Neil Finn reveals some secrets, but probably keeps a lot more...

The familiar fringe that flops down over his eyes has some flecks of grey now. Those eyes might have a few more laugh-lines, but still have a sparkle - even when in the midst of one of those conveyor belt days of interviews trying to convince the audience to accept your latest musical tangent.

Neil Finn has been doing this for over 40 years. And still can find the wonder in it. “I’m as fascinated by music as much, maybe more, than I’ve ever been,” he states, but then reality checks “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t dark days where you can’t quite find what you’re trying to achieve.”

Many would name him a master of the craft, the art, the mystery of songwriting. He offers some of the formula: “There’s inspiration, creativity – and some bluff. And maybe a bit of skulduggery,” he adds conspiratorially.It’s probably up to the listener to work out just what proportion of those ingredients are present across Dizzy Heights, the new album under his own name rather than the Crowded House or Pajama Club band guises of his late. Although it’s very much a family affair: wife Sharon, and sons Liam and Elroy centring a band that trooped off to Flaming Lips’ producer Dave Fridmann’s studio in upstate New York. Finn clarifies: “We’d actually did a couple of ‘family band’ gigs at the end of Pajama Club tour. This maybe a step to one day doing an album where we can all write the songs, then play it all together. New Zealand’s Von Trapps? Maybe not,” he muses. “There’s not many truly memorable family groups. OK, maybe The Partridge Family,” he jokes.

The thoughts dovetail: “It’s about finding a balance. Music is the most important thing in the whole world, beside my family. But then you recognise the cosmic significance of a few songs is fairly small. You’ve got to keep both of those thoughts in your head, otherwise you’ll disappear up your own arse. But make it too frivolous, and it’s all too much just a game of getting famous.”

But Neil Finn does have the fame, and a canon of songs that truly affect people. There’s a pride in the work, perhaps tempered with a bit of a self-effacing New Zealand reserve. “I don’t really sit around and think about the ‘legacy’ aspect of it. But I do know I’ve written things that mean a lot to a lot of people”, he admits. “I appreciate that exchange - that’s profound, I’m lucky to be part of that.”

However, a competitive element seems absurd to him. “Comparing and connecting my work to the work of others, it makes no sense. To be honest, I’m bored by the idea of all those lists that seem to be the fashion – particularly when I’m not on one of them. And I just hate being asked ‘So, what’s the favourite song you’ve written?’ – that’s ridiculous to me, an impossible question. I can maybe pick 20 that I’m really happy with, but don’t ask me for three or five.”

He again ponders the mystery, and the tricks of the trade. “Maybe one of the secrets of a successful song is it sounds like your revealing yourself – even when you’re really not. What might start from some personal point would get bogged if you kept just trying to diarise your life – although that does seems to work for Taylor Swift,” he chuckles. “That’s where the skulduggery comes in – to open up doors to possibilities, so people can imagine their own scenarios.”

So, it seem we think we know Neil Finn, but probably don’t. We presume he’s the character in his songs. He then demystifies one of greatest of these supposed confessional moments: “Maybe I’m being disingenuous, but Into Temptation is really from two experiences – neither of which was me having it off with a stranger in a hotel, as much as people might want it to be.”

“Basically, there was a rugby team and a netball team staying at the hotel I was in, I heard what I thought was someone knocking on my door, stuck my head out to find that next door along one of the netball girls was, er, ‘calling on’ one of the rugby boys. It was actually very comical - he saw her, then saw me looking, much embarrassment all round, and I just quickly went back in the room and scribbled down ‘Opened up the door, I couldn’t believe my luck’….” So, now you know.

“And the ‘Knowing full well the earth will rebel…’ is from after one of big earthquakes in LA, one of those hellfire preachers saying that was God’s punishment for America’s sins. But there’s not a person who doesn’t understand the theme - but sometimes banal circumstances can make for a great song.”
What makes Neil Finn different from we mere mortals is not many of us could find that kind of emotion in the banal.

The Triffids: You remind me very much of someone that I used to know...

A Secret In The Shape Of A Song – The Triffids and Friends

The Metro, Sydney

17/01/08

Twenty years ago I sat in London’s Dominion Theatre as a lanky, slightly frayed young man folded himself into a rickety bentwood chair and sang from deep inside himself. It made me want to come home.

This night – to paraphrase one of David McComb’s lyrics – despite a patent lack of him, the band and those songs were still present and often utterly moving. Secret… became a mix of reunion, celebration, tribute, and maybe the wake The Triffids themselves never got to have.

