Seven Worlds Collide: Crowded House at karekare.

Rip It Up, Issue 240, 1 August 1997, Page 12

Seven Worlds Collide: Crowded House at karekare.

V\7'7’l local music journalist Chris Bourke started his W JLJLCJL-L Crowded House book, Something So Strong, he was writing the continuing story of the band and their rise to critical acclaim and popular success in the United Kingdom. But in 1996, as the writing of the book neared completion, the story of Crowded House took a radical change with Neil Finn’s decision to disband Crowded House at the peak of their international success. Bourke’s Sydney-based book editor at Pan Macmillan, allowed the publishing date of the book to be put back, while Bourke returned to the research stage and followed the band through their

final week of gigs in Australia and rescheduled final final interviews with the core bandmembers. To write the 376 page Something So Strong Bourke had access to 98% of the people involved in the band’s saga from Melbourne to Los Angeles to London to Karekare t 0... Bourke gives a detailed blow by blow narrative of the people and politics involved in exporting a song to a global audience. Here is a reprint of just one chapter where Crowded House worked with UK producer, Youth, just one of many people that the band encountered on their long and winding road.

’’T" 1 !— band was eager to get started on 1 JLlCthe follow-up to Woodface. It was also time to cut the umbilical cord with producer Mitchell Froom. ‘We were looking for somebody completely different,’ says Neil, ‘whose personality would inspire us to be looser and experiment.’ David Field, a young A&R man at Capitol, remembers having ‘this Youth idea. I’d met him and knew he was a character. He hadn’t really done anything that was relevant, but I thought, this could be really . interesting.’ Born Martin Glover, South London wide boy Youth first came to notice as the founding bass-player in the uncompromising art-punk band Killing Joke. After leaving the group in 1982, he won respect as a producer/re-mixer, working with techno, dance and pop acts such as Brilliant, PM Dawn, Blue Pearl and the Orb. Field took the band to meet Youth in Brixton, where he has a couple of small studios in an old house. ‘We met him in the front room, sat down, had a coffee and proceeded to talk,’ says Paul Hester. ‘lt’s early, and he’s rolling joints the whole time, so we were all quite impressed. I thought, •he’s like Neil from The Young Ones. He just: rambled on and it just sounded like fun.’ Something clicked straight away, says Neil. ‘He’s got a pretty nutty approach and attitude to things, and a great record collection. And he said some good things about music and passion, the sort of intensity he likes in music. So we took a punt -on him.’ Youth’s persona is very theatrical, says Field. Seeing him connecting with Neil Finn was like ‘the existentialist meets the skeptic. It was definitely two extremes, and the challenge was how they treated it.’ Mark Hart says they chose Youth because ‘he was the most outrageous. He was the one who fit the bill the least. As far as being a v

competent nuts-and-bolts producer, he was up in the stars somewhere. And that appealed to them in many ways, because Mitchell is very much a tight-fisted, cracking-the-whip kind of guy. With Youth, it’s like “making a record should be like making a journey”. He had all these little sayings, and they really hit it off.’ The other chance element in the experiment was the recording location. Neil wanted to avoid spending weeks in a sterile studio and realised that he had never done any serious recordings at home in New Zealand. When they couldn’t find a studio that appealed to them, they decided to rent a house and set up their own. Recording the album on location also suited their experimental frame of mind. Neil’s first instinct was to establish the studio on Great Barrier Island, which is accessible only by plane or boat. ‘We quickly realised it would be a nightmare getting supplies in, or if something broke down,’ says band manager Grant Thomas. ‘lt was no place to make a record.’ They then headed for the secluded, windswept coast 45 minutes west of Auckland, to Karekare beach, made famous by The Piano. The Maori name for the beach, Waikarekare, translates as ‘rough, turbulent waters’. The last Karekare house they visited was a stark concrete structure, nestled in the side of a hill like a gun-metal grey bunker. It was built it in the style of an open-plan studio suitable for performances. A floor-to-ceiling window slides back so the large living room is open to a southern view of the valley. In November 1992, equipment tech Dugald McAndrew flew over to New Zealand to get things ready before Crowded House took up residence in the Karekare valley. They rented a couple of houses for accommodation, and the forbidding building

