Told that Record Collector would be arriving at 4pm, Neil Finn figured this would finally afford him the chance to ease the effects of the jet lag. It's been two days since he arrived in London from his hometown of Auckland in New Zealand, but any sleep lasting longer than two hours has eluded him. In the early hours of the morning, he awoke in his Marylebone hotel bed fretting about the session Crowded House were due to perform for BBC Radio 2's Vernon Kay on his mid-morning show. Three songs in total, with the station's in-house orchestra.
In the event they did something old, something new and something borrowed: their 1992 hit, Four Seasons In One Day; recent single, Oh Hi; and a version of Petula Clark's Downtown. As for something blue, well, anyone even passingly familiar with their body of work will know that beneath the surface of every Crowded House standard seemingly built for mass participation - Don't Dream It's Over, Weather With You, Fall At Your Feet, Better Be Home Soon - lurk deeper undercurrents of melancholy that, decades previously, saw some perceptive wag label Finn's songwriting style as "Leonard [Cohen] and McCartney".
Should you have heard the session - executed as it was, with seemingly effortless insouciance - you might wonder what aspect of it could have possibly been prompting Finn's nocturnal anxieties. "Oh, it was just the thought of screwing up live on radio," he explains, "The conductor's there and he's going to signal you in at a certain moment. And so, of course, even though it went great - you're so full of adrenaline that you go back to your hotel to sleep, and you've never felt so wired in all your life!" There's no self-pity in Finn's demeanour, more an amused exasperation at his own shortcomings.
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