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After we had discussed the recording of Woodface we spent some time talking about the songs Tim recorded during that same time but set aside for his solo projects - mainly his next solo record Before & After. We also returned to discussing the unused version of Crowded House's "It's Only Natural" with sampled drum beats. Because part 1 of the interview is more about Woodface I posted that in the Crowded House forum. Part 2 which is mostly about the demos for Before & After fits better in the Tim Finn forum and is published here exclusively. Enjoy!

Stuart, at Periscope Studios you mainly worked in the secondary recording room at on Tim Finn’s solo recordings. Some of those recording were eventually released on Before & After. Which tracks did Tim work on and what was your involvement?

 “Looking out for you” [Can’t Do Both” – ed]. was written entirely around this Sly Stone loop which carried the entire atmosphere of the track, it was a 'riff' not just a beat, it was ALL the music basically, with synth strings and piano parts coming in to build the track. The vibe got lost in translation I felt, by trying to reproduce the magic of the loop.

“Hit the Ground running” I'm surprised at how accurately Tim managed to reproduce the complex beat I created, but the drum track sounds very different to any other Tim track I ever heard, to my ears, and that's probably why. Tim basically retained all he musical parts I wrote, except the bassline phrasing is slightly incorrect to me. The 'drop dead' chords in the chorus, which Neil particularly liked when we talked about the track the next day, the little falling piano note melody.  Even the harmonies… I was fudging this weird harmony on the "Keep you up for hours" ad lib with a pitch shifter, and it sounded hilarious on certain notes because it didn't scale intelligently, it was just locked to the root note. Tim sang the harmony to fix that on the final version.

 We actually performed “Hit the Ground” live together one night in Melbourne at the Princess Theatre for an AIDS benefit gig, using DAT backing and playing guitars and singing over the top live.

Reproducing the demos with other players worked on "Hit the Ground Running", but it missed on "Can't Do Both". What a mess that turned out to be. It became rudderless without that Sly sample gluing it all together listening to it now. I didn't realise Tim used the title of another track we worked on, which I loved - "Burning Down One Side Only" in the updated lyrics of “Can't Do Both”. I can hear him trying to consciously pull away from the sampled riff on that one, but he killed the vibe in the process somewhat.

We also worked on “Persuasion” and “Strangeness And Charm”. We had a nice, brooding version of “Persuasion” going, that one we fully demoed. Persuasion was already written when Tim brought the song to me, so we were basically just experimenting with what sort of treatment we'd give it for a recording. I just had a listen to “Persuasion”, and he destroyed that one [laughs]... Too fast, he's flat throughout much of the track, the country style backing is too plain and happy for the lyric... Tim worked with other people, because sometimes he needed steering, and he knew that in his heart more than anyone. The beauty of Tim was that he wasn't afraid to completely throw away his preconceptions about how a track could sound, and he was delighted when he got music dished up to him that took it somewhere different to what he imagined.

I was never a huge fan of “Strangeness and Charm” (inspired by the modern day physics term) and that one was being tracked up in the big studio anyway as a potential album track [for Woodface -ed], so I kind of let that alone for the most part, after a few hours of midi exploration one afternoon.

"In Love With it All' was written in the Periscope era, but it fell into the “Strangeness and Charm” category in that we didn't work on it ourselves away from Crowded House. “Strangeness and Charm” was tentatively tracked early days with Ricky Fataar playing drums in the big studio, but this one didn't get quite so much love, or perhaps, as i suspect, Tim wanted to hold it back to use himself. I think Tim was  picturing a pretty straight ahead band treatment musically, so maybe that's why we never went after it in the MIDI studio.

I don't recognise "Many's the Time (In Dublin)” or the other titles from Before & After as from the Periscope era.

"Not made of Stone" rings a bell, but I can't confirm it came from that far back. The title reminds me of one of Tim's favourite sayings when he was trying to describe a situation as fluid: "Look, it's not carved in stone".

"Hit the Ground Running " sounds so much stronger than everything else to my ears, and not just coz  it's my music... it's comfortable, plus the myriad of vocal adlibs were all created when we up late at night wasted and messing around with funny pitch shifting ideas etc. He captured the entire essence of all those sessions in that recording, and it sounds slick, but I can hear him struggling on all the other tracks to a greater or lesser degree. Songs get their own energy after a certain stage, you can submit to that energy and run with it, or try and manipulate it into something else, but I reckon that's when you start overthinking things, and sucking the life out of it.

