There is nothing in Neil Finn's elegant, wistful song craft that suggests an insurrectionary spirit. And yet there he stood on the stage of the Phoenix Concert Theatre Monday night urging the audience to shed its inhibitions, at one point even goading fans into a symbolic act of disobedience.

About halfway through his two-hour set, the 44-year-old New Zealander fixed his gaze on a string of banners draped around the balcony promoting a Toronto radio station that purports to represent the cutting edge of contemporary rock.

"Do they play my music?" Finn asked.

"Noooooo!" came the chorus from the packed house.

"Then tear the banners down."

As causes go, Finn allowed that it paled in comparison to "stopping the war in Iraq." But, he said, it was all he had to work with at the moment.

"Does anyone here like just one kind of music?" Finn continued. "I didn't think so. We don't like being segmented into those radio formats. It's crap."

While no one was quick to heed Finn's call, most of the promotional banners, including one for a credit card company, eventually came down. It wasn't the dismantling of the Berlin Wall or anything, but it did have a liberating effect.

Soon patrons standing at the front were responding to Finn's invitation to get up on stage and dance. One guy even launched into a strip tease.

"I'm not sure what we've unleashed here," Finn marvelled. "I wasn't expecting underpants."

It wasn't all mischief and mayhem. Finn has clocked more than a quarter century as a superior pop tunesmith, formerly with his brother Tim in Split Enz and Crowded House and for the past five years as a solo artist. And a fair sampling of that output was in evidence Monday.

Finn and his band — the roster of accompanists ranging from three to five — opened with "Now We're Getting Somewhere" from Crowded House's 1986 debut, before turning the clock abruptly ahead to "Wherever You Are" from last year's One All.

That disc and Finn's earlier solo effort, Try Whistling This, provided the bulwark of the set, including "Driving Me Mad," "Human Kindness," "Sinner" and "She Will Have Her Way." Briefly surrendering the guitar, he sat himself at the keyboard for "Faster Than Light."

Old 97's frontman Rhett Miller, who opened the show with a rousing acoustic set culled largely from his current solo album, The Instigator, returned to the stage to sing harmony on the Crowded House rarity "Lester," a song Finn wrote for his dog. Finn also plumbed the catalogue for "Pineapple Head," saving "Weather With You" for the sing-along encore.

That signature Crowded House hit was preceded by a lovely cover of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," which Finn and former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr performed on last year's live set 7 World's Collide. By that point, Finn's little radio revolt had long since subsided. But the attendant sense of community still held sway.