Don’t Dream It’s Over: The Remarkable Life Of Neil Finn
★★★
Jeff Apter
JAWBONE. £16.95
No-frills account of Crowded House leader’s saga.
Neil Finn joined and revitalised Split Enz as a teenager, built the dearly loved Crowded House and enjoyed a late-career busman’s holiday as Fleetwood Mac’s unlikeliest member since Dave Walker. Along the way, he has stayed married to the same woman since 1982, while his relationship with older brother Tim would fascinate a platoon of psychologists. There’s a great book somewhere, but for all that it’s a brisk and clear trot through the years, Jeff Apter’s take on this “remarkable” life is too unremarkable to compensate for the absence of access. Pivotal events in Neil’s life and career, such as sacking Tim from Crowded House mid-tour, are dispensed with in the perfunctory fashion given to his under-estimation of the difficulty of maintaining tennis courts. Worse, beneath the clichés (“egos were checked at the door”), since everything Finn has touched has, apparently, been superlative, there’s no critical appraisal to distinguish One Nil from Woodface.