was set up for recording. An old Neve console and 24-track Ampex tape-recorder, plus crates of effects racks and vintage microphones and a baby grand piano were put on a truck and driven over the narrow, winding road to the west coast. Arriving before Youth were his engineer Greg Hunter and programmer Matt Austin, who flew direct from the congested grime of Brixton, South London. It was a bit of a shock. ‘They looked like Dickensian waifs, punks from London,’ says Hester. ‘Long, thin hair, pale skin, no shoes or socks. They’d arrived at this little house in Karekare, and were going, ‘Where the fuck are we? What have we done?’ ‘ The band recorded six days a week for two months, quickly settling into a haphazard routine. The conscientious pair - Neil and Mark - would arrive at the studio at about 11 each morning, then wait an hour or two for the others to arrive and start making tea. As the days went by, the sessions would start later - and finish later, not getting to bed till four o’clock some mornings. ‘lt got shifted to this weird zone where we were playing a lot at night.’ The band’s recording method changed. They worked up songs from lengthy jam sessions, developing their own parts rather than having them arranged by Neil and Mitchell. At about nine o’clock each evening everyone would take a break and return to a house for a catered meal. Youth would hold court while the red wine flowed and joints kept appearing. Slowly the others would peel themselves away from the intense philosophical discussions, and make their way back to the studio. Youth - the pagan voyager - took to the area’s primal atmosphere immediately. He would walk around barefoot, encouraging everyone to ‘Take your shoes off, man - feel the path with your mind.’

Youth’s contribution was to conduct the spirit of the sessions with his enthusiasm. ‘He definitely steered things in a completely opposite direction,’ says Paul. ‘Black and White Boy’ is an example. When written, it had an almost bossa-nova groove, with a smooth soul melody. ‘Youth just took that one to another place: More buzz man, turn the guitar up. More fuzz, Neil - heavy. Yeah, heavy. Less notes, Nick - just that note, the whole way. All the way! ‘He was set up in the lounge room on a few pillows wrapped in his sari, with his ashtrays and his pot and his coffee and his books. So there would be this reading and rolling, then stopping to tell someone to turn their guitar up full. More of everything! And he would dance during takes, with headphones on. He would come up to you and conduct, just wave his arms at you and scream, Freak out, man, freak out! More! More! ‘lt was like a happening. It was great, totally the reverse from Mitch and Tchad. We would freak out and they’d say, “That was pretty good.” Instead we got, “Man, that was sublime... a paradox of rock.” ‘ The band got used to Youth hippie dancing in front, conducting. Meanwhile, Hunter would be headbanging behind the mixing desk, having fun turning up the volume and continually blowing speakers, creating ‘zen mixes’ in which only four knobs on the desk could be turned up at any one time. Youth could recognise the character of the band and play with it, says Hester, ‘introducing folklore and games to build up the band’s spirit.’ The mood created, the band were free to explore and run with it. Such an occasion brought about... Nude Night. A cathartic disrobing took place during the sessions for Tn My Command’. The band had been playing a few takes which