We came up with heaps of songs that I don't think Tim ever recorded, I must dig out those demos we made, because some of the tracks were superb. Tim probably felt a bit funny using all our tracks without me around, but he put a couple to use, as I mentioned. The last night of Woodface tracking, after Neil went home with Sharon, Tim and I grabbed Andrew Horne, Paul Kosky's assistant engineer, and took control of the studio for the night and tracked a bunch of songs. One in particular, “You Change”, we wrote on the spot, and it was a killer piece of funk.

At one point “It’s Only Natural” was worked on in the main recording room. You were involved with an unissued version of that featuring sampled drums.

One of my goals at the time was to get Crowded House to use a breakbeat as a starting point for tracking. They would've been the first Australian band to drop a beat in a release if they would have run with that. We gave one of my rhythms a shot for a night's session on "It’s Only Natural" which still needed a drum track at that stage. Neil was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the whole studio-grown beat idea, as it was strange and new, and untried for them...he didn't quite have his heart in it. In the end he reacted about as violently as you would get out of Neil; once he decided he wasn't happy with an idea, it became his enemy. There was a recurring open hi-hat in the drum pattern which came from "Impeach the President" [an often sampled 1973 song by the Honey Drippers -ed.] which he pointed out as the thing that was putting him off at the time, which he had an issue with.

Was the decision to abandon the idea of sampled drums have to do with technical reasons?

I don't think Neil's reticence at the time regarding loops was due to any technical reasons. Although its grunt was relatively meagre by today's standards with a mere 16 meg of sampling time at full bandwidth in stereo, the AKAI S1000 was the state of the art, an $8k sampler, and the remix is testament to its power. I think it was just the way that the situation played out at the time and was probably a bit of fault on both sides. "It’s Only Natural" has a very straight ahead beat, and in the end sounded great with Paul playing, but Neil kind of put me on the spot that night, and wanted a beat in a hurry, so I wasn't super comfortable with what was going on myself, in terms of getting the best beat for the track. It's easy to rifle through hundreds of beats in a minute these days, but you still have to try a stack of things first, to find 'the one.' The only disadvantage with having just enough memory to do a whole track, (S1000) is that auditioning ideas was slower. I was storing samples on 3.5" floppy discs! There was also the question of clearing samples, which was a whole new ball game for someone like Neil, but indicative of sweeping changes that would affect the way music was made over the next 30 years, from 1990.

Neil and Tim embraced your ideas more in the years to come.

It's interesting to hear how prominent the drum tracks are on Neil’s newer stuff and how much of the ‘Stu attitude’ to rhythm remains to this day. Neil is still taking advice from relative unknowns that he trusts with regard to song writing, just like he did with me back in the day. It's great he got the family involved too, but that's Neil... he loves his home space and his family and friends. I'm glad Neil embraced it later on though, and he has his own home setup now, which is the ideal situation for a songwriter.

Tim on the other hand, used almost all of the parts I'd written or come up with in sample form on his tracks, and just got other musicians to play them when he came to recording his next album [1993’s Before & After]. It was a bit of an odd feeling to hear those tracks after working on them for so long, basically being re-recorded to copy my parts, or my samples recreated in the studio, but that's rock 'n' roll I guess.

 

Last edited by Guy.
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I wish there was more information like this out there. So fascinating to hear both his experiences and his opinions given that he was so closely involved with the recording evolution. It's just eye opening to hear how much these songs go through. Those of us who don't record hit records for a living are easily unaware of the labor and debates that go on behind the scenes. The band certainly doesn't just show up, record a song, and go home.

It's hard to imagine, for example, Paul coming in to record new drum tracks for a song that's already been recorded. Just doesn't sound like something that should work, especially if he's changing the groove. Wouldn't you need to then go back and re-record all the other instruments to match the new groove? Just fascinating stuff.

It'd be interesting to know how much of the so called Still Life demos are recorded with Stuart Ellison and which were recorded earlier and which he then added parts to.

There are  versions of "Persuasion" and "Funny Way" on there and "Persuasion" in particular is quite different from the album; but frankly, it's terrible in comparison with the finished Mark Hart-produced song to my ears -- but Stuart doesn't seem to like the album version at all. I could not disagree with him more. Different tastes.

Also the version of "Hit the Ground Running" on Still Life doesn't have the "drop dead" piano chords that he mentions, but a rather fast strummed acoustic guitar -- it does have a slightly different bassline which  sounds like what Stuart is describing and the song is more or less whole and intact. There's just a bit in the album version that's missing in the demo.

These are not the first musicians I've read about using unknown musicians to help them find their way through songs. It's truly very hard work to come up with a decent song that doesn't sound like something else, and no musician is really an island; it's a collaborative art.

