NO PLACE LIKE HOME
CROWDED HOUSE MAKE A WELCOME RETURN WITH A NEW DRUMMER AND A NEW ALBUM.

BY MARTIN JONES

It would not have been an easy decision for Neil Finn and Nick Seymour to revive the moniker of Crowded House after the death of drummer Paul Hester. You can bet that it was not a decision taken lightly. Though the revolving drum stool – satirised so expertly on Spinal Tap – is a staple cliché of the rock world, Paul Hester was far more than just the drummer of Crowded House. He was the Aramis to Finn and Seymour’s Athos and Porthos.

But back Crowded House are, and in a big way. With Beck’s drummer Matt Sherrod and previous Crowdies collaborator Mark Hart on board, Finn and Seymour have written and recorded a new Crowded House album, Time On Earth, and launched the band into a high-profile tour schedule that has already included spot at the Coachella festival in the US, a bunch of summer festivals in the UK, and is about to hit Australia briefly for the Live Earth concert before launching into a seemingly endless North American tour. The adage “absence makes the heart grows fonder” certainly seems to have applied to Crowded House, the band’s international popularity at an all time high.

Such popularity must certainly help to justify Finn and Seymour’s decision to restart the band, in their own minds. As difficult a decision as it must have been, you can imagine it must have also provided great relief. You can just imagine the pair working together on the new songs with constant sidelong glances, an unspoken ‘do we or don’t we?’ constantly bubbling in their thoughts.

After a ten year run of touring and recording that produced some of this country’s most deeply cherished songs, Crowded House split up in 1996. All the Crowded House members busied themselves with other musical projects, Finn releasing solo albums and teaming up with his brother Tim both in and out of Split Enz and Seymour joining Deadstar and establishing his own recording studio in Dublin. Paul Hester hosted his own television show Hessie’s Shed as well as Max TV’s Max Sessions amongst other musical projects, and took his own life in March 2005.

Rather than sealing Crowded House in a crypt for good, Hester’s death inspired a realisation of just how precious such musical relationships are, and a renewed determination not to disregard them.

Finn invited Seymour to contribute to a new set of songs he was working on with Ethan Johns, songs that were intended as a Neil Finn solo album.

“I’d made a few records in the ten years that I haven’t been working with Neil,” Seymour picks up the story over the phone from his Dublin home, “and I recognised when we first started playing together in December 2006 that when we got together we made a certain sound, we just couldn’t help ourselves but to sound like the years that we had played together. And I guess that is an identifying Crowded House sound. So you always have the points which you embark on and then work from there and we always seem to approach working together in a very similar way – I guess that’s why we sound the way we do when we play. But having said that, there were a lot of areas with Crowded House that I felt we hadn’t explored at the time we broke up and we’re just embarking on those regions now I’d say.”when I’m going to get a real job.”

Time On Earth is available through EMI. Crowded House play the Live Earth concert in Sydney on July 7.

Read the full feature in July Rhythms.