Crowded House + Augie March
Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne

There was a certain inevitability about Thursday night’s Crowded House gig. Such stadium shows – with the outsized gestures (front-of-stage solos, video screens, hand claps etc) engineered to make up for the gap between audience and band, as well as covering-the-bases setlists – always carry a script written to ensure everyone goes home happy. Returning to stages for the first time since their enormous Sydney Opera House farewell gig eleven years ago, Crowded House needed to flaunt their new material – a large proportion of the rather good Time on Earth record – to prove themselves more than a nostalgic apparition from the good/bad old days of Keating, Paul Kelly and the D-Gen. The new stuff worked well, but eyes noticeably started to drift, feet were no longer tapping (2/3rds of the gig was spent seated) – so the home stretch saw a greatest hits extravaganza with a few new and old obscurities added in.

The band members were clearly enjoying themselves, “back in Melbourne,” as Neil Finn remarked, “where it all began”: Nick Seymour was bounding around the stage in a veritably glowing white suit – and there was even joy for a clearly nervous Davey Lane (You Am I) stuffed up the back on acoustic guitar and copybook rock poses. Yet Crowded House’s predominantly melancholy and relatively subtle music is a strange fit for this kind of spectacle-driven event. It’s their honeyed harmonies and vocal melodies above all else which managed to imprint on thousands of brains during the early 90s. And it’s clearly these the audience want to hear. Or, more precisely, want to sing. Finn shifts off the mic at various points, letting thousands of voices miraculously arrange themselves into an orderly and musical swell (“hey now, hey now, don’t dream it’s over”). It’s a stunning thing, hearing a group of vocal chords move in unison like that. Less stunning was the band’s uncomfortable attempts at psych-jams (see the afro-beat breakdown of ‘Private Universe’ – first song of the set, no less) and crowd interaction (a few hand claps fell flat, a few lines of lyrics bummed).

Augie March, on before Crowded House and after a relatively anonymous Irish rock thing, were, by their own admission, “a bit under the weather.” Unfortunate, to say the least. Home town nervousness combined with a hint of the flu and Glenn’s ever-threatening perfectionism made them tense. Nevertheless, it was a solid performance in the setting – i.e. a giant fuck-off stadium with crowd obliviously streaming in – and the band’s harmonies were really, really shining. This vocal performance made their appearance with Crowded House make some sense. Augie’s dense and textured music doesn’t translate as well to the unforgiving bounce of concrete, plastic and sky-high roof, but it carries a similarly revisionist approach to some now classic sounds. If Crowded House’s success was, in part, derived from hooky songs bludgeoned by willing radio stations, Augie March’s taste of the same with ‘One Crowded Hour’ will no doubt have suggested future directions – along the same path or in a radically different direction.

by Ben Gook