ONE NIL TO NEIL

Mix Pearl Jam, Crowded House, The Smiths & Radiohead & you get a bona-fide supergroup.

It’s like stumbling into your own birthday party - you don’t know where to look first. Centre stage is Neil Finn, hair greying but still a hint of that haphazard Crowded House quiff, a wise-cracking ringleader for the musical circus around him. On his right, the almost impossibly tall Ed O’Brien from Radiohead. To his left, the long-lost British guitar hero Johnny Marr, wearing a shaggy Liam Gallagher haircut. Ponytailed bass player Sebastian Steinberg, from New York avant-garde rock group Soul Coughing, alternates between upright & electric bass. Occasionally Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam takes to the stage, throwing himself at the microphone. At the rear, multi-instrumentalist Lisa Germano & Radiohead’s drummer Phil Selway lurk in the shadows.

Welcome to Neil Finn’s "Seven Worlds Collide", a five-night run in New Zealand’s recently renovated St James Theatre. It’s much more than a launch for the former Crowded House leader’s solo album. One Nil, his second here since the band’s demise. Here for one week only, is a catch-them-while-you-can supergroup.

The five shows have been preceded by four days of 12-hour rehearsals in a barn at Karekare, the wave-swept west Auckland village where Jane Campion’s The Piano was filmed. It’s a rushed itinerary - Johnny Marr only managed to make it for a day of rehearsals & there were 40 songs to learn, from Crowded House classics to songs on One Nil to dusty old Split Enz tunes.

But any rough edges have been smoothed out by the time the band hits the stage for this fifth gig after Finn’s solo opening gesture of Crowded House’s plaintive anthem, "When you Come". What follows is three-and-a-half hours of the stuff that makes you fall in love with your record collection all over again.

Sometimes, it’s almost too much. On "Suffer Never", the gritty highlight from 1995’s Finn album, Finn, Ed O’Brien turns the song into a slice of apocalyptic guitar meltdown. And Vedder’s rush through Pearl Jam’s own live favourite, "Better Man", sees Phil Selway pounding the drumkit in a manner he hasn’t needed to do in Radiohead for a long time.

When Marr start into the Smiths’ classic "There Is a Light", with Neil Finn managing a sweeter approximation of Morrisey’s drone, the excitement is intense. Two hours later, the impossible happens; after mumbling that he hasn’t played the song for a while, Marr begins the pulsating opening to "How Soon Is Now". O’Brien, who’ll later drunkenly gush in abackroom bar that Marr is one of the reasons he picked up a guitar, adds the spine-tingling distortion. And when Neil’s son, Liam, takes to the stage with his band, Betchadupa, for the Split enz classics "I Got You", "History Never Repeats" & "I see Red", it’s with Vedder singing them, careering around the stage to songs that have become staples at every beach barbecue & Saturday night party in New Zealand for the last 20 years. A few days after the gig, Finn says the moment he saw Liam playing "I Got You" was the highlight of the week, especially as he’d had to calm his son’s nerves before he hit the stage. "It was magic for me, here’s a song I‘d written before Liam was born, and there’s his band playing it, rocking up a storm".

Finn’s plan for the extravaganza came late last year: he & O’Brien had been longtime friends since meeting at a festival in the Crowded House days, Germano & Steinberg had played on One Nil & Johnny Marr & Finn had met at Linda McCartney’s memorial concert in 1998. Vedder has gone on record as saying Split Enz made his life bearable as amixed-up kid in California.

Finn says: We all felt really moved by the week, because we proved that with a really strong will you can become a band. The fact that it was five nights was a great thing because it meant that we could develop - it wasn’t a one-off all-star occasion".

It’s not often you can find seven such strong personalities playing on a stage & giving each other room, and that’s not lost on the man behind it all. It was, he says, fondly, five nights of "charms & delights".

"Ed was just expressing that what he liked about this was that it had a certain joyfulness about it."

He’s not joking. A few hours after the last gig ends, Ed O’Brien is what you could adequately describe as emotional at the after-show party, still coming down to earth after the week. "When Neil played that last note, we were all sat on the edge of the stage" he says. "and we thought, "oh no, it’s over".