Crowded House

As Crowded House embark on their tour behind Intriguer, their second album since reactivating in 2006, multi-instrumentalist Mark Hart talks to Andrew P Street about...

...getting the band back together.
It was great, actually. Neil just called me up and said "hey, Nick [Seymour, bassist] and I were just thinking maybe we'd get the band back together," and I was like "yeah, man – let's rock!" [Laughs] I love this band so much, I always have.

...getting past the fact that previous Crowded House album Time On Earth started life as a Neil solo album.
Of course that I wasn't [originally] on the record, and then we had to find a drummer [to replace the late Paul Hester]. But once we got Matt [Sherrod] Neil thought, "well, let's have at least some songs with the actual band playing", so we cut four songs. And it just felt like we'd never left, at least with my parts. And Matt is a quick study, so it was really fun.

...his pride in this year's "proper" Crowded House album, Intriguer.
There's only ten songs. It's possible to sit down and listen to without looking at your watch. It's something you can digest in one meal.

...the songs that didn't make the cut for the album.
Some really good songs didn't make it. We had all the song titles up on a board in the studio, and everybody would check their twelve favourites and see which ones were most common, and from there we kept whittling it down. It was a little painful to see certain songs disappear – you'd get a twinge of "man, that's such a great song..." But then we'd be like "eh, boxset, b-side, whatever."

...trying to follow Neil's capricious muse.
Neil is amazing at coming up with these strange ways of playing things: he'll detune his guitar and put a capo up the neck, and I'll be listening to it on a demo or whatever and thinking [awestruck] "how is he doing that?" It's always always a challenge to find something that's going to fit in and work musically. Sometimes it involves one note. And sometimes it involves no notes. It's the space that's important sometimes.

...knowing when not to play.
Look at an orchestra: there are guys sitting there turning pages nearly the whole time, and then they come to life and the trumpets kick in. Not everybody's playing all the time. It makes sense, really."

Crowded House Hordern Pavilion, Sat 6 Nov