Tag: crowded house

Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

Ennio Where You Go

Craig McAllister

In the Venn Diagram of melodic rock, the circles formed by Fleetwood Mac, Teenage Fanclub and maybe even the Beautiful South (or Paul Heaton as they’re called these days) intersect at the point of Crowded House. Seemingly perennially unhip, Crowded House have the casual knack of crafting ear-friendly songs that spool out like unravelling McCartney melodies; wistful, super-melodic and always with an unexpected yet beautiful chord change to dazzle and tug at your heart. But you knew that already.

They played Glasgow’s Hydro last night, a metal and multicoloured goldfish bowl of an arena designed, seemingly, to suck both the money out of your pocket and the soul out of the music you’re there to hear. As a concert venue I hate it. I watched from the second tier as the audience on the floor had the time of their life dancing to Prince doing his freaky greatest hits-heavy thang. I watched from the very back row – nothing behind me but breezeblock and Govan sky – as the snow fell below us during Paul McCartney’s festive set addition. I watched, invited, from a VIP box – happy in the haze of a drunken hour or two – as Travis rattled out a decent set of their greatest hits, but as four static dots half a mile away. My best Hydro experience was for Paul Weller; standing, near the front and with a bristling Weller on fine, back cat-trawling form. Looking back in that dead space before the encores, you could see the dreaded curtained sections rising behind the first tier of seating. I’m sure PW noticed the blackout curtains too, for he’s never been back. One night in a vacuum-packed Hydro vs two nights in the Barrowlands? No competition really.

It would take someone really special to coax me back, and the price of those Crowded House tickets wasn’t doing much to sway me, but with the date looming I did what any self-respecting tight arse would do and headed for the resale sites. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. At lunchtime yesterday, about 5 hours before doors opening time, Twickets turned up trumps. Section 2, y’say? Row U? That’s almost McCartney-levels of nose bleedingness. I’ll take ’em!

Taking away the horrible venue and last-minute seating, you can’t fail to be impressed by Crowded House. Despite also suffering from lower than expected sales – it’s packed, but two large blacked-out areas and a closed tier 3 would suggest that (kinda ironic for a band called Crowded House), they play the hits, they dive into their extensive back catalogue and they bring out buried beauties to give them their rightful place. They can rattle off a jingling, jangling and Byrdsyian Weather With You straight from the kick off, first number in, because the strength of what will follow is just as great. Even Don’t Dream It’s Over is played before the half hour mark. Two stone cold classics that would round off most bands’ sets gifted early, the inference being that there are even better things around the corner. And there are.

A wonderfully woozy Private Universe, all ambient guitar and dubby percussion proves to be the fulcrum upon which the set rocks and rolls. A delicately brushed Fall At Your Feet…a skiffly Four Seasons In One Day…a roof-raising It’s Only Natural which gives way to the rockin’ liquid gold of Distant Sun…Neil Finn has quite the gift. Sure, you can split hairs about what’s missing – there’s no Nails In My Feet, for example (boo!), no brooding Into Temptation or swooning Not The Girl You Think You Are, but when, in the encore, you’re gifted Some Greater Plan, a mini masterpiece that will eventually be considered the equal of any of Finn’s greatest work, no one will complain. Tell me I’m wrong.

Crowded House – Some Greater Plan (For Claire)

What’s really great about the Crowded House live experience is that, even though it’s a heavily-produced arena show, there’s room in the setlist for spontaneity. Most bands of this stature nowadays play identical sets night after night, sets programmed to ebb and flow and match the light show that accompanies it. Crowded House change their sets up. You don’t really know what you’ll get from night to night. I’m not sure the band does either. The group like to take the piss out of one another at every opportunity. There’s humour aplenty. Neil Finn makes up songs on the spot. He busks an unplanned There Goes God purely for a fan in the front row who’d requested it. And he singles out all of us who are up there in the back rows, turning the lights on us and asking if we’re OK. As a thousand mobile phones light up, he rattles off another impromptu song about the place being filled with fireflies. We’re maybe in a different postcode to the drum riser, but the band make sure we know they know we’re there. They’re good eggs, are Crowded House.

The best bit?