To find the band’s tour manager/wardrobe director, the spindly Handsome Steve Miller, a tuxedo’ed mix of greeter and theatre usher made things surreal enough. He then provided a suitably declamatory introduction for the band to appear. I told myself I’d be dispassionate and critical. That lasted until about the third bar of Too Hot To Move.

Graham Lee’s pedal steel drew tears. Alsy MacDonald and Martyn Casey provided a rich and melodic rhythm section. Robert McComb’s cross-currenting guitar was an underrated sound. And there was Jill Birt’s keyboards, and those lead vocals that mixed awkwardness and petulance, and contrast to David’s deeper murmurings of the heart.

The guests of the evening tried to fill out the band’s sound as well as that void where David’s voice should be. Lee pitied the people who’d never heard Chris Abrahams play piano. His rippling solo opening made Mark Snarski’s towering Bury Me Deep In Love even more heartbreaking. Unexpected was an appearance from Abrahams’ musical partner, Melanie Oxley. Her longing Conquer You was a highlight.

Casey’s fellow Bad Seed Mick Harvey is a man who should step forward more often. His desolate run at The Seabirds had all the exhausted agony of the relationship at its core.

Mark Dawson’s drums were a martial counterpoint to MacDonald’s lighter touch. He shone as The Blackeyed Susans celebrated their time as David’s vehicle. The Rob Snarski crooning of Ocean Of You showed McComb’s grasp of the pop traditions.

Having seen Steve Kilbey sleepwalk through some Church gigs lately, I was worried as the opening inhalation of drums announced the majestic need of Wide Open Road. But with the grin of a true fan, he was passionate and aching and better than ever imagined. He maybe even topped that with a visceral howl of Lonely Stretch.

Conversely, Youth Group’s Toby Martin’s sweeter tones were right for the melancholy of Trick Of The Light. The hit that never was, but always should have been.

Such contrasts went through the encores: a scything, almost psychedelic, Field Of Glass  – with Julian Wu’s and Brian Jonestown’s Ricky Maymi meaning five guitars were spiralling over each other – followed by the evening’s perfect full stop of Birt’s gentle questioning Tender Is The Night. That song has a central query of ‘Don’t you want to forget someone too?’ On this night, the answer was a resounding no.

Mike Noga: A quiet Saturday night in a quiet bar in Darlinghurst.

Mike Noga

Golden Age Bar

With a couple of exceptions, Sydney is still working out the ‘small bar’ thing. That’s partly due to the ongoing cage match between a council trying to keep some culture in the inner-city and a state government intent on selling off not only any building with human activity, but the park opposite as well, and even the bus that got you there.

And some blame could be sheeted to the bars themselves, where the musical entertainment provided is often just to be background music to deciding which single-origin spiced pilsener you want with your artisan cheese platter. But sometimes you want more than old mate yowling Dylan covers, or noodling like George Benson. Someone to entertain and engage. Someone like Mike Noga.

The random nature of a Saturday night means there’s a crowd where some know all the words from his genuinely terrific solo work, a proportion having to be told he used to be the drummer in The Drones, and a few who might need explaining that “See, there’s a band called The Drones…”. But armed with only the guitar his dad bought him, a $5 harmonica (“Yeah, really should have got the $30 one…”), and a tambo on the floor to add occasional percussion, Noga is chatty from the little mirrored box with a mirror ball that is The Golden Age stage. He offers samples of his often downbeat muse: the mortal regret of I Will Have Nothing silences the chatterers, chunks from his churning latest album King like the sadly jaunty All My Friends Are Alcoholics – always striking as an interesting choice to play in licensed premises – and “Irish murder ballad by a guy from Tasmania…”, Eileen.

There’s also the danger and delight of such intimate venues: the punter at one of those almost-on-the-stage tables having the hiccup attack right in the quiet bit of M’Belle. Noga stops, laughs with her, soldiers on. Or the lady further back who asked for something a bit more upbeat, and is rewarded with the swing of Down Like JFK as the 35^th president considers taking the convertible may not have been the best of ideas.

He finishes with King’s closer, the human need and longing of This Is For You, and most everybody – even those likely who had no idea of who or what was on offer – probably considered this a good way to spend a Saturday night.

 

You Am I: And thereafter, you put the needle to the (Live) record...

You Am I

All Onboard

The You Am I Set Pty Ltd

 

In which the finest guitar band in Christendom attempts to deal with two of Australia’s great rock and roll orthodoxies: “Yeah, they were always better live…” and the ever-popular “We like your old stuff better than your new stuff…”.
  