Truly prolific songwriters like the Finn's are making music all the time with a variety of people and I'm not surprised that they cop arrangement ideas from the people they make music with, this is the kind of thing that Paul Hester grumbled about before he left in 1994, after all.

I have to say that Tim's backing away from many of Stuart's ideas was probably for the best -- I don't think that that eletro-funk sound is really what Tim does best. But I also wonder how much influence Stuart Ellison had on similar songs that Tim is credited for from the era, like "The Island", or "Runs In the Family".

It seems that Ellison deserved a co-arrangement credit for "Hit the Ground Running" and "you've Changed", at the very least.  It sounds like Stuart Ellison was playing the pre-production role that Mitchell Froom played for Neil Finn on the first few Crowded House albums and Ellison deserved some co-arrangement credit for "Hit the Ground Running" and "You've Changed", at least.

Maybe "Can't Do Both", too, though his own words indicate that Tim (and Langer/Winstanley) pulled back from Ellison's ideas and changed them . It is, in my opinion, the least successful song on Before and After, at any rate.)

Last edited by Lance LaSalle
Guy. posted:

I was never a huge fan of “Strangeness and Charm” (inspired by the modern day physics term) and that one was being tracked up in the big studio anyway as a potential album track [for Woodface -ed], so I kind of let that alone for the most part, after a few hours of midi exploration one afternoon.

"In Love With it All' was written in the Periscope era, but it fell into the “Strangeness and Charm” category in that we didn't work on it ourselves away from Crowded House. “Strangeness and Charm” was tentatively tracked early days with Ricky Fataar playing drums in the big studio, but this one didn't get quite so much love, or perhaps, as i suspect, Tim wanted to hold it back to use himself. I think Tim was  picturing a pretty straight ahead band treatment musically, so maybe that's why we never went after it in the MIDI studio.

Thanks so much for sharing this interview!

I'm particularly fascinated with the comments about "In Love With it All" and "Strangeness and Charm," which always sounded like Woodface outtakes to my ears.  So it's pretty interesting to me that Ellison seems to think those songs were part of what Crowded House was doing at the time (even if Nick and Paul weren't involved).

Jaffaman, can you shed any light on that? Were those two Finn Brothers songs ever considered for Woodface?  What's the scoop?

 

mattl

I've long been fascinated by the period when the attempted third CH album "absorbed" some of the attempted Finn Brothers album and morphed into Tim joining CH for Woodface. And I knew some songs wound up on Before and After, but never knew Tim was also working on a solo album (Still Life?) at the time. So there there three albums in the works simultaneously (!). Would love to hear more about Still Life, if anyone has anything else to share (thanks for your insight, Lance). Wow, a flow chart of where all these songs were originally slotted and where they wound up (and some were eventually shelved) would be fascinating!

It's a very complicated saga, Woodface. Here's what I've put together:

