‘a matter of life and death, taking on
issues of love, family, friendship, religion, reconciliation and, as much as
anything else, the relationship between the brothers themselves.’
Everyone Is Here (2004)
by The Finn Brothers
Three flashbacks. Two of them blurry.
Very late 1970s or very early ‘80s. A gig by Split Enz at
Leicester Polytechnic. Eraserhead hairstyles, clown make-up, Pierrot
outfits. Great show – somewhere between Art Rock and New Wave. Crowd wildly
enthusiastic. We’re right at the front and, at the end, the Finns et al line
the stage, bending over to shake hands, dripping sweat and greasepaint over us
all…
Early ‘90s now. It’s Crowded House at The De Montfort Hall,
Leicester. Volunteers from the audience have joined Neil Finn at the mike to
sing ‘Better Be Home Soon’. At some point, extrovert drummer, Paul Hester vanishes,
only to reappear above us where we stand downstairs. He balances on the rail of
the balcony, which he proceeds to skip around…
Early 2007. We’re pulling our cases on to the bridge outside
our hotel, on our way to catch a boat, a bus and a plane back home. There
standing on the crest of the bridge, is Neil Finn, gazing around, taking it all
in. The way you do. In Venice
* * * * *
The musical adventures of Tim and Neil Finn, working apart,
have been too multifarious to detail here. Suffice, for the moment then, to say
that their collaborations – in Split Enz
and on Woodface (1991) by Crowded
House – are regarded as the commercial and creative high points of their
careers.
They have, however, also released two albums as The Finn
Brothers. The first, eponymous release in 1995, is a low-key, low-fi outing,
low on memorable tunes, which felt like a failure at the time and in no way
suggested that, nearly ten years on, they had Everyone Is Here in them - in my view, the best record either of
them have ever been involved with, even having the edge on the great Woodface.
Dedicated to their recently deceased mother, Everyone is Here is, in a sense, a
matter of life and death, taking on issues of love, family, friendship,
religion, reconciliation and, as much as anything else, the relationship between
the brothers themselves.
Although they apparently get on well (compared, say, to
other pop music brothers such as the Everlys, the Davieses and the Gallaghers)
the Finns have generally tended to keep their distance creatively, only occasionally
making music together after Split Enz. Whilst they have remained consistently
successful in Australasia for over four
decades, it is Neil (b. 1958), the younger brother by six years, who has, with
Crowded House, sold the most records by far in the northern hemisphere. Neil it
was too, who after joining Split Enz six years into their career, steered them
into more commercial territory, writing and singing their UK/US breakthrough
pop hit, ‘I Got You’, after which they entered their most profitable and
critically acclaimed phase.
Tim Finn, with Phil Judd, the
founding members of Split Enz, may therefore have felt some satisfaction that
his temporary membership in Crowded House resulted in their high water mark, Woodface, more than half of which he
co-wrote with Neil. The degree of equilibrium thereby restored to whatever
sibling rivalry existed between the Finns wasn’t, however, enough to extend
Tim’s tenure in the band. Meanwhile, it was Finn jnr. who continued to display
the magic ingredient required for mass appeal. Age-gaps can matter to friends
and siblings, and six years is a not inconsiderable one.
In the sombre, sepia photographs on the sleeve of Everyone Is Here, the brothers
resolutely and unsmilingly face in different directions. Another shot shows a
bridge over the Waikato River near where they grew up in New Zealand; it
appears exactly in the middle of the CD’s lyric booklet, separating
‘Disembodied Voices’ and ‘A Life Between Us’, tracks 6 and 7 of 12 and the two
songs which most clearly deal with the brothers’ relationship.
The ‘Disembodied Voices’ are recollected from ‘Down the
hallway forty years ago’ where Tim and Neil used to talk together in their
bedroom after lights out before falling asleep. As the Finn boys both attended
boarding school, this presumably alludes to the nocturnal conversations they’d
have during holidays when ‘What became much harder was so easy then’. Floating
above the nostalgic, pastoral combination of banjo and mandolin*, the gentle
rise and fall of the melody, sung in close two-part harmony – as are so many of
the songs – works towards the understanding that:-
‘We all made
our choices -
Let’s work
out what we’re going to do.
Disembodied voices
Revealing
what we know is true.’
The next song begins with the yin and yang of sibling love,
Neil singing lead –
‘In so many
ways I’m the same as you
And so many things
are better left unsaid.’
Tim takes over at the start of the following verse,
admitting ‘I won’t give control to any one’, whilst in the hushed final verse,
referencing the album cover, the two of them harmonize:-
‘And brother,
must be the different
Direction
we’re facing –
You’re still
as unknown as ever.’
before Neil asks his big brother, ‘Are you still someone /
Who’ll watch over me?’ In between, the choruses, again reminding us of the
cover photo’s, use the terrifically effective image of riverbanks to illustrate
the ambiguity of the brothers’ relationship:-
‘And we’re staring
at each other,
Like the
banks of a river
And we can’t
get any closer,
But we form a
life between us.’
Musically it all flows along, turning here and there, the
current strengthening in the chorus to produce mature song-writing of the
highest order. The second half of the album, heralded by ‘Disembodied Voices’,
gathers in lyrical intensity with the songs becoming more personal and
powerful. Which is not to imply that the first half is somehow weak – far from
it.