Thing is, on their night – which is actually now more often than not than it once may have been – You Am I are an absolutely supreme rock and roll band. And there are points across these two slabs coloured vinyl (naturally…) where there is a glorious gasping and grasping energy to them.

Tim Rogers’ and Davey Lane’s guitars dogfight around over Andy Kent’s bedrock bass and Russell Hopkinson’s still superlative drumming to make something that can move an audience or pin it to the wall as necessary. Timmy will probably always half-jokingly despair about his voice, but even he seems more aware of how to hold it together - or when that crack in the note and grab for the next breath is all part of the drama of what they now are.

The second part of the conundrum is a little more problematic. Many in the crowds seeing them on the 2017 regional tour from where these performances are accumulated probably haven’t even listened to much of the band’s 21^st century output, but things like Convicts’ It Ain’t Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore and Friends Like You can hold their heads high besides the Mr Milks and Jewels And Bullets of the catalogue.

Of course no live album is ever going to truly give a gig’s smell of sweet sweat and beer, but some of the personality of The Australian You Am I Tribute Show does come through - the drumrolls of Rusty’s intro to the towering Trike have a wander through Land Of 1000 Dances, then heads for some chicken tenders at the Colonel’s before it all rips in, or as Rogers puzzles some of the younger souls in the audience by reciting one of Live At Budokan broken English preambles as they cover Cheap Trick’s I Want You To Want Me with the grinning care of true fans.

Apart from all that, All Onboard also has most all of what even the casual observer would require from their peerless back catalogue: Get Up, Good Mornin’, Rumble, that one about a piece of German seating furniture. Get as a souvenir of many nights well spent - by both you and them.

Hits and (occasionally hazy) memories. Not the first, and not the last, live appreciation of The You Am I’s.

YOU AM I

Enmore Theatre

Roughly, I’ve probably seen 10,000 bands. A hundred good ones. A dozen great ones.

And one You Am I.

And this night, a sense of occasion - as your favourite band play the two records that mean so much too so many. Most present having such an investment in Hourly Daily and/or Hi Fi Way Tim Rogers probably didn’t need to sing at all - we knew the words anyway.

Some quibbled these recitals occurring in reverse order – discussions of the albums’ relative merits went on endlessly at nearby bars before and after the show. But Hourly Daily is an arc, an entity. Coloured with brass, cello, and video backdrops of the inner-west Sydney it is so much of, there’s even greater resonance merely because you’re there. “This song was written about 12 minutes’ walk from here…,” as Rogers reflected at one point. There’s a hundred couples in the audience who were those puzzled lovers of If We Can’t Get It Together. How many of them here are still together another question entirely. We’ll avoid those now-ex’s in the interval, as the band dispense with the scarves and checkered pants look for the second act.

For Hi Fi Way is a rock and roll record, played by a magnificent rock and roll band, in increasingly sweat-soaked t-shirts. A shudder of volume went through the place as Jewels And Bullets roared. If not entirely lost in the moment, marvel at just how good Russell Hopkinson is as the cymbals shimmer and splash, while Andy Kent’s bass strolls and heartbeats. Davey Lane is a young rooster strutting. Purple Sneakers is still every inner-west girl you’ve ever kissed. And How Much Is Enough? the perfect fullstop.

Encore? Sure. A divebombing Sound As Ever, a sprawling (literally and figuratively) Young Man Blues, Berlin Chair’s sparkle and shatter. Plus thanks, and advice from that guy with the guitar and the blue crushed-velvet trousers: “Take risks. Get out of your comfort zone. Fuck yourself up…” And “Be excellent to each other…”. In turn Rogers promises this band “Will keep making mistakes for you”. Long may they do so.

Absolutely not an end of year 'Best Of...' List. Not At All.

Wait, Am I Still A Tastemaker?

They remain the most obligatory, and yet still infuriating, opening statements that morph into questions after being introduced: “So, you’re into music...so, what’s the best album of all time?” often followed with the related “Music’s so shit now…why don’t they make records like Sgt Peppers/Dark Side Of The Moon/OK Computer/*insert title from questioner’s generational era* anymore?”

