House Guests 1

This is the man who signed Crowded House. His name is Tom Whalley, and in 1985 he was a junior A&R man with Capitol Records in Hollywood. Gary Stamler, manager of what became Crowded House, brought the demos to Whalley. At the time, Whalley had signed teenage bar-band the Del Fuegos to Slash, and put Neil Finn together with fledgling producer Mitchell Froom, thinking, "Well, if Froom can do such a good job with such unpromising material, what could he do with real songs?"

So the careers of Crowded House and Froom got a major boost. (To be fair, Froom had already produced Richard Thompson's Daring Adventures and went on to do better work with Thompson. And Dan Zanes of the Del Fuegos later put out one of my favourite records, Cool Down Time, also produced by Froom. It stiffed, but Zanes found a new career as a songwriter and performer of children's music. His Rocket Ship Beach is addictive, and so much smarter and less patronising than the Wiggles.)

Whalley went on to have a stellar career himself, at Capitol and then Interscope, signing all sorts of acts such as No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails and Tupac Shakur. When I was writing Something So Strong I played phone tag with his high-camp PA, but an interview never eventuated. I suspect it was one of those cases where they had no intention of doing an interview, but didn't want to be discourteous enough to actually say no. So you keep ringing.

Nevertheless, everything I've read or heard about Whalley makes me like the guy. He isn't the Type-A egomaniac that so often populates the backrooms of the music industry. Yet his career has eclipsed that of his Interscope colleague Jimmy Iovine, or David Tickle, wunderkind producer of 'I Got You'. Whalley is one of a vanishing breed: a music man in the music business. Recently another real music man crucial to the Crowded House story, EMI chief in the UK, Tony Wadsworth was "stepped down" by new EMI owner, investor Guy Hands. It was Wadsworth's support while he was head of Parlophone that helped make Woodface a hit in the UK after it flopped in the States.

These days Whalley is the chief executive of Warner Brothers Records. A rare interview with him just appeared in the Financial Times. It describes him as looking "like a carefree surfer but is in fact a 54-year-old father of nine", and quotes him actually using the phrase "Holy mackerel!"

Whalley has some interesting points to make about the future of A&R (artist development) in his battered industry. Whereas new EMI owner Hands, with an eye on cashing up assets, sees A&R as irrelevant, Whalley argues that

"the discipline - always more art than science - is essential for music companies if they are to muddle through an unforgiving landscape. "It still comes down to A&R," he explained. "None of this works - mobile doesn't work, downloads don't work, CDs don't work - if A&R isn't good."

I recommend the Financial Times story for a different take on the woes of the industry (and for good stories about dealing with the heavy metal band Dio, and signing Tupac Shakur in an airport lounge).

Whalley has changed his tune a little from his thoughts a year earlier, when the Los Angeles Times found him

"incredibly upbeat for two reasons. First, the amount of people who want music in their lives is greater than ever. For years, as an industry, we looked at, say, 15- to 25-year-olds as the target of what we do. Now the audience for music has dropped down, for various reasons including the Disney Radio, to where you have 5-year-olds who love popular music. At the same time, people in their 60s are still passionate about music. When you have that breadth of people, it's a very exciting time to me. Then, there's the artistry, which I feel is going through a period of remarkable creativity today."

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Apologies for not posting for a while. The new book has been taking up my time, but I have some ideas for things to share in upcoming weeks. This weekend I'm off to Womad NZ to get down among the hackysackers, and a special bonus has just been announced. (Though I was also looking forward to Cesaria Evora, originally part of a strong bill that includes a great selection of New Zealand acts - Age Pryor, SJD, Don McGlashan, as well as visitors Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, and Mavis Staples.)

And regular transmission should be back on track soon with the Distractions website: as Paul Hester would say, do not adjust your set.

Meanwhile if you want a copy of Something So Strong, you can email me at: so-strong (AT) xtra.co.nz

My Dog Has Fleas

Nearly 11 years after finishing Something So Strong I am following the Crowded House story only as an interested observer rather than as their Boswell. So I will post to this blog occasionally when I have something new to offer, maybe sharing that has come to me as part of the “long tail” of the book, a New Zealand perspective, or offering leads to other connections of interest to Crowded House fans.

In the next few blogs I will comment on topics such as the pros and cons of doing an updated version of Something So Strong, a “lost chapter” on the band’s Spinal Tap-like search for a keyboardist, or reviews of new material. It’s a lot easier for me to add new editorial to this blog than to the website which a friend is updating for me when he has a moment. This year I should do a course in HTML.

In the meantime, I thought overseas readers might enjoy this photo of the greyhounds that invaded the stage in a bizarre conclusion to their New Zealand shows three months ago. It turns out they live just a few kilometres from where I am house-sitting on the Kapiti Coast just north of Wellington, while writing my next book.

Photo of Jennie Scotcher with Mo, left, and Biggles by David Haxton of the Kapiti News.

Biggles and Mo, plus six other retired racing greyhounds, were the surprise guests who came on just before the encore. They belong to Jennie Scotcher, a member of the Greyhound as Pets trust founded to find homes for greyhounds that have retired from the track. By coincidence she is also a fan club member of the Crowded House club. (Just before Jenny and her husband Rob emigrated from England to New Zealand a couple of years ago, they had been in the front row at the Albert Hall in London for the Finn Brothers show the day after Paul Hester’s tragic death.)

The dogs spent most of their time at the concert “lying with their paws up in the air, asleep,” Jenny told the local Kapiti News. They woke up when it was time to don their vests and enter from stage left at about 11.00pm; their carrot was a sheepskin they had to chase. Biggles was a bit distracted by the audience, while Mo charged to the head of the pack to get to the sheepskin.

