When Crowded House step on to the stage at Musgrave Park, in Cork, next month, it will be almost 33 years after their first Irish gig, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Neil Finn remembers one part of that night in 1991 very well: a man in the audience came up on to the stage and proposed to his girlfriend. “This is why we like little accidents, because it makes you remember them,” he says from his home in New Zealand.
“We had a brilliant night. It was a midnight show or something.” His bandmate Nick Seymour, who’s based in Sligo – he’s speaking from his “man cave” garden studio – confirms Finn’s account.
“Yeah, they had a theatrical show during the evening; then they put on a gig after midnight.” (The Midnight at the Olympia phenomenon started that year.) As part of their encore at the Olympia, Crowded House sang Van Morrison’s Irish Heartbeat, a favourite of Finn’s mother, Mary, who left Co Limerick for New Zealand as a child.
“It became very popular at our family gatherings,” Finn says. “My mother always asked for it, so my brother [Tim] and I used to perform it.” Crowded House’s Irish thread runs deep.
Seymour, who’s originally from Melbourne, bought an apartment on Exchequer Street, in the middle of Dublin, in 1994, and has been an Irish citizen since 2008. They’re more Irish than Australasian these days, he says. “The only person now in Crowded House that doesn’t have Irish citizenship is Mitchell Froom [the band’s Ameri.
