TIME FOR A CHANGE Oh DANNY BOY

Rip It Up, Issue 191, 1 June 1993, Page 18

TIME FOR A CHANGE

Oh DANNY BOY

is sitting under a tree on the patio of the Auckland City Art Gallery, graciously granting interviews to a succession of journalists, yours truly included.

He's relaxed but formal, comfortably attired in an open necked untucked shirt, salt and pepper stubble lending a grizzled patina to his ruddy complexion. So this is the face that one of the most beautiful women in the world loved for six years, hmmmm. The reason he's giving audience is the release of his latest solo album, Before and After, the one that, his friend, the boss of Capitol records in America,

thinks could make our Tim a household name in the States. But Tim must be hedging his bets — he's about to move back to New Zealand from Melbourne, citing "more positive feeling towards local culture" and friends, family and ageing parents as the draw-cards. About bloody time! Why write 'Parihaka' when you live in London and Melbourne?

Tim squints into the middle distance.

i Finn and guitarist Joel Haines atop building for the filming of Tim's 'PersuaßSU' video by Stratford Productions. Photograph by Darryl Ward

"You don't have a plan, you just end up somewhere. Now the more we come back here the more we feel a connection with the place and just want to be a part of it." Are you happy with the way your solo career has progressed? "I'm just a songwriter, really, and at the end of the day I write songs and people give me money to record them. The word 'solo career' makes me nervous. It's more just a way of life. The career aspect is how well one does in the market place and that goes up and down. I’ve had albums that have done really well and I've had albums that haven't done too

well. The scale of the thing isn't so important as the intensity of the reaction. To affect one person in quite a deep way is an amazing thing to be able to do. I'm so lucky—lean travel, I can do what I want in life. Do I enjoy my life? Yes." Can you live off your back catalogue?

"Theoretically I could. I wouldn't have had an extravagant lifestyle but I could have survived. There has been other income but if I stripped it right back to that, if I'd done no solo records, I could have eked out an existence on Split Enz airplay. We still get a lot of airplay in Australia — Split Enz and Cold Chisel are the only two bands who came through the 70s and get that much

airplay in Australia." Aside from his solo projects, Tim Finn has written soundtracks for films — Puberty Blues and The Coca-Cola Kid (where he met his famous ex-girlfriend, the actress Greta Scaachi) —

amongst them. Then there was Tim's short-lived membership of his brother Neil's band, Crowded House. After recording the album Woodface with the trio, Tim was suddenly out on his own again. Is there any sibling rivalry between him and his much-feted younger brother?

"People are always interested in this and if we don't give them the dirt they'll invent it. But really we're very close, it works better for us if we come together and then separate. It didn't work being in the same band. There was a tension between us that neither of us enjoyed very much and looking back on it now, it should have been seen as a project. On stage was where the problems

were. Recording was great. On stage Neil was inhibited, he found himself falling back into the younger brother feeling and Crowded House didn't need me at all on stage. I felt like I didn't want to push too far, cos I love to kind of run the show, I feel comfortable in that role of dictating what happens. So Neil and I didn't feel comfortable with each other. When we're separate we ring each other up and talk for an hour or when we see each other it's always a celebration."

But don't you think, as a songwriting unit, there's a chemistry that brings out the best in you? "There is a lot of chemistry. Those songs came so quick and easy, we were both throwing

ideas at each other, it was just so natural. But whereas my solo records have been more introspective and brooding and not so inviting, the songs we wrote together were very immediate and inviting. But that's not to say that I couldn't write that on my own. I just tend to write over a period of time so it's like a journey. You either buy into it or you don't. It's not immediately accessible." You say you write from personal experience. Are there any songs on your new record about Greta Scaachi?

"Um. I don't know if they're about her. We were together for six years so that's a long time and we both had a lot of faith and hope for it. When it went away it was pretty devestating and it took a while to get over it. But songs are sometimes a way out of that for me, a healing. So she's in there, yeah. But the album is certainly not about that."