That may well have been the intro. Bowie’s Five Years marches to a close, the lights go down and a brilliantly-atmospheric Ennio Morricone track fills the venue. It’s Romanza Quartiere, Morricone’s theme score for Quartiere, a late ’80s film that I must confess to never having seen, but if the film is anything like its soundtrack, I’ll be rectifying that soon.

Ennio Morricone – Romanza Quartiere

Morricone’s theme is classic Ennio. Big, elongated strings that weep and sweep, a recurring motif that is melancholic in extremis, tastefully and exquisitely played from shimmering start to stately finish. It’s a remarkable piece of music. Coupled with the instant pop rush of Weather With You, it makes for an electrifying one-two.

Frustratingly, the version played immediately before Crowded House entered also featured a clanging dulcimer – the ghost of John Barry running with a set of skeleton keys – and some tasteful Mediterranean bouzouki that replicated Morricone’s motif. I’ve searched the internet from corner to corner and can’t seem to turn this version up. There’s a chance, I’ve read, that Crowded House have taken the original and overdubbed it with these other percussive and melodic instruments of their own. If so, more power to their talented elbows. I’d LOVE to hear a studio version.

Get This!, New! Now!

Finn de siècle

Craig McAllister

I’d lost my way with Crowded House sometime ago. That wee imperial run they went on, from Temple Of Low Men via Woodface and Together Alone to their Greatest Hits compilation, would have been enough to sate the keenest of appetites for most things Finn. Add in the eponymously-titled album(s?) released by Neil and Tim in the late ’90s plus Neil’s solo material and the Seven Worlds Collide project in the noughties and suddenly you’d be knee deep in wafting, rolling melodies and jetstream harmonies wrapped around gently scuffed acoustic guitars and chiming, jangling electric six strings sent down from the musical gods above. There’s never ever enough time in the day to get through it all and so these ears wandered off in search of new bands and new sounds when they hadn’t fully soaked in the Finn brothers’ stuff that was already right in front of me. Which was, in hindsight, a bit daft. They’ll never be hip, but where the Finn name is attached, there’s usually something happening.

I took a chance last week on Crowded House’s latest album, Dreamers Are Waiting. I say ‘latest’, but it’s been out a year already. Not for nothing do I have ‘Outdated Music For Outdated People’ at the top of this blog. So, I’m slow to catch up, but for just £6 via the devil’s online supermarket (next day delivery, a mountain of packaging) I couldn’t pass it up, no matter how many independent shops it may close or rainforests it may fell or zero hours contracts it took to get it to me. Yeah. When it comes to the price of music, I have pretty lousy double standards.

Crowded House is a real family affair these days. There’s no Tim Finn, but ever-present bass player Nick Seymour is still involved, alongside Neil and his two sons Liam and Elroy, augmented now and again by Neil’s wife Sharon and the well-travelled Mitchell Froom. The songs on Dreamers Are Waiting are well crafted and carefully considered, the production rich and vivid. It’s a good album.

The opening track is a real beauty, a real scene-setter of what promises to follow. It’s not a wham-bam opener, over and out in a breathless rush of flailing cymbals and crashing feedback. Crowded House don’t go for that. What they do go for though is control and restraint. Bad Times Good is a quietly confident, gently unravelling masterpiece.

Crowded House – Bad Times Good

With breathy Californian harmonies wafted in from Neil Finn’s stint in Fleetwood Mac and a heavy borrowing of Don’t Fear The Reaper’s multi-tracked, multi-stacked backing vocals, the album opener has all the hallmarks of soft rock greatness. It’s absolutely vintage Crowded House; from the understated acoustic opening and muted percussion to its gently tumbling piano/guitar arpeggios and close-miked vocals – and it has you hooked from the off.

Neil Finn is a tease though. He has unlimited melody the way some of us listeners might have limited patience, but still, he doesn’t give it all up at once. We’ll discuss the music in a second, but first we must acknowledge one of the finest voices in popular music. There’s an unexplainable tone to his voice that gets me right there. Very few vocalists have this impact on me – most of my favourites don’t – but Neil Finn is one of them. An undeniably brilliant vocalist. And melodicist. And writer.