  • The band records some songs in 1989; Neil is producing; Nick is fired for about a month, they record without him with Neil or "Joe Somebody" playing bass. (Some of these Nickless songs are on Afterglow.)
  • Tim and Neil record Murchison Street demos in late 1989 for proposed project to be recorded after the third Crowded House and tour.
  • In late 1989/early 1990, Crowded House and Split Enz play a short tour together. Mark Hart is made an official member of Crowded House.
  • Tim and Neil make a few live appearances together, playing "Chocolate Cake" and "Parihaka" together on Australian TV.
  • CH begin recording pre-production demos in Melbourne with Mitchell Froom -- Mark Hart is fired because "Froom sees the group as a trio."
  • The band travel to LA to record their third album,with Tchad Blake engineering again. Tim lives with them and hangs out in the studio with them, adding vocals and acoustic guitar as a sort of unofficial "fourth" member. There is some tension between Neil and Mitchell Froom. Neil develops health problems related to stress.
  • There is a break, then they record more in LA. This time Neil is with his family.
  • Finally they send a rough draft of the album to Capitol Records with the following tracklisting:
  • Whispers & Moans
  • Anyone Can Tell -
  • Fall At Your Feet
  • Fame Is
  • Four Seasons In One Day
  • Left Hand
  • Dr. Livingston
  • As Sure As I Am
  • Italian Plastic
  • Sacred Cow
  • She Goes On
  • Fields Are Full Of Your Kind.
  • Neil and a newly-single Tim return to Melbourne and begin recording their Finn Brothers album in Tim's Periscope studios, which is at his house, with Paul Kosky engineering. Ricky Fataar plays drums. Mark Hart contributes keyboards to some tracks. Stuart Ellison is around, basically consulting (contributes to Weather With You.) Everything goes well, they record without pressure and very swiftly.
  • AT the same time Tim records demos with Stuart Ellison (and probably others) for his projected fourth or fifth album (depending on whether you count Les Patterson.
  • Capitol says they don't hear a single on the Crowded House record. Neil freaks out. He isn't inspired by Crowded House; he is excited and inspired about the Finn record.
  • Neil and Tim decide to finish the Finn Brothers album as a Crowded House album, ditching the above Crowded House album. Nick and Paul are skeptical about Tim joining the band, but what can they do?
  • Froom offers to come help with the new line-up's album. Neil fires him.
  • The new 4-piece band record more songs at Periscope, with Neil producing. Paul re-records some of Fataar's drum tracks and Nick records some bass tracks -- but not all. Details are hazy but it seems that Nick records bass on very few of these songs; possibly just part of "Weather With You."
  • Froom has Bob Clearmountain mix "Fall at Your Feet" and possibly other songs from the aborted CH album and presents them to Neil.
  • Neil rehires Froom for overdubs and further recording in LA. Froom suggests using the best songs from the second project and the best songs from the first. The two albums are merged and work begins making them sound like one project.
  • More songs are recorded ("It's Only Natural") and the album is finished. Capitol records is pleased.
  • The band do a promo tour of the States, with Tim on keyboards.
  • The album is released on July 1st in the UK, July 9th in Australia bearing a Produced by Mitchell Froom and Neil Finn credit. I have no idea when it was released in the USA, but around the same time, at the beginning of July, 1991.
  • A tour of Australia ensues. Eventually Neil is dissatisfied with Tim's keyboard skills (though the one concert I've heard, the Power Station in Auckland available to watch here: https://www.frenzforum.com/topic/should-tim-have-been-fired-new-video-reveals-the-truth is great. Neil rehires Mark Hart to do the heavy lifting on keyboards.
  • Eventually Tim is depressed with his reduced role in the band. This takes its toll on the band and they fire him with Paul and Nick sort of leading the charge.

    I suspect the tale of Before and After is a similar complex, drawn-out story, but details are extremely sketchy.

    There seem to have been three main recording spurts: one with Langer and Winstanley in London; one in Tim's Periscope studios; and one in Ireland with Hothouse Flowers and the ALT guys. I have no idea  what order those sessions came in.

    The so-called Still Life demos are a  bit of a mystery, to be honest: some of them seem to have been songs that he recorded with Stuart Ellison, like "One Side Only", which Ellison claims he co-wrote; but some of the  seem to pre-date that: particularly "Hit the Ground Running"seems to have been Tim's demo BEFORE Stuart Ellison worked on it; as the features in the final song that Ellison credits himself with arranging (the bassline, the complex beat, the "He Could Keep You Up for Hours" opening hook) are not part of that demo.

    WE also know that Tim recorded demos in Sydney with a band (two were released on the I LIke It Rare series: "Making a Mockery" and "Remember and Forget".) Finally in 1992 Tim did a lot of touring in the UK.  I guess he doing those tours to support himself while he was working with Langer and Winstanley on Before and After. 

    My guess is that more Langer and Winstanley stuff was recorded but either Tim or Capitol was dis-satisfied with the Langer and Winstanley record;  and Tim then worked more, adding the Periscope studios and Irish stuff  to the record and combined it all to make a stronger record, though rather a hodge podge. Most of the B-sides from that record are L&W songs so at least 7 L&W songs have been released.

 

Last edited by Lance LaSalle

Wow. Can i say the bullet pointed detail of the above post is the best thing thats appeared here in years. Well done.

full of deets, intrigue, successes, failures, a succinct potted history that doesnt airbrush a thing. Well played. Five stars.

i look forward to someone doing the same unvarnished thing with what happened to matt and mark at some point... something that still leaves me cold.

 

Last edited by silent stream

Lance, I also liked your dot points as well to the Woodface history. Just a few things...

- I loved what Mark said when they asked him to join the band, "Sure, I'm flattered, I'll do it." Didn't he sound so humble. No wonder he won them over (well, perhaps the oatmeal played a part too! **humour**)

- Reading the SSS book, it was actually the two managers/attorneys Grant Thomas and Gary Stamler who discussed Mark Hart should be back in the band for keyboards for the US tour. They suggested that to Neil and he agreed.

I'm not sure I would buy a follow up Crowded House book! I'm sure it would be a tearjerker with mentions of Paul. Bless him. And I would feel sad for Mark again too.

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