It was perhaps his smallest audience for nearly two decades.
On November 23 last year Neil Finn played in the Crowded House farewell concert at the Opera House before 250,000 people.
This month it was different. Finn’s audience was not even 250, barely 25. He was sitting outside hut in the tiny village of Bhu My near Da Nang, Vietnam, playing to a bunch of children. But the two concerts had something in common. Both were charitable. In November it was a children’s hospital and blood bank. Bhu My village was also being visited by people from the Fred Hollows Foundation, monitoring work done to restore sight to people with cataract blindness. Finn is a member of the foundation in New Zealand — something he does not sing about.
Earlier, Finn played at the largest Australia Day celebration outside Australia — in Ho Chi Minh City, along with Mark Seymour of Hunters and Collectors, Finn’s son Liam, aged 14, doing his first major gig (drums), some quickly cobbled together local backing and a couple of ring-in Australians, Mark Bowyer (guitar) and Neil Lawrence (harmonica). The 3000 people enjoyed some gutsy and mellow numbers in the benefit concert for the foundation.
Australia Day is celebrated a week earlier in Vietnam so it doesn’t clash with Tet — the New Year.
Finn had just returned from a month in New York finishing some additional music and mixing for his new solo album (“”getting a burst of energy from the Northern Hemisphere”). Most of the work, though, was done earlier in New Zealand. The name is not fixed but a new song, Try Whistling This, might be the title.
The album is slotted for a May or June release and Finn expects to tour Australia early in the album’s life and in the northern hemisphere in their summer.
Finn has been relaxing at his beach house near Auckland with his family. Why doesn’t he stay there and live off his royalties?
“”You have to feel good about what you are and what you do,” he said. “”Writing music is a compulsive thing. You cannot not do it anymore. I could be luxuriantly miserable. But you have to make a mark — not on the world so much as making a mark for yourself.”
Well, he has done that. As his mother, Mary, told him, “”Neil, you’ll always be all right. A good tune is always in short supply.”
And who said the English were masters of understatement?
It won’t happen in the next album, but in the one after that look for some Vietnamese influence.
On his last day in Vietnam, Finn returned to the bus with a weird shape under his arm. He took off the cover to reveal a Dan Bau. It was about a metre and half long with a pearl-inlaid sounding board and a single string. Someone had even wired an amp jack into it.
To get any harmonics out of it you’d have to slide you palm on it with every note plucked. Now a week later, Finn told me over the phone he is yet to get a tune out of it, but he is determined.
Pardon an old classic buff in this medium, but that’s a real musician. There’s heritage here on two counts. Liszt, Dvorak and Grieg to name a few were great ones for picking up traditional music. And then there was the great violinist Paganini who was so infuriated with an audience’s lack of appreciation that he ripped out three of his violin’s strings and played the next piece flawlessly on one.
Vietnam has a thriving black market in tapes and CDs. CDs are $3 each. I didn’t see any pirate copies of Crowded House or Split Enz albums and didn’t know whether this would be good or bad news to Finn. But he was remarkably nonchalant about piracy.
People who buy pirate tapes and CDs or copy at home probably wouldn’t buy a proper version first up anyway, he explained.
“”But ultimately it increases your exposure and they’ll come to a concert or buy the real thing later anyway.”
It was a generous approach that matched his whole trip to Vietnam.
Crispin Hull was the guest of the Fred Hollows Foundation and Travel Indochina.