The music that carries Bad Times Good threatens to fly off on a couple of well-placed chiming chords midway through the first verse –  ‘Make a good time last/Before we choose a path, let’s spend the night at Los Campaneros please,’ – but Finn pulls it back – ‘through the doorways of the past‘ – you’re not ready for it yet, he thinks, and the tune settles in again. Those chiming, not-quite-expected chords, sometimes the harbingers of deadly night, other times the chink of light in a door half ajar are, it dawns, something of a Finn trademark. Not The Girl You Think You Are…Nails In My Feet…Into Temptation...Distant Sun (great performance from the Tonight Show here) all benefit through the principal songwriter’s way with a well-chosen chord that provides the stepping stone to melodies to die for.

‘Hey! Everybody wants to make a bad time good.’

Something is nagging at me by the second verse. It’s the vocals! They’re wonderful! And wonderfully close to Gerry Love’s more pastoral deliveries on those late-era Teenage Fanclub albums. No bad thing, obviously, and when married to those hazy, lazy Blue Oyster Cult heeeeyyys gives us a track that anyone with an addiction to ’60s-influenced sunshine pop and an unravelling melody should enjoy playing multiple times in a row and never tire from. Trust me on that.

As the second verse winds its way to an end, and the bass player begins a frugging run up the frets, the reins come off and we’re suddenly soaring. ‘It’s a challenge for the impresario,’ sings Neil, and the band behind him climbs upwards and outwards on a beautiful chord progression, led by understated and underscored strings – where did they come from?!? – subtle and keening, leading us to the key moment that opens the song into technicolour.

When they hit the sunshine chord – ‘Whether sunlight or shadow falls on me‘ – and the tune opens as wide as the Clyde- ‘You won’t come out….’ – aw man! It doesn’t get better than this! Neil Finn’s vocals are now flirting with that falsetto that he can do – the one you’ve tried and failed at since first hearing Weather With You – and a song that once showed real promise now really delivers and then some.

There’s an acoustic drop out, before perfectly executed ‘Heeeeyyy!‘ AOR vocals breathe their way back in, blowing the track to its slow-winding, meandering end. The rest of the album has a lot to live up to. It doesn’t quite get there, to be honest, but as far as opening tracks go, you’ll not hear a better one this year.

Gone but not forgotten

House Music

Craig McAllister

Crowded House‘s Into Temptation is a slow shuffling, McCartney-esque cheatin’ song, all minor chords and lilting vocals that carry the heavy weight of a clandestine world.

Crowded House – Into Temptation

It’s a terrific wee song, played, like its subject matter, with a hesitant and delicate touch, necessary for allowing the melody to tip-toe in the gaps in between.

“The guilty get no sleep in the last slow hours of morning,” offers Neil Finn, as the creeping chord progression ascends in the way a guilty party might sneak back up the stairs in the wee hours.

“As I turn to go, you looked at me for half a second

With an open invitation for me to go into temptation.”

Wow. There’s no denying what the song’s about, a 4 minute wonder that was inspired after a knock on Finn’s hotel room door one night. Staying there in the middle of a Crowded House tour, Finn had noticed a men’s rugby team and a women’s volleyball team were also residents. On opening, he realised the knock had been on the door of the room next to his and he caught a quick glimpse of a female volleyball player going (into temptation) into the room of the rugby player who was staying there. What goes on on tour stays on tour ‘n all that….

A fairly insignificant track from the band’s second album, Into Temptation benefits from being on Crowded House’s Best Of compilation, Recurring Dream where it remains as a slow-burning standout on an album packed full of great songs. Anyone with a liking for guitar based melodic pop should look no further. Never particularly hip or happening (never mind the AOR leanings of the music, they could’ve done with a decent barber and tailor), Crowded House nonetheless endure, a more straight-laced Go Betweens for folk who’ve never heard the Go Betweens, a safer bet than the edgier Del Amitri. It’s hip to be square, as someone once sang.

Like all the best Neil Finn compositions, Into Temptation features a brilliantly technicoloured chiming bridge where ringing arpeggiated guitars sparkle and the melody soars before returning once again to the unmentionable matter in hand. As far as songs of unfaithfulness go, it’s second only to James Carr’s Dark End Of The Street, another post for another day, for sure.