The opening track, ‘Won’t Give In’, is the one which most
sounds like Crowded House. Underpinned by Neil’s subtle electric guitar, it is
about the gathering of the Finn clan for the funeral with the narrator
reflecting that ‘Once in a while I return to the fold / And the people I call
my own…
A strong sense of determination to get on with things no
matter what characterises these first three songs before ‘Luckiest Man Alive’,
Tim’s inspired love song for the woman who ‘cut right through his foolish
pride’, lifts the mood and tempo. It features yet another soaring chorus and multi-instrumentalist
Jon Brion on 12 string and a distinctively ringing ‘Turkish banjo’. ‘Homesick’
though, is another downbeat number lyrically, dealing with a sense of
dislocation arising from ‘thinking ‘bout
what I’d lost…my home town feeling strange…homesick for the country I’m living
in.’ Amidst its strings and staccato riffing, pedal steel and lap steel guitars
create a yearning atmosphere to compliment the song’s emotional force.
Back at the album’s second half, a strong sense of urgency
‘to make you less lonely’ drives ‘All God’s Children’ which starts with a good
theological joke:-
‘We’re all God’s children
And God is a woman
But we still don’t know who the father is.
I can’t help thinking
There’s a fortune riding
On the answer to that question.’
The chorus rises up on a swell of Beatlesque guitars - and
this would be good point at which to commend Neil Finn’s playing which, like
that of George Harrison, is never either flashy or fussy, but is always exactly
right for the song.
‘Edible Flowers’, a beautiful song left over from the Split
Enz days, but which fits into this album perfectly, begins with richly
orchestrated minor chords and Tim at the piano, melancholically reflecting that
‘Everybody wants the same thing / To see another birthday’. On the chorus, Neil’s voice rises like sudden
sunlight pouring through a stained glass window:-
‘Bright lights dissolve
Like sugar deep inside you now
And silver rain falls down now;
I’m hardly here at all.’
On an album full of great singing, this is perhaps the most
sublime highlight and it moves me to the core every time I hear it. Then Tim
comes in again, as low as he can go, reflecting on ‘all the trash and the
treasure’ and ‘the pain and the pleasure’ and ‘the edible flowers / Scattered
in the salad days’. Then that chorus returns to rip out your heart again. Even
if it didn’t bring so vividly back the image of my own mother floating away on
a sea of morphine, I’m sure this song would still wrap itself around my heart.
Tim takes the verses once more on ‘All The Colours’, a
lovely tribute to his mother featuring
harmonium and euphonium, which pictures her being gathered up by a rainbow as
she finally leaves her family:-
‘Now we’re left here
To get on with our things,
Writing it down
And working with wood and strings.’
Those lines could provide a suitable epigraph for the album
which continues with the close harmony of ‘Part Of Me, Part Of You’. It comes
marching in – drummer Matt Chamberlain in fine form here – with its positive
declarations of reconciliation with the Finns’ environment and each other. The
closer is ‘Gentle Hum’, with Neil singing lead at the piano, Tim doing the hum
and other vocal effects, as the song casts its mystical spell over the record:
‘This gentle hum / Will make us one.’
The twelve short songs on Everyone Is Here form a remarkably consistent, sensitive and soulful whole. You will wait a long time before you hear
another album with as many melodies as strong as these. Into its second decade,
I’ve yet to hear a better album in this new century.
N. B.
* Tony Visconti,
who plays the mandolin as well as double-bass and cello on ‘Disembodied
Voices’, which he also produced was, in fact, the original producer of Everyone Is Here. Crowded House producer,
Mitchell Froom helmed most of the re-recording, which was the version actually
released (albeit with Visconti’s string arrangements). Between them, the two
producers have an impressive track record: David Bowie, T. Rex, The Moody
Blues, Morrissey (TV) and Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Randy Newman and
Richard Thompson (MF) to name but a few.
There are no song-writing credits in the otherwise
comprehensively detailed sleeve-notes to Everyone
Is Here; I thus infer that all the songs here are more or less co-written.
Under each lyric however, where we are told who plays and sings what, Neil is
sometimes above Tim and vice versa. Maybe therefore, as with Lennon and
McCartney on Beatles albums, we can assume that the lead vocalist is mainly
responsible for composition? In any case, Neil gets ‘top billing’ on tracks 1,
3, 5, 7, 8, and 12; Tim on tracks 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, and 11.
Crowded House drummer Paul Hester’s balancing act at the De
Montfort Hall may well have been an early display of self-destructive
tendencies – he hanged himself from a tree in an Australian park in 2005. Neil
Finn sang ‘Better Be Home Soon’ at a memorial service.
Two other albums primarily involving the Finns, which seem
to be getting lost in the mists of time, are Enzso (1996) and The Sun Came
Out (2009). The cleverly titled Enzso
is a set of Split Enz songs rearranged with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra,
which features, as well as both Finns, various ex-Enz and other NZ luminaries
on vocals. The Sun Came Out, a 2CD
charity project for Oxfam organised by Neil under the banner of 7 Worlds
Collide, features consistently good original material by not only himself and
various other members of the Finn family, including Tim, but also the likes of
Johnny Marr, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, K. T. Tunstall, Radiohead’s Phil Selway and,
again, various Kiwi artists. Both of these records are well worth seeking out.
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