Tim says that half the songs

on the album are about relationships, which he calls the laboratory. "It's the place where you work out a lot of things about life, not just about women or men but about yourself. Human beings resist change but if you get in a situation where you have to change or go down the toilet, it helps sometimes." Would you be happy to retire now on the basis of what you've done or are there still great songs inside you waiting to be written? "No, I wouldn't be happy to retire. I see writing songs as a vehicle for my life. It's not so much that I feel I have a great

song to write, it's the process itself of writing songs and re- \ cording them, that's what I'm

interested in rather than judging the songs against each other. Hopefully I'll continue to have some sort of audience for it but even if I didn't I'm sure I'd still write or I don't know what would become of me." What would you do? Tim laughs. : "I'd like to share a bit of what I know. There's a young band in Hamilton that I did some demos with, trying to get them released. I've got a label that goes through Sony, Definitive Records. Maybe writing for other people. I've always wanted to make a movie, a musical, but I'd have to stop doing everything for two years. Sail around the Pacific, go to Tonga."

Will your lifestyle change dramatically if you move to New Zealand? "No it wouldn't. Life for me is family, friends, swimming, reading, exploring, writing. Simple things."

DONNA YUZWALK

Just to break the mould, Canadian DANIEL LANOIS has arrived at the performance of rock n'roll via his work as a producer with such luminaries as Eno, Dylan, Peter

Gabriel and, of course, U2. Normally production is a progression for artists brave, informed or bankrupt enough to shape their own music. Whatever, Lanois with his slow, friendly, unphased drawl, obviously savours both roles. "They're very different," he explains from Hamburg on the eve of his European tour. "I like doing the live thing asyou'vegotto be resourceful enough to makethe thing work at that moment. You've got to dig a little deeper to push the songs through and it's also quick communication as you're heard through the ears of an

audience and then you re-adjust. "The studio doesn't allow you that speed of communication. You can play something over and over but you never get to find what it's like to an audience until you play it to someone in a car or something. I enjoy the laboratory a lot—that's what I call the studio — but the live thing is a real change and challenge." Lanois was born in Quebec and spoke only French until he was ten, after that English became his exclusive language. This dual cultural upbringing is most obvious in songs like 'The Collection of Maire Claire' on his new album For The Beauty of Wynona, where Lanois sings alternate verses in English and French over a traditional air.

"It sounds traditional but I'd recently written that song. I chose to do it in a folky fashion to capture the setting as it's the story of a trapper in the woods who comes to too much wrong. I really wanted to paint the extremes of culture that I know and also I'm interested in the romance in the world of misfits and I'm fascinated with the mixture of French and English cultures." Wynona is Lanois' second solo album and it's a far more complete and satisfying blend of styles than its predecessor, 1989's Acadia. It must be more rewarding making your own music rather than polishing other peoples' songs? "I really enjoy working on other people's records. I do that work wholeheartedly and get into it as if it was my own. There's a sort of balance taking place for me in my life right now and I call it the Balanced Diet of Music. Live music is giving me something I don't get in the studio and vice-versa. I won't give either one of them up right now although for the next four months I'll be remaining loyal to the live performance so I haven't accepted any production work and I'm trying to be quite bohemian about it, wait until it falls into my lap and feels right." In the early 70s solo albums became a passtime for musicians normally constrained by the band environment. Consequently there were a lot of so-called singer/ songwriters with stiff, disjointed records relying on a couple of tracks to carry them. Lanois' Wynona, which has something of a pre-punk idealism and tone about it, has more than its quota of good songs strung together with an undertow of the producer's ambient background. "Sequencing the record and deciding on the thirteen songs that would make the finish line was a struggle and there's definitely some material on this record that's focussed at the more razor sharp end of things, songs like 'Brother LA' and 'Wynona' show the more rockist side of things.

" 'Brother LA' is a reflection of the LA riots, something that couldn't be overlooked and something that inspired a lot of people to do some writing. It's an idealistic point of view that says if your back's up against the wall call someone you know. The foundation for the song came from a jam session and during the jam my

chord effects processor went faulty, it went into this wild feed-back degeneration. We stopped and tried to repair it but it sounded so wacky and out of control that I decided to go with it. It's the sound that ultimately made it onto the record and it came from a broken down piece of equipment. And I couldn't get itanybetterthanthat." (laughs). The Wynona of the title isn't a reference to the actress but to a small Canadian town near where Lanois was raised. But it's more abstract than that.

