It is
the pronounced darkness of Kare Kare at night that sticks in Neil Finn's memory
when recalling the thousand sensory impressions as Crowded House recorded Together Alone across the summer of
1992/3. Finn and his bandmates had moved into a large house owned by producer
Nigel Horrocks, perched above Kare Kare Beach itself, a disconcertingly sublime
setting for an album that has not only gone on to be the band's critical
highpoint, but one of the finest Antipodean albums ever made.
"On
a moonlit night it would be like you were in a starscape," says Finn,
marking 20 years since the album's October 1993 release, "and on a
moonless night the sport was to get back from dinner without a torch."
It
seemed to resonate at the time too: "Sleep by no means comes too soon / In
a valley lit by the moon" he sings on the album's opening track 'Kare
Kare'. Perhaps in some way because of the influence of the changing elements
and the dramatic landscape, the recording of Crowded House's fourth album ended
up also being confronting, emotional and difficult, an intense period that
changed the course of the band's history.
Says
Finn, "A lot of relationships fell victim to that period, and I don't know
what to put that down to entirely. As much as there were great psychic goings
on and comings together of different worlds, there was also some odd energy.
"In
the people that surrounded us there were about five or six relationships that
went bust in that time. There was a lot of contrary emotion, a loss of innocence."
The
story of Together Alone began in the
aftermath of extensive touring of the band's 1991 album Woodface, oft-cited as Crowded House's best, what with featuring radio-friendly
singles 'Weather With You', 'Four Seasons In One Day', 'Fall At Your Feet' and
'It's Only Natural', though in choosing Together
Alone as his favourite Crowded House album, Finn now refers to Woodface as "overlong and a bit
piecemeal".
The band
had toured Woodface in New Zealand
too, a visit that rekindled Melbourne-based Finn's love for his homeland. That
renewed kinship coincided with a wish to make an album that was "looser,
sprawling and a bit more psychedelic". Horrocks' house was identified as
the spot for this "exotic and extravagant plan", with one crucial
ingredient now top of the list of priorities: the appropriate producer to join
Finn, bassist Nick Seymour, drummer Paul Hester and new band member,
multi-instrumentalist Mark Hart.
The
success of Woodface allowed the band
their choice of some of the world's foremost record makers of the time, such as
Steve Lillywhite (Morrissey, The Psychedelic Furs, U2) and Gil Norton (Pixies,
The Triffids, James). But given the kind of album Finn wanted to make, and the
potentially unsettling nature of the setting, the selection was something out
of leftfield: Youth, former bass player in Killing Joke making his name as an
eccentric producer, in the early Nineties most well known for work in the realm
of dub and with electronic/ambient pioneers The Orb.
"He
wasn't like any of the other producers we met at the time," says Finn.
"My inclination and ours as a band was to go for a less predictable choice
than someone like Lillywhite, who'd made a lot of great records. We went round
to visit Youth in Brixton [London], and he had just had such an unusual set-up.
He came across like an escapee from Glastonbury, but within that there was keen
intelligence and I think Paul was pretty impressed with how much pot he smoked.
"He'd sit back and wouldn't say a lot in terms of specifics,
he'd just encourage us to keep playing and listen out for good jammy moments
and encourage us to be as loose as we could.
"His approach was sometimes a bit vague and I was looking for
more specifics at times and feeling it was a bit of an abstract process, but
one way or another it got there. We all arrived at an aesthetic we started to
like."
Today,
Together Alone stands as Finn's most
emotive, moving work, and it is the combination of the Kare Kare environment
and their freewheeling producer that is responsible for that, along with such
telling ingredients as Mark Hart's deeply sensitive contributions on 12-string
guitar and pedal steel, and the Maori flavours that ripple through the record.
But
it was the elements – the tide, the mist and the valley – that affected the
album the most. A mystical allure threads through Together Alone, perhaps the result of a subconscious response to
the landscape by those involved, yet the impact of the conditions was also very
literal and direct.
"We
were suddenly aware of the landscape every day, and the light and the way
things were changing. If it was a rainy day it just didn't seem appropriate to
be doing a certain type of song. I remember specifically recording 'Fingers Of
Love' in the manner that we did, which was very different to how we rehearsed
it, on a grim, dark ominous-looking day and I'm sure that had a lot to do with
it.
