Sometimes all pop music needs to do is spread a little happiness. Playing a small London show to mark the release of their eighth album, Gravity Stairs, Crowded House do rather more than that. There’s comedy, with Neil Finn teasing bassist Nick Seymour – the only other constant member of the band – about his strapped knee, which leads through a summation of Seymour family history into the crowd singing Where Is Love? from Oliver! to the stage. There’s the beauty of the interlocking guitars and harmonies; on the lightly psychedelic All That I Can Ever Own the band are as perfectly woven as spun sugar.
And there is something laugh-out-loud bonkers, in the form of Mick Fleetwood taking the drum stool when Finn digs back into his past during the encores to revisit I Got You by Split Enz. Fleetwood eschews the metronomic unfussiness of the recorded version, and plays it like Keith Moon, inserting fills where neither space nor time suggest they should be. It’s raucous, ridiculous and absolutely wonderful. Obviously it ends with Fleetwood thrashing round the kit and leading the band in a huge rock climax.
The heart of the two hours, though, is the perfection of Finn’s songwriting, and the brilliance of the band. As well as the two surviving founders, Finn’s sons Liam and Elroy play guitar and drums, Paul Taylor adds percussion and the brilliant Mitchell Froom – who produced their first three albums – colours everything subtly with keyboards. When they combine on songs as perfect as Distant Sun or Fall at Your Feet, it has the same effect as the shift from monochrome to Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz.
Finn Sr is relaxed and happy, and seeing him and his sons playing music together with such evident pleasure is a delight – for every time Liam launches into some fabulous solo, his dad is able to trump it. At one point, Liam teases him about not being cool, but any 66-year-old who can keep his sports jacket on for two hours without apparently breaking a sweat, while rocking a Les Paul, and playing one of modern pop’s greatest catalogues, is as cool as they come.