Jenny had dinner with the band, and Neil told her the idea for the greyhounds came from a vision he’d had of dogs “running madly on stage.”

What I’m wondering is: what did Lester think?

Return to Wellington

On Wednesday 31 October I emerged from my rural retreat to see Crowded House at the Events Centre on Wellington’s waterfront. I remember Paul Hester explaining to me the American hierachies of venue: club, theatre, shed, arena, stadium.

The Events Centre is a shed that can fit about 3000 but in no way is it a music venue: high, tin ceiling, tin walls, no acoustic cladding within. It’s best suited to basketball. Still, on my third attempt (after 1998 and 2003) I finally saw a great Bob Dylan gig there in August: they got the mix right, and the rhythm section in particular were prominent. (Although the Dylan gig a couple of weeks later at Auckland’s last movie palace, the Civic, was more comfortable, I enjoyed Wellington just as much. And the John Fogerty gig I saw in this shed in late 2005 was one of the all-time great shows by a “dinosaur”, full of energy and every song a hit.)

Opening act Pluto was a non-event: it’s all about the singer and he struggled in a cavernous venue that was only slowly filling up, due to ridiculous hold-ups at the front door. The first thing I’d do is encourage the bassist to play some runs rather than just repeating the same note in demisemiquavers for a bar or three before changing to another note. Mate, get a copy of Rubber Soul and twiddle the balance knob.

Supergroove was a sensation, so energetic I wouldn’t have been surprised if they ended in a puff of smoke. Che Fu, of course, is the star singer, but Karl Stevens in particular provides a mad, angular, frenetic focal point, like something from the heyday of Two-Tone ska. And the bassist – couldn’t he have given the Pluto guy some tips? – flung his long hair about like a heavy metal poodle. And the crowd just roared, like a Mexican wave: these guys were massive stars when many in the audience were still teenagers.

So Crowded House had a hard act to follow. Their audience is now so across the board in New Zealand, and far bigger than it ever was before the band split up in 1996. It was 21 years ago that I saw them in their first New Zealand gig, playing at a party in an Auckland living room.

A year later they returned as pop stars, playing the Logan Campbell Centre after ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ made #2 in the US. But as far as New Zealand was concerned, that was it. The venues got smaller, and most people still saw them as a spin-off of Split Enz. Even after Something So Strong was published, people would still say to me, “Didn’t you write a book on Split Enz?” But for those who stayed interested, there were great gigs at the Power Station, Wellington’s Town Hall, double-billed with REM at Western Springs, at the intimate Founders Theatre in Hamilton and even outdoors at a racetrack in Palmerston North (where Neil encouraged a running race, and improvised a commentary from the stage, while the band played the theme from Bonanza).

Then the band broke up and after Recurring Dream was out, suddenly they were all over classic hits radio and on the muzak in every supermarket. It wasn’t just the idiot commercial radio programmers of the 1980s and 1990s, and an audience that took them for granted, partly it was the band’s fault. They were based in Melbourne, but were looking north to conquer the world. They came down here to tour with each album, but didn’t do much more. With our small population and a steady fanbase, who can blame them?

At the Events Centre, I needn’t have worried about the Supergroove effect. Apart from having a set list chock-full of hits, Crowded House were punchier live than I can remember. (Though Hester, besides his anarchic humour, had a touch of Keith Moon about his drumming, and I liked the steady R&B grooves that his replacement Peter Jones achieved; so did Nick Seymour.) It’s not just new drummer Matt Sherrod, they play as if asserting their relevance.

Time On Earth is a strong album, hampered by being too long and having too many songs at the same easy tempo. (Mitchell Froom always thought Woodface was too long, so people missed out on ‘She Goes On’ and ‘How Will You Go’; he wouldn’t have been the only one to have dropped ‘Chocolate Cake’ and made ‘It’s Only Natural’ the opener.) But the one I avoid playing is the brash Johnny Marr co-write ‘Even a Child’, which tries far to hard to be radio friendly and poptastic.

I think Neil Finn’s second solo album in particular was under-rated: having mostly been written out at Piha on Auckland’s wild West Coast, it is the great New Zealand beach album. It could have been called Barefoot and Pohutukawa Christmas, which would have really confused things in the States. Check out the coda to ‘Into the Sunset’ in particular: never has the soaring flight of a seagull been evoked so well in music.

Stand-outs in the long concert were a surprise ‘Whispers and Moans’ (always a favourite from Woodface), ‘Silent House’ (which works so much better on Time On Earth than on the Dixie Chicks album) and the first TOE single ‘Don’t Stop Now’, which is one of the great car radio songs of 2007. Oddly they didn’t do the second single ‘She Called Up’, which has such a great groove and Wurlitzer piano (though the chipmunks’ hook would be better with some uncharacteristic Crowdie touch, like a horn section). ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ came early in the set, and the best songs from TOE were highlights (‘Pour Le Monde’, ‘Heaven That I’m Making’) that earned their place alongside evergreens such as ‘Distant Sun’ and ‘Private Universe’.

Humour is just as essential to a Crowded House show as those songs, and jamming, though I could have done with a lot more of the former than the latter. Their musical references are always great fun – ‘You Sexy Thing’ and ‘Puppet On a String’ made an appearance – but pointless “wigging out” in outros seems to be a way of showing that the band is edgier than its small, perfectly formed, highly crafted and accessible songs may suggest.

It was getting close to midnight when Neil said it was bedtime with ‘Better Be Home Soon’. But no one could have gone home dissatisfied, or that Crowded House is genuinely revived as a band. I certainly needed the long drive back to the country to wind down.