When Crowded House’s Neil Finn stepped in to replace Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist and songwriter Lyndsey Buckingham in 2018, the unlikely pairing soon made perfect sense, and enabled the band to perform their final crowd-pleasing An Evening With Fleetwood Mac world tour.
With Buckingham forced out of the band due to a refusal to tour and fractured band relations, frontman Finn proved to be a fitting stand-in during the 88-gig stretch, appearing alongside legendary band members Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and John McVie and Mick Fleetwood plus Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ guitarist Mike Campbell.
However, speaking to the Broken Record podcast, Finn has revealed that his joining the band may not have been the seamless fix that everyone perceived.
“It was an amazing experience. Like stepping into another life for a while. So unexpected… I knew Mick well enough to know that I would have a good time but learning somebody else's songs and the way they put songs together is really fascinating," Finn explains.
"Getting deep inside it… Because you think you know the way that songs work, but then when you actually learn them, you find that there's more going on than you realised.
“And they're harder to learn other people's songs too, the little nuances that they add. Like Go Your Own Way… Learning it is more difficult than you think. Somehow they’re hard.”
And, faced with either a ruinous change of key or ruinous damage to Finn’s voice across the tour, one song had to bite the dust.
“Certainly, Monday Morning,” Finn fingers. “It’s quite a strange song and a weird lyric as well. There’s so much singing in it! It's really high and it's very hard to sing because there's no gaps in the vocal.
“In the end I had to say I don’t think I can do that one unless we drop the key quite a bit and we stopped doing it. I was blowing my voice out every night trying to do it. If I’d have been doing it myself, I would have created space somewhere, so I could get a breath!”
Commenting on what makes Mac so great, Finn has his own take: “Classic bands are a result of having five distinctive personalities musically – and something about that being undeniable and unreplaceable… Having said that, I did replace Lynsey…” observes Finn…
And what of stepping into such famous shoes? Did Finn get any endorsement from Buckingham before taking his place? “I’ve not met him, no,” says Finn. “But I have a feeling we’d probably get along just fine. I know he wasn’t happy about the situation, but I don’t think he would have blamed me for it. I would hope at some point he might have thought ‘Well, at least someone who can write a good song has taken my part.’”
Finn is now of course back with Crowded House and the band are currently on tour with the UK leg kicking off this Sunday, 6th October.