Before you ask, my stock answer to the first usually runs something along the lines of “Born To Run/London Calling/Hourly Daily/Yankee Hotel Foxtrot/*insert title from questioner’s generational era*”  , although it doesn’t really matter what you say – they’re often just looking for the chance to argue their favourite, and/or disagree vehemently with your choice: “The Clash? Come on, they were crap compared to the Pistols, maaaaaaaate….”, and go from there. My response to the second query is usually the somewhat more snappy: “Well, it could be that it’s not 1967/1972/1994 anymore, chief…” which thankfully usually leaves me alone with the cabanossi and cheese at the party.

Conversely, the need to know about the new hits its peak around now, with the equally obligatory end-of-year ‘Best of…’ lists. There’s conventions here too: you’ll forget the one that came out in January, the work-experience writers will deliberately pick something from out of their comfort zone of music to show how ‘open-minded’ they are to an audience that really doesn’t give a shit: the guitar music guy will throw in Gambino or Kendrick, the electronica fan will namecheck Gang Of Youfs’ emotionalism. Because they think they should. And I’ll still stand by Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange being a terrific record of its time, transcending all pigeonholes. And, of course, somebody will loudly and angrily squawk ‘Whaddabout….?’ as you’ve missed their singular favourite. Come at me, bro.

But, as ever, the 1-to-10 list has always shit me. Music as a ranked and competitive thing has always struck me as a bit silly. So, I’m not doing one. And you can’t make me. However, there are 2018 records that are affecting in various ways, that you probably should know about – and who’s gonna tell you if I don’t. Then there’s that one that I actually might call my favourite of the year, but I won’t mention contradicting myself if you don’t.

Now, when you reach the time where the media outlets talking about you preface your name with ‘veteran’ - although I much prefer ‘venerable’, it giving me an adjectival flavour of a monkish aesthete, which you’ll admit is me all over – you may crave the familiar. So, a couple of these names may have appeared in rants, screeds, or dribbling words of praise from me before – although this year’s works may have come with some sort of twist or another. Thus, things I’ve listened to a bit, and you probably should too:

Tell Me How You Really Feel was the apt title for Courtney Barnett’s (surprisingly-not-all-that-) difficult second album. At times blunter and more angry than previously, she could still be wry and observational - but appropriating Margaret Atwood’s line “…Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them..." had more people hear it - and hopefully understand it - than ever before. While that’s Courts’ #2 record, Warm is probably about the 20th to have Jeff Tweedy’s name on it – although a little bizarrely the first collection of new and original material with just his name on the marquee. He philosophises and ruminates on a stroll around the human condition, perhaps revealing a little more of his songcraft and wordplay than he would have with the sometimes intimidating virtuosity of Wilco in the room.

Getting even more minimal, and even more in contrast to what went before, St Vincent recast the shiny technological art-pop of Masseduction as Mass Education – basically the piano and guitar sketches of the songs. Never has an album of ‘demos’ been so austerely beautiful, and so totally different to the final (or maybe more accurately, the ‘other’…) result. Further blurring of gender roles and musical styles to crystallise an artist’s identity came in Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer – the best Prince album this century, not the least due to some posthumous input from the little purple himself. And from purple to Blue Poles, Jack Ladder made another album suitable for moody brooding. Touchstones: Bowie, Cohen, Ferry, things dark and crooning. This he does very well. Also contains some Benet and Callinan, as it should.

As for songwriters who know their history, and increasingly their place in it, Elvis Costello gave the faithful the health scare to just worry about how much we might miss him, and presented an album to make us appreciate him again now. Look Now was Declan at his most crafted. At times baroque, with a tumble of words, other times just utterly graceful and gliding, it’s the record to put next to the glistening ‘80s gems like Imperial Bedroom and King Of America. Yeah, that good.

 

Having waded through my pleasure in all of the above, then there’s the one so original that three months on I’m still working it out. Emma Louise is already ‘successful’ – in the sometimes odd terms of music in the 21^st century: Label-signed, ‘hit’ songs of chart position, even that one that got used in a perfume commercial and as meaningful mood-setter on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. That was Jungle – you’ll need that as a trivia quiz answer one day, I imagine.

So, with a new album to do, she debunked off to Mexico, and made Lilac Everything, a record of her typically clever and well-made pop songs – including one called Mexico about debunking off to Mexico to get over a busted heart. So, autobiographical broken relationship songs? Yeah, maybe – but maybe not.

Some previous messing with the technology of recording had seen Emma discover the perfectly monikered effect of ‘dragging’ – slowing and down-tuning her voice to an veering-to-male-sounding croon so distinctive she even gave it a name as a different identity. ‘Joseph’ delighted many, and equally upset some of the faithful who lamented the loss of her more usual bell-like clarity. But the artist went with idea for whole record. And it so works.