"It’s
a powerful place, not an easy place to be in some ways. There's a lot of energy
there and it's quite confronting, but it’s a good energy for music."
And
with such an evocative sense of the natural world, comes the album's inherent
spirituality. It is pervasive, and all the more remarkable given that Finn is
what we might imperfectly call an 'agnostic atheist': "I'm not short of a
sense of wonder and curiosity and awe about the way the universe is organised
or disorganised, but I'm just not religious at all and don't subscribe to one
single deity."
Together Alone is the most otherworldly of
Crowded House albums, though Finn's style of balancing the personal and private
against the cosmic stretches back to the band's eponymous debut LP in 1986 and
even the Split Enz days.
The
powerful supernatural feel that runs through Together Alone, inspired by the landscape, is perhaps a response of
sorts to the Catholicism Finn grew up with. Indeed, songs such as 'Nails In My
Feet', 'In My Command' and the exquisite 'Catherine Wheels' hint at guilt,
subservience and even abuse. ("So strong was his hold on her / Regarded by
some as his slave… Bruises come up dark", he sings on the latter.)
But
those Catholic flavours were distorted and developed by both the location, and
the particular values that Youth brought to proceedings.
"Youth
was very much into a Pagan mentality," says Finn. "He'd walk around
with a stick when things were getting exciting and shout 'Pagan, Pagan'. He was
into crystals and all the hallmarks of Paganism. I was pretty cynical and
sceptical; it wasn't a spiritual journey for me at all. I didn't relate to it,
but I kind of enjoyed it because it added a certain theatre to things."
Such
a singular experience recording the album left Crowded House a markedly
different band in Together Alone's
wake. In the years leading up to the residency at Kare Kare, they were cast a
certain way by fans and media thanks to their jauntier singles and
high-spirited live shows. But the rawness and intensity of the period, Finn
believes, allowed something altogether more brooding to emerge, and even sewed
the seeds of the band's split in 1996. In particular, the effect the time had
on the much-loved Hester, whose longstanding depression led him to commit
suicide in 2005.
"In
the course of allowing other versions of our band to exist, it opened up some
slightly darker aspects, which might not have ended up being very good, I don't
know.
"We
were pretty much cast as the 'fun' and 'joking around' band with Paul being the
way he was, we had made a reputation on being these fun-loving guys from down
under, a little bit cartoony, and the album definitely let a darker streak
emerge.
"And
that was always there, with Paul in particular – no one that funny doesn't have
a dark side, and from that record on he was more prone to descending into quite
antisocial states of mind. I don't blame the record particularly but I think it
did open up and expose the band a bit, for better or worse."
Hester
left the band during an American tour in 1994, with Finn pulling the plug
completely in 1996. The reformation in 2007 with Seymour, Hart and new drummer
Matt Sherrod was at least partly designed to "leave some good history in
there, instead of that big deathly full stop".
For a
man famously averse to picking favourites among his songs and albums, that Finn
identifies Together Alone as his
preferred Crowded House album is some statement. And it remains beloved among
fans too, containing as it does some of the band's most ambitious, complex and
atmospheric singles, such as 'Private Universe', 'Fingers Of Love', 'Nails In
My Feet' and 'Distant Sun'. Some of the album tracks contain some of Finn's
most extraordinary moments, such as the coda on 'Catherine Wheels' and
startling lines such as "Will we be in our minds when the dawn breaks? /
Can we look the milkman in the eye?" on 'Walking On The Spot'.
Together Alone can be thought of as the
beginning of the most creatively fertile and imaginative period in Neil Finn's
life to date. Two years later came the much looser first Finn Brothers album with
Tim, then in 1998 his first solo album Try
Whistling This was even more experimental with elaborate electronic touches
courtesy of another influential producer, Marius De Vries.
Indeed,
every turn he has made since 1993, particularly those unexpected ones, such as
Pajama Club or the Seven Worlds Collide project, can be traced back to that
cathartic and perspective-shifting time at Kare Kare, where the senses and
nature met music.
"I
remember when we got things going where we stood there and we were in the
moment and in the environment, it was kind of elemental, and that was how we
conjured up that sense of epic, epic nature."