More than two decades after his first foray into livestreaming, Finn’s Infinity Sessions are beaming extraordinary collisions from Roundhead Studios to the world. Ahead of the latest installation, Toby Manhire catches up with the Crowded House frontman at Studio A.
The latest session, featuring Neil Finn, Vera Ellen, LEAO, Victoria Kelly and Simon O’Neill, complete with a nine-piece string section with arrangements by Victoria Kelly, and supported by the Spinoff, can be found here.
Neil Finn has been messing around on the internet for a while now. Twenty-five years ago he launched Nilfun.net (don’t visit that URL – it’s since been poached by an Indonesian online casino – there’s an archive here), where he’d post “musical games, art pieces, curious bits of nostalgia and flights of fancy”. In early 2001, he tried something few in New Zealand had before – a livestreamed concert.
The “webcast”, as it was then called, featured Finn and friends, clustered in the basement in an earlier incarnation of Roundhead Studios, in Parnell, performing acoustic versions of songs from his new solo album One Nil, at 10am on a Wednesday. The technical director of the project “had to bring in a server on the back of a truck”, Finn recalls. “It was fucking huge. Now it would be on a chip, probably.”
The technology was much bigger and the megabits many fewer, but the session itself stands up today. (You can watch it here.) The sound quality is good, and the mortar around the songs is strangely engrossing: Finn sits beside a giant PC desktop monitor, landline phone to his ear, taking requests from fans around the world. “I had some guy in Sweden, and it was mid-summer for us, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s snowing outside,’ and asked us to play something. And I played it for him and just went: that’s fucking amazing. Without needing any gatekeepers or being part of somebody’s operation, you could directly communicate with people. It felt like it was coming straight from your brain into their world, you know? It’s a lovely feeling.”
That feeling stayed alive through the years, and in 2017 an audacious new streaming adventure was launched – four consecutive Friday nights at Roundhead, by then long settled into in its new home on Newton Road, culminating in the live recording of the album Out of Silence, for which Finn was joined by a menagerie of established and emerging local musicians. “It was insanely ambitious, in a way, and it certainly was quite stressful at times,” says Finn today. “But the kind of energy that it creates becomes quite addictive.” Those nights were called the Infinity Sessions, and they became the pilot of something else: a series of livestreamed Roundhead concerts, curated by Finn, bringing together artists from New Zealand and abroad: everyone from composer Victoria Kelly to hip-hop duo Church & AP, from west African blues collective Tinariwen to Aussie powerhouse Jimmy Barnes.
The latest installation of the Infinity Sessions is this Monday, March 17, with an eclectic lineup that speaks to the breadth of musical excellence in Aotearoa today. Taite-winning Vera Ellen, who opened for Crowded House on the Australian leg of their recent tour, will sing. So will the Grammy-awarded tenor Simon O’Neill, performing Kelly’s spellbinding interpretation of Sam Hunt’s ‘Requiem’. David Feauai-Afaese’s electrifying trio LEAO will be there.
Neil Finn will knock out a few songs, too, including one that has never before been recorded or performed, and may well never be again. “I might just have it as a one-off,” he says. It’s all part of “some weird compulsion to create some, you know, mythology around the idea, because it doesn’t make any sense, really, an Infinity Session. It’s not sponsored. It’s not aimed for a particular audience or a genre or with a view to Spotify or Apple or any of that sort of stuff. It’s fully indulgent.” The impulse is to “have an idea and try and make it as spectacular as possible – both the way it looks and the way it sounds. And having this room and having had quite a lot of events in here, makes me realise every single time we’ve done it, it’s always felt like something really life affirming and special and inspiring. Just food for the soul, really.”
When he says “this room”, Finn is pointing out through the glass window. We’re sitting in the control room for Roundhead’s hallowed Studio A, a vast rack housing dozen of audio processors on one side, the colossal 8088 Neve recording console, originally commissioned for the Who in the mid-70s, on the other. The studio itself is one of New Zealand’s most beautiful rooms – wooden floors, natural light beaming in, and, hanging from the ceiling, half a dozen exquisite chandeliers, courtesy of Sharon Finn, designer and proprietor at Sharondelier.