didn’t seem to be going anywhere. ‘lt was like we needed to jump in a cold bath and get out and do one,’ says Paul. On the way back from dinner, he suggested the answer was to shed their inhibitions with their clothes. ‘I thought we’d go nude, run around the house a couple of laps, then stand on the hill and howl and scream at the moon for a bit. Then we’d record a take. So that’s what we did. ‘Me, Neil and Nick were nude within about a second, ready to go, and Mark was diligently taking off his trackshoes and socks,-then putting his shoes back on. He was being sensible, and we were going, Mark - we’re having a wild, abandoned moment here. Don’t get sensible. What are you doing? And he’s going, “I-I-I’m putting my shoes on.” We almost lost the moment. Mark had this doubt about his nudeness. Eventually we got him out there.’ ‘So there we were,’ says Mark Hart. ‘Neil playing keyboard, me playing guitar. Everything strategically placed. Of course, the real hippies - Youth and Greg - wouldn’t have anything to do with it, being British and modest. But we didn’t use those tracks! There might have been a bit of selfconsciousness that you could detect. We ended up keeping a track we cut before dinner. It was funny - but we tried.’ They listened to the takes - still nude - in front of the mixing console. ‘lt was great,’ says Hester, ‘we were all smiling, and someone snapped a couple of photos from behind: the true arseholes of Crowded House.’ Youth’s experimental recording methods reflected his new age leanings. On ‘Pineapple Head’ he asked Mark Hart to stand in a circle of volcanic stones while recording a guitar part. He obliged, stretching his leads 100 meters from the desk to the stone circle sited on the hill above the house. Youth then gave Paul his instructions for recording the vocal. It was at this point that Parlophone promotions manager Malcolm Hill, visiting from London, happened to call by to check out the exotic location. ‘When I got there, they were going along with everything Youth suggested,’ he says. ‘As I arrived, Paul was sitting in an upright flight case, holding in his arms lots of crystals, singing backing vocals. I said to him, what the hell are you doing? He whispered to me, “Well, Youth wants me to. He’s barking mad, but we’re getting some great results.” There was a lot of wackiness going on, but it was very funny.’

Mark Hart says that occasionally he would get frustrated at the lack of progress being made - ‘We’d just be getting ready to do something and a thunderstorm would roll in’ - but then he realised ‘We were under the influence of the project: we weren’t controlling it, it was controlling us.’ Although Neil had most of the central ideas before they started recording, they started to change in character. Songs that were particularly affected by the climate at Karekare include ‘Fingers of Love’, recorded on a rainswept, melancholy day; similarly ‘Distant Sun’, with Nick and Paul in separate rooms inside the house, while Neil and Mark played acoustic guitars on the porch shrouded by a cold mist; ‘Private Universe’ changed from a swing song to a panoramic guitar wash; and of course ‘Kare Kare’, credited to all the band because it emerged during a jam. ‘Locked Out’, originally a slow ballad, became what Nick describes as a ‘Mancunian thrash’; ‘Black and White Boy’ was similarly delicate - like ‘lnto Temptation’, says Mark - until one day Neil started playing it like the Ramones. Both the physical and emotional climate at Karekare were always extreme, says Hester. ‘Every day there was something going on, as people settled into the joint. They’d go off for walks and have these intense things happen. A lot of stuff has gone down in that area of New Zealand, and I think that rubbed off on us.

‘lt was quite tough,’ agrees Neil. ‘lt was a weird combination of people and there was quite a bit of stress around. But there were a lot of really good things about it too. There were very good days where we made some good music. But it was torturous to some degree.’ As the weeks dragged on in the intense environment, energy became drained and tempers frayed. ‘Towards the end, Youth wasn’t functioning particularly well, but then I’m pretty relentless,’ says Neil. ‘I regard the experience as a loss of innocence. It brought a lot of hostile things to the surface.’ Nick found that, to his chagrin, Youth the dance/remix guru was ‘a bit of a dosser. But I was very happy about the left turn Youth took us on, definitely. Before Youth I don’t think Neil had even a tolerance for dance music.’ Having Youth as producer meant they were less ‘pedantic about the details’ of what they were doing, says Neil. ‘That’s what we wanted, and I wanted more of it. In the end, he was quite conservative with us. I was hoping he’d really challenge us, but he still made quite a ‘Crowded House-y’ record with us. I don’t think he really wanted to be the known as the guy who screwed up Crowded House. ‘The album sounds really good in hindsight, it turned out really well. So in a way you can’t knock Youth. Whatever he did, somehow it worked.’