"Imagine Wynona is an unobtainable desire and quite often the thing we can't get is the thing we want the most. In the case of the song, the man changes everything about his life to try and win the heart of Wynona and in the end does not succeed. So it's about the obsessive journey to a desire, to a goal." Perhaps unavoidably, a lot of Lanois' music echoes the people he has produced. So, on Wynona you have a strong Dylan taste on some songs, the odd Edge guitar lick or the swampiness of the Nevilles. But he never lets

these influences swamp his songs, they're obvious but they enhance rather than overpower his music. "What happens is there's a bleed over effect that takes place. When I work with people 1 pick up a few tips — writing tips from Bob, guitar tips from the Edge, and I like to think that I've left a few things behind for them to pick up. It's not unusual for that to happen, especially if you have a lot of respect for people to begin with. Their philosophies and techniques are likely to stay with you and I think that has happened for sure."

Regardless of the success of his new record, Lanois

looks destined to become semi-legendary for his work as a producer, a job that is becoming more complex with the growth of technological options. What does Lanois see as the job of a producer? "Why don't we use a term that I'm currently trying to pull out and that is 'spotting'. What I do most of the time is try and pick out strengths. If I feel that people are bypassing something that is special and unique to them I usually spot it and bring it to their attention. "As far as studio composition goes a lot of people that I've worked with use the studio as a writing venue and I use the spotting technique as part of that process in regards to lyrics or titles. Quite often singers will have a bag full of lyrics and something will fly by thatthey might not completely notice and I bring it to their attention. So it's very much an artistic, creative involvementthat I have. "Some of it has to do with technique and sonic manipulation and a lot of lessons that I learned from Brian Eno. I still like starting with one thing and transforming it into something else. Sometimes artists like to be presented with an alternative way of looking at their work and that's where the sonic manipulation comes in to play. When they're out for dinner or away for the weekend you can weird up a couple of tracks and make them completely fresh. "To give you an example, one of my favourite tracks on U2's Achtung Baby, 'Love Is Blindness', is a track that Bono wrote but we never really had a backing track for it. While they were out of town doing a photo shoot we took one of Larry's drum tracks from 'Acrobat', slowed it down and layed the chord structure of 'Love Is Blindness' on top of that and when U2 got back they were really excited and Bono put on a vocal and Edge did a few guitarsand that's what turned out to be the master track. "The stranger more atmospheric, darker tracks are the ones that have manipulations done to them. Other things that U2 do are very much live and raw off the floor, and those things are quite evident on the record." Are you hired for your ability in the studio or is personality an important part of the job? "Ultimately people work with me because of a mood I bring to records. Brian Eno really makes the same kind of contribution and he used to say to me that whatever he gets his hands on turns to melancholy and I think that whatever I get my hands on turns to bittersweet. It's one of these built-in qualities." The obligatory parting question of when-are-you-gonna-tour-down-under meets with an interesting and sad anecdcote.

"My history teacher at high school who introduced me to a lot of folk music was from New Zealand. We had a folk group together and I don't suppose you would've heard of him, but they were Gary and Evelyn Muir. "Anyhow he never told me a lot about the country but later on I met an aboriginal man who was from NZ, a great guy, he used to work for U2." Yeah, roadie Greg Carroll who died in a road accident in Dublin. "That's right. When you know somebody from the place it gives you an image as to what NZ might be like."

GEORGE KAY

"When I work with people I pick up a few ti ps - writing tps from Bob, guitartipsfromfne Edge..."

This year's biggest hip hop sensation has been New York threesome the Digable Planets. Their debut single 'Rebirth of Slick', an international top ten hit, presented a surprised world with their blend of cool bebop samples and their own personal philosophy, a combination of black awareness, existentialism and buzzwords.

According to the engagingly named Doodlebug, the ideo-

human, we have emotions that are involved in the equation, like jealousy, that prevent us from being as well oiled as maybe insects are, it's more instinctual with them. "With humans it's inside of us to be that way but there's a whole bunch of other little elements that keep us from doing it."

The band have said that their ideology came from a com-

DIGABLE PLANETS are (l-r) Doodlebug, Ladybug and Butterfly

scathingly contemptuous of America, its society and education system. "The constitution is a piece of paper that promotes racism and sexism. To think that this country bases its whole ideology on that constitution just lets the world know that they don't give a fuck about females or people other than the dominant race in this country. "Society is very hypocriti-