Neil Finn: ‘When I replaced Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac, his fans gave me the evil eye’

“There was a funny night, near the end with Fleetwood Mac,” Neil Finn recalls with a laugh. “The crew sometimes used to dress up in the wings to surprise the band. It was nearly Christmas, and we’re doing a big, climactic Go Your Own Way. Mike (Campbell)’s going like the clappers out front, playing about twice as long Stevie (Nicks) wished he would, because her arms are getting tired on the tambourine, so she’s kind of inwardly cursing: ‘Get him to finish! Lindsey never played this long!’ And I stepped over to the side of the stage to take it all in, and there’s seven of the crew doing the nativity, this whole beautiful tableau, and I didn’t see them at all.”

The 66-year-old New Zealand singer-songwriter shakes his head. “There’s something about being in performance mode that has such a focus and you can miss details right underneath your nose. I felt bad for the crew but Stevie didn’t notice either: ‘What baby Jesus?’”

Finn notes, rather incredulously, that he is still listed as a member of Fleetwood Mac on Wikipedia. “It is quite weird because it almost seems like a dream now.”

Finn has led something of a charmed life in music, recruited into his brother’s band Split Enz as a teenager (for whom he wrote and sang their enduring 1980 hit, I Got You), later rising to global success with his own much-loved band Crowded House. Finn’s plaintive voice, thoughtful yet elliptical lyrics and Beatley sense of melody and harmony made him a star not just with the general public but with his peers, amongst whom he has a reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter. The best of Crowded House (Don’t Dream It’s Over, Four Seasons In One Day, Weather With You, It’s Only Natural, Better Be Home Soon) have become modern classics. 

The band’s knockabout, good-humoured image was dented when drummer Paul Hester left (and later died by suicide), but Finn has periodically revived them with changing line-ups, whilst enjoying a superb solo career involving side projects with members of his musical family (brother, wife and sons) as well as collaborations with members of Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Wilco and Johnny Marr. Neil and brother Tim Finn were appointed OBEs for services to music in 1993. Then in 2018, when guitarist, songwriter and singer Lindsey Buckingham was forced out of Fleetwood Mac in a power struggle with singer Stevie Nicks, Finn was invited by drummer Mick Fleetwood to join for a global stadium tour (along with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell).

“It was like stepping into another life for a little while,” recalls Finn. “They are a real band, all with quirky, individual personalities.” He has never met Buckingham. “I don’t think he’s got any beef with me. I sort of hoped in the end that he might think, well, at least somebody’s putting their all into trying to do my do my songs well. There was just one night when two girls down the front had Lindsey shirts on, giving me the evil eye. I just waved and smiled.”

Mick Fleetwood had hoped to record an album with this line-up. “Mick is the flagbearer. He has huge dreams and aspirations for the whole thing all the time. He would have loved us to move it forward, but the stratospheric success of Fleetwood Mac possibly feels like a weight. It’s like moving a mountain.”

Finn did record a song with Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and Mike Campbell, the gorgeous Find My Way Back Home, released in 2020 to support a New Zealand homelessness charity. It may have been McVie’s last recording before she died in 2022. “That was the last time I saw her. She was performing at a Peter Green tribute that Mick put on. I bought my little set-up and she recorded her parts backstage. Bless her. Christine was just the most beautiful, soulful part of that band, she walked into soundcheck every day with no airs. I’m very sad that she’s not here anymore.”

The experience helped him rethink Crowded House, which had been through various line-ups and breaks, and hadn’t released an album since Intriguer in 2010. “We had come to a bit of a dead end, I didn’t think we were progressing in any discernible or positive way, so I kind of put it on the shelf and did my own thing.” That included projects with both his sons, multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Liam Finn (40) and drummer Elroy (35), which started giving him ideas. Crowded House producer and keyboard player Mitchell Froom was the last piece in the puzzle. Original bassist Nick Seymour “got a sparkle in his eye when I mentioned the idea of how the line-up might be.”

The reformed Crowded House released a fine album, Dreamers Are Waiting, in 2021, although promotion was piecemeal due to the pandemic. They came off the back of a “storming” American tour to record a new album, Gravity Stairs (out today), that compares with their finest work, a strong set of beautifully formed songs with lush harmonies, shifting between luscious balladry and off-kilter rockers. “It feels like a step forward.”

Amongst the stand-out tracks is a beautiful, strange ballad, Some Greater Plan, that evokes notions of love at the end of everything, with a lamenting coda: “We gave up on the world somehow / Now we better start believing.” It sounds like an anthem for the Climate Change era, but Finn reveals that it began life as a song about a brief love affair his late father had in Italy during the last days of the Second World War. “He had a very harrowing war, and this affair with a diplomat’s daughter revived him, and became a sort of family legend. He’d get this faraway look and start speaking Italian. ‘Arrivederci’ was almost the extent of it, but my mum would roll her eyes and say ‘I suppose Nada used to say that, did she?’”

Finn leaned into the ambiguity of the song’s message, which could be directed at a younger generation with apocalyptic concerns. “There’s a sense that if all we can do is be together in a room and sing a song, well, that’s not nothing. I’m always banking on the idea that songs open windows and doors in your imagination. It’s slightly an excuse for not tying up loose ends but I trust that process. So a song like Fall At Your Feet can get played at a wedding and get played at a funeral. I’ve done both, actually.”

Amongst Finn’s greatest songs is Don’t Dream It’s Over. He sang it every night with Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac, Ariana Grande performed it with Miley Cyrus at her Manchester One Love charity concert in 2017, and U2 played it during their Las Vegas sphere shows last year, in response to the outbreak of conflict between Israel and Palestine. “There is something universal in the song, it turns up everywhere. It’s so overwhelming what’s going on in the world, really, and that Bono would choose it to represent his feelings about such a complex thing was really nice. It’s had a grand life, that song.”

Finn describes songwriting as a compulsion. “Sometimes when it’s not really going well, you kind of go ‘Oh, who am I trying to fool?’ You’ve got to be aware of the cosmic insignificance of your individual efforts in trying to write a great song, But then also, at some point, you have to believe that it’s the most important thing in the world. Or else you’ll never climb those stairs.”

He unambiguously has faith in the power of music. “At Fleetwood Mac, when we were touring America, I was really aware that half the audience were probably Republicans and half were probably Democrats. In fact, there’s some sympathies both ways within the band, I was a little bit surprised here and there. But you are looking out and you go, well, how often would a roomful of Republicans and Democrats be singing the same song together? There’s so few things that anyone can agree on in the world, but everybody loves music, it’s a huge unifier.”

Gravity Stairs by Crowded House is out now