Neil and Liam Finn, new album Lightsleeper, Mick Fleetwood
Neil and Liam Finn on the art of the hang, Fleetwood Mac and the four-letter words that have kept their dynasty going.
Standing side-by-side in the shadow of Sydney Harbour Bridge on a crisp autumn morning are two men who look somewhat similar and strangely familiar. Helicopters occasionally wheel overhead, while across the water behind them stand the gleaming white sails of the Opera House.
There is an air of importance and seriousness about the pair dressed in dark tones, as a photographer flits a few metres in front of them.
A middle-aged couple strolling underneath the bridge clocks this peculiar scene and, as they approach a loose semicircle of spectators, the man asks: “Who is that? Are they someone famous?” That all depends on how you define fame, he is told, and whether a certain four-letter word means anything to you: Finn.
“Is that Neil Finn?” asks the man. It is indeed — and that’s Neil’s eldest son, Liam, with the beard. “Well, there you go,” replies the man, who then continues his midmorning walk with his partner.
When this interaction is related to Liam moments later, once the photographer’s work is done, the younger Finn laughs. “That’s so weird that they would care to want to know who it is if they didn’t recognise someone themselves,” he says. “What does it matter?”
Liam’s wife, Janina, overhears the exchange and has a better idea for a rejoinder. “It’s a wedding, actually,” she offers to the retreating form of the clueless busybody, who is by now out of earshot.
“Yeah,” says Liam, warming to the joke. “We’re the royal family of New Zealand.”
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Although the younger songwriter is taking the mickey, as Finns are wont to do, there’s an element of undeniable truth to his tossed-off remark. As far as musical royalty is concerned, there has never been a family that has made a more significant or lasting contribution to the Kiwi songbook than his. In guises that include pop acts Split Enz and Crowded House, as well as an array of solo and collaborative projects — including Liam’s contributions both with the band Betchadupa and under his own name — that surname has been rightly lauded for its enduring facility with words, music and melody.
With great artistic influence comes the possibility of egos to match, and perhaps the passing couple on this bright morning in May might have seen father and son looking stern for a few moments as they stared into the distance as per the photographer’s instruction.
Perhaps they’ll return to their workplace and tell their colleagues that those Finns seem to take themselves awfully seriously for a couple of pop musicians. Little could be further from the truth, however, for this is a pair whose recent exploits include grappling with one another for a couple of hours on a clifftop in naught but their underpants while filming a music video for a song named Wrestle with Dad from Liam’s 2014 album The Nihilist.
It’s the same instinct for comedy that saw the younger Finn dropping his trousers without warning while his father sang perhaps his biggest hit, Don’t Dream It’s Over, into a webcam during a bizarre show hosted by Sydney artist Kirin J. Callinan in 2015. As well, a short note in the “about” section of Liam’s Facebook page scans more as a cheeky gag than a warning — “don’t f. k with the Finns”.
“Liam and [younger brother] Elroy grew up with the mentality of the humour that had developed through me being in Split Enz and Crowded House,” says Neil. “Certainly both bands had an irreverence for the way that you do things traditionally — and enjoying it more when we were upsetting people’s sensibilities, as that was always the most fun we could have. It’s just a natural part of the family humour — we all just want to give each other a laugh, really.”
There aren’t many families that choose to record music together across multiple generations, yet that’s exactly what has been captured on Lightsleeper, an album that marks the first collection of original songs written and performed by Neil and Liam Finn.
Elroy, an accomplished musician in his own right, plays drums and guitar, and Neil’s wife Sharon plays bass and sings, among other guests. It is a pop record at heart, but with plenty of textures and tonal deviations that will surprise devotees of both songwriters.
It is into this family that Janina Percival married three years ago. As well as being Liam’s wife and mother of their child, she is his manager. “It’s an interesting duality. There’s one rule: don’t talk business in bed.” She pauses, then laughs: “We never keep the rule.”
As a relatively new entrant into the Finn clan, Janina has a unique insight into its dynamics. She notes their shared sense of humour is “probably the No 1 thing” that enables the family to work so well as a unit, along with another four-letter word.
“It’s always love and humour,” she says. “It’s good for a family, because there are always moments of tension, but they can laugh their way through it.
“Neil and Sharon have done a really amazing job: they’re all very down to earth, and I think empathy is the biggest thing they share. It’s amazing how much Liam and Elroy talk to them; they’ll [talk on] FaceTime at least twice a week. They have a very strong bond, and they’re very much friends.”
As father and son settle in for a long conversation about the origins and intricacies of the 11 songs comprising Lightsleeper, however, it’s a more recent family event that has them smiling: two days earlier, Neil and Sharon celebrated their 60th birthdays in a combined party hosted at Roundhead Studios in Auckland. “We didn’t have to organise anything,” says Neil. “And they got the top party band in the South Pacific, if not the world: a band called Stallion.”
Led by Liam and Elroy, the house band also featured a handful of friends and family members. The eclectic set list began with Tequila, which was a hit for the Champs in 1958. Later, Neil’s older brother, Tim — with whom he shares a rich musical history in several guises — got up to sing Kooks by David Bowie, while after the speeches the birthday boy and girl got up to perform Bowie’s Moonage Daydream, backed by their sons.
“Dad broke an A string [on his guitar] in the first verse — that’s how hard he rocked it,” says Liam with a proud grin.
