Crowded House, Squeeze reunite for summer

updated 8:18 p.m. ET July 20, 2007

NEW YORK - The Police and Genesis are the rock reunions getting most of the attention this summer. Two other bands with smaller but rabid followings — Crowded House and Squeeze — are also getting back together after taking dramatically different paths.

Squeeze’s partial reunion is an exercise in nostalgia and a business calculation. Crowded House is trying to make a mark with new music after its two surviving original members bonded again over the death of their drummer.

Crowded House’s new CD comes less than a year after release of a DVD and disc of the band’s 1996 farewell concert before hundreds of thousands of fans outside of the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

You say goodbye, we say hello?

Drummer committed suicide
The melodic pop trio from New Zealand was an instant sensation with hits like “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and “Something So Strong” in 1987. It was a peak they never matched in the United States, although they had a more consistent popularity in other parts of the world.

Crowded House began unraveling when drummer Paul Hester quit in 1993. Drummers are in the background of many bands, but it was hard to miss Hester’s outsized personality — in case you did, he’d leave his kit to perform handstands across the stage. Chief songwriter Neil Finn and bassist Nick Seymour dissolved the band a few years later.

Hester committed suicide in 2005. Such tragedies are always hard to explain, but Finn does not feel the lack of the band in Hester’s life had anything to do with it. Hester even knew before he died that the three men might work together again.

New album full of memories
Finn and Seymour began writing the next year, and the new CD they made, “Time on Earth,” is suffused with the memory of Hester and the fragility of life.

It was only after the songs were together that Finn and Seymour decided that it felt like Crowded House again. Guitarist Mark Hart, who had joined the one-time trio in 1992, was invited back. Former Beck drummer Matt Sherrod came onboard, in part because Finn liked the freshness of someone who knew less about Crowded House than any of the others who auditioned.

In the cases of both Crowded House and Squeeze, age melted away some of the annoyances that had broken them apart.

“I just feel like being in a band again,” Finn said. “It is true that more tolerance and appreciation of difference now exists. When we were younger we wanted each other to be like ourselves but now we realize with a band it’s the difference that creates the interest.”

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