's fucked but... It just made you think about all those things. He must have got to a point where he couldn't deal with it. And I'd been vagueing
out a bit at gigs. The week before, a couple of times my mind wandered and I actually forgot where we were at, and I was completely out of sync with the boys and that was quite scary for a couple of seconds there. I'd never felt like that before. I'd always felt that we were all in it. So that was quite a shock to me, and the boys picked up on that and we got to Atlanta, had a few days off, and I got really sick and had a bad migraine and had to drive 50 miles to see a doctor. And Mardi was
there with me and six months pregnant, and we'd been in an earthquake together a few weeks earlier just hanging on to each other in this room, and I was just thinking, Am I trying to tell myself something or what? I saw Mardi on the bus in the afternoon - we got kicked out of the hotel and had nowhere to stay that day and we were in
this car park outside this place and it was just too sad. So I found the guys and we went into this little room backstage at the Roxy and we had this little meeting, and I just talked for about 30 minutes straight and got it all out on the table and everybody just went, OK. There was never any doubt from the others. I think Nick was a bit pissed off that I was leaving him to fight the battles on his own. Neil was absolutely euphoric. He was throwing his arms around me at the end of the night.
After hugging Mardi and telling her he loved her, he was just... There was something about me leaving that he wanted to do. He was getting a on the fact that I was doing it. He wanted to leave himself? When we were talking the other day about songs to play this weekend, there's this song by Mental As Anything called If You Leave Me Can I Come Too? He looked at me and said, "We should do that!' What are your treasured memories of Crowded House
on-stage? It's just big and small. There's big memories of big outdoor concerts like the WOMAD show in San Francisco with Peter Gabriel in 1993. There were 115,000 people in Golden Gate Park on a beautiful day. We used to do this human pyramid for big concerts. Three of the crew would come out and make the base and we'd
get on top and I'd be on the very top. Stunts and hits, that was our recipe for big shows. And Neil got everyone to put their hands up and the world just went pink. Amazing. I think in Holland we had a happening where Nick was painting on-stage. We had a four-by-two canvas set up and Neil was interpreting his work with the acoustic
guitar. Nick is Tony Hancock in Th Rebel. That's where he lives. Just a whole load of Crowded House bullshit just clicked in one big night in Maastricht, or wherever it was. One of those nights with the Crowdies where you could almost step out of your own shoes and watch it. So all that business was an important
thing about Crowded House? Yes. Because we enticed people in through the doors with the records, but then when we got them into the concerts it was like OK, this is what we think, how about that? And people would be a bit taken aback at first. Why are they stopping? Why are they talking? What's happening? And we just loved
that. I think that was Crowded House's thing in music in the'80s and '90s, being able to do that. But was it detrimental to the mystique that groups need? Definitely. I think that's what tripped us up. Also Neil's a guy who's been in a band before and he wanted to be involved in everything, and I think that wore him down and didn't allow him to have as much fun with it as he could have. That mystique the British groups, that's their thing. They do that beautifully. Young pimply kids who are 10 can do it in England. They're not too anxious to lay it all out. Let'em come to you a bit.
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