“It’s a very exclusive band, and we’re also very full of ourselves: we know we’re the best. It’s only been around for the past four years; we do about one show per year.”
As his father wryly notes, every show so far has been in the top five Stallion gigs of all time.
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Yet another four-letter word key to the Finns’ closeness is hang, an essential part of the music business, which tends to involve a lot of waiting around. Because Neil and Sharon always enjoyed taking Liam and Elroy with them as music took the young family around the world both boys became well versed in learning how to make their own fun with a minimum of fuss.
“They came on tour a lot,” says Neil. “Not all the time, with school somehow getting in the mix. But even then, we took them out of school quite gladly, really, because they learned a lot. Something about that meant that they learned the art of the hang. On tours, it’s a unique environment: crew people will tell you it’s as important as you doing your job well, that you’re a good hang, and you know how it all works. It’s a community, and it’s got some codes of conduct and values systems that are quite good.”
Liam agrees, but saw those early experiences through a slightly different lens. “We learned that if you kept everyone laughing, you didn’t have to go to bed,” he says with a smirk.
“But now, hanging out with Mum and Dad is not that different than hanging out with any of my friends. I’m sure they feel the same way, and it feels really nice. It’s nice that we get to share all this now.”
As for the decision to combine forces, this could only have happened after Liam had been out doing his own thing with Betchadupa, then as a solo artist. Father and son remained close throughout that time — including Liam playing with Crowded House for a year — but it was a series of joint shows a few years back that brought them together as collaborators.
Although they were intimately familiar with each other’s material and could draw on the songs in the live arena, they decided to beef up the repertoire by writing more songs, together.
“I don’t know if it would have felt the same if we tried to do this 10 years ago; there might have been more bridges to cross,” says Neil. “This record felt like something that really only worked because Liam had been out and established a body of work that I find quite awe-inspiring to look at, really. He’s written more great songs, to my mind, than most of the people that I know of my own age.”
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Throughout the interview, there’s one more four-letter word that makes a couple of appearances, almost as an aside. A drummer named Mick made an appearance on several tracks on Lightsleeper, including Any Other Way and Anger Plays a Part. Mick also played on a version of Troubles, which was the cause of some tension between father and son: it was cut from the album, but has been reinstated in stripped-back demo form for the vinyl release, so that each side has three tracks.
Better known by his surname of Fleetwood, Mick has become a rather large presence in Finn lore of late, to the point where he threatens to overshadow this new release — through no real fault of his own. In April, the British-American rock band announced that it was replacing its singer and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham with two men.
One is Mike Campbell, former guitarist with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while Neil confirmed his surprise appointment on Twitter, where he wrote: “Snow warnings for parts of the country, the mystery of Stonehenge solved and yes, I’ve joined Fleetwood Mac.” When this subject is raised, Liam smiles and says, “That’s the beginning of a whole new story” — hinting that it might be better told at another time.
His father says: “That’s been a recent development. But we got to know Mick really well in the course of making this record; we had a lovely week with him, and he played on four of the songs. Mick’s the best-dressed guy in the studio by far every day — and he has great stories.”
While much of the global reporting around Neil joining Fleetwood Mac to date has focused on the peculiarity of New Zealand royalty joining one of the most famously fractious groups in pop history, perhaps there’s something even bigger at play.
With decades of tightly wound history, in-jokes, love and musical talent already well established within the family Finn, the real question is this: are the members of Fleetwood Mac skilled in the art of the hang?
The answer will be known soon, as the band’s North American tour begins in October, with more than 50 dates booked through to April. No dates have yet been announced for Australia and New Zealand.
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Running beneath the surface of Lightsleeper is an additional layer of familial love. “We’ve now entered another generation shift in the Finn family; another young Finn has arrived, courtesy of these guys,” says Neil, nodding at his son sitting beside him.
“We decided to make the record before Janina was pregnant,” says Liam. “Then during the demoing, we found out that we were going to have a baby. It was sort of like: ‘Oh, OK, that seems natural — you make a record with your dad, you’re gonna become a dad.’ ”
The first song they wrote together for the album is We Know What It Means, which scans as not only a beautiful portrait of the Finns at different stages of their lives, but whose chorus hints at the obsessive nature of pursuing songwriting perfection (“So close and yet so far / We found each other in-between / We know where madness was / It’s nowhere we haven’t been”).
“In some ways it’s the most autobiographical, about our relationship,” says Neil. “We shy away from being too overt, but it definitely has something to impart about the family.
“It was during that period of doing the first writing that Liam told us [Janina was pregnant] — so it’s been the sub-agenda, the subtext for the whole album.”
The youngest Finn, Buddy, is now almost two years old. As Janina watched two men in dark tones being photographed in the shadow of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, she shared a recent discovery related to how similar the voices of father and son sound on the record.
“When I first started dating Liam, I’d have to say ‘Who is this?’ when someone answered the phone, because I would get confused by Elroy, and even sometimes Neil’s dad,” she says.
“But, funnily enough, our son Buddy can tell their voices apart. Buddy can hear a song and go ‘Papa’ — which is what he calls Neil — or ‘Dad’. It’s fascinating, because we haven’t ever said, ‘This is someone’s song’ — he knows. He can tell. It’s very strange.”
With those finely tuned ears, the newest member of the royal family of New Zealand will fit right in.
Lightsleeper will be released on Friday via Inertia/[PIAS].