The man largely responsible for building the place, Jason Dempsey – “he knows more about the mechanics and the construction of this place than anybody,” says Finn – is up a ladder when I arrive at Roundhead. Turns out that a couple of weeks ago, he’d bumped into Finn in the very early hours of Wednesday. Dempsey was high as a kite. The rock-star caricature ends there, however: They were both at Auckland City Hospital. Dempsey had been admitted with a kidney stone stabbing at his abdomen. Finn had been there since 10, having gone in with some heart flutters – “a little bout of atrial fibrillation”.
Nothing to be alarmed about, Finn is quick to stress. “It doesn’t turn out to be anything major at all, but they wanted to check me out, and about three in the morning they wheeled me in for an X-ray and there’s no one else in the whole X-ray department, then all of a sudden this wheelchair is coming towards me. That’s fucking Jason.”
Dempsey: “This is like, what, three in the morning?”
“And you just had a scan. It’s the strangest, funniest thing. He was flying on fentanyl.”
“It was like a ghost town, you know, no one there. And then Neil called out. I was so high I could have been anywhere.”
Dempsey is still waiting for the accursed kidney stone to pass. “Today might be the lucky day,” he says. Finn has a thought: “Monday night, 8pm, live at the Infinity Sessions.”
The Infinity Sessions invites comparisons with the likes of the BBC’s Later with Jools Holland, or NPR’s Tiny Desk, or Live on KEXP. Finn has enjoyed appearing on many such things, whether with Crowded House or other projects. If there’s something that sets the Infinity Sessions apart, he says, it’s that participants don’t feel they’re “operating in someone’s idiom … What feels a little bit different about this is that it has a more organic, for want of a better word, feeling – it doesn’t feel like there’s any gatekeepers in there. You can just put out whatever you feel like you can pull off.”
Given there is no outside funding to speak of – though Finn does say he is open to the idea of a “very benevolent sponsor” – the project Finn calls “fully indulgent” and a “ridiculous idea” is also, I suggest, one of real generosity. “I’ve got some resources that I can use,” he says. “I’ve wasted a lot of money on much less exciting things over the years … I’d love to see it grow – we’ve had pretty high aspirations for how good it might be.” He hopes to continue hosting visiting artists at the same time as elevating New Zealand work. “If you can present some of the stuff that you really believe in, and give it its best possible chance of looking and sounding amazing, then that is good just for the feeling of general confidence that, you know, New Zealand is the place to be.”
Is there some sense, too, what with the seemingly ubiquitous volatility of the world, the foreboding, the eternal doomscroll, that live music and a connection with an audience – whether in the flesh or down the wire – is more necessary than ever? “Without wanting to aggrandise what we’re doing, because it has to maintain humility at its core or it’s probably doomed, my response to, what can I do, and I sense everybody we know is walking around going what can we do, is to do what you are good at with the best possible spirit and outcomes in mind, and that it can in a small way shift the needle,” says Finn.
“We live such separate lives now. Although everyone is more connected than they’ve ever been, to everything at once, the actual sense of community is rare. Live music is your connection, feeling the same thing as other people in the room, sensing your humanity among other people.”
He looks at it this way: “Just give every single performance you ever do, and every rehearsal, your absolute best chance of being the best thing it can be. And then there’s just a possibility that somebody in that room is going to be elevated and transported and they’ll carry something good into the next thing that they do. And I still believe that that’s the only real chance you have of affecting anything. So if you don’t, underneath the whole process of what you’re doing, have some kind of belief that you’re trying to make the world a better place then –” He tries another way in: “Music is pretty mysterious … I’ve heard people say, well, music is never going to change the world, but I think it can. I reckon we only know the half of it.”