But yeah, it would have just been a gimmick – albeit a pretty good one – if the songs couldn’t stand on their quality. Falling Apart, Wish You Well – yep, crumbling emotions and eventual acceptance still often make the best tunes, gender irrelevant. Although get to Never Making Plans Again, with its soul-ly tinge - and if the handlers haven’t got around to offering it to Adele or Norah Jones, they’re not earning their money.

You need to hear this record. Make up your own mind about the central conceit of it, or just listen to something truly original.

Visions of sugarplums, customers.

Me And Billy Bragg have a natter way back when.

HEARTS AND MINDS

You don’t so much interview Billy Bragg as have a conversation - with him asking as many question as you - as he prepares for one his semi-regular Australian tours.

His previous visit, a short hit-and-run for a music conference with a just couple of shows shoe-horned in came a few days after the 2013 election. ”I think a lot of you were in a state of shock,” he notes. “So how’s the Abbott thing working out for you?” We trade phrases suitable for song like ‘Inept arseholes’, and ‘All going down the pan’ of the situations both here and in England, before talk comes back to the music.

The death of folk music legend Pete Seeger is still a touchstone. For the music, the man, and what he represented. “He was taking on the world with just a wiry voice and a banjo,” Bragg explains. “I remember being at some ceremony for him, looking down and finding him doing cycling exercises on the floor – he must have been near 80. That’s 100% better than twerking.”

It was not just the physical vitality that impressed him. “Even in his nineties he still had work to do, things to achieve. And this was a man who had travelled with Woody Guthrie, wrestled the Klu Klux Klan as they tried to stop (legendary black singer) Paul Robeson performing. He actually walked alongside Martin Luther King. You were shaking hands with history.” Conversely, Bragg plays down moments from his own life. Being at the frontline of the Miners’ Strike in Thatcher’s England, visiting Russia as Communism collapsed, and the campaign to free Nelson Mandela among other things, just doesn’t seem to have the same currency to him.

“I don’t want to think about that yet. I want to live in the present - I still have plenty to do. History will judge us on what contribution we make, but that’s for history, not for now.”  For Bragg, it all comes back to the work: “Not all music, but some can carry a message - an idea that can just carry and take hold. You have to have a faith that sometimes that’s going to happen.”  

In another twist this most English of singers’ latest album, Tooth And Nail, has seen him embraced by America as never before. Getting labelled as ‘alt.country’ or even ‘Americana’.  “Americana is a quite broad word,” he says in that quite broad accent. “It can be Johnny Cash, it can be Booker T. - any music that has its roots in American roots music. Whatever that is.”  

“I was just trying to find my way back to Mermaid Avenue,” he recalls the celebrated - if slightly fractured - collaboration with Wilco of Woody Guthrie songs, which gave all the participants a wider audience. “I wanted to find more of that sound, that idea, that Wilco and I sometimes got in the studio. But I got sidetracked – that’s been known to happen before,” he muses.

Those thoughts dovetailed with his homeland’s view of the music. I throw one of his quotes back at him: ‘The English don’t get folk music - it’s what the Scots and Irish do when they’re drunk.’ He pauses. “Did I say that? I might have been drunk,” he adds with a laugh.  

He quickly and politely clarifies: “Maybe what I meant that our Celtic neighbours still use folk music as part of their identity, where in England it’s quite different – it’s much more marginalised.”

Does that mix in with the natural English reserve? “An embarrassment in letting go?,” he asks himself. “Like Morris dancing? Everybody tends to be embarrassed by Morris dancing - sometimes even those actually doing it. Then again, I have Scots friends who are mortified when they see some bad singer get up in a kilt.”

Mr Bragg can also see the upside: “The folk audience – wherever they’re from - still want to hear topical songs, and that’s died out a lot in much other contemporary music.  Do people not want to think? Sure, to switch off and relax - I’m fine with that. But don’t tell me that music’s only purpose - it can be more than that. It can be about any part of the human condition.”  

While knowing the past, Billy Bragg knows things have changed, via a keyboard and a screen. “When I was 19, I really only had one outlet – learn to play an instrument, write songs, do gigs. If you were really lucky, go into a cheap studio and make a record. A 19-year-old now has so many more options: Write a blog, make a film and stick it up on Youtube, tweet up a crowd.”

“Music has probably lost its vanguard role, where in the second half of the 20^th century music was our social media. It used to be three chords and a chorus - now it’s 140 characters.”