I’ll be your little boy running with that egg on his spoon
![[cover art of Crowded House's first album]](https://www.musicandmeaning.com/site/images/music/crowdedhouse-ch.jpg "Cover art for Crowded House's self-titled album, painted by Nicholas Seymour")
I read the news about Paul Hester‘s suicide last night on MetaFilter and couldn’t believe it. He was probably best known worldwide as the drummer for the Neil Finn-songwriting-driven band Crowded House, one of my all-time favorite groups.
I was just listening to the album Woodface for the gazillionth time the other day. It’s a great CD — my favorite CH album, and I highly recommend it. Hester wrote perhaps one of the most fun tracks, "Italian Plastic." The title for this entry is a line from his wonderful lyrics. He also wrote/co-wrote a few other songs during the band’s history.
If you’re not too familiar with the band but you at least have its self-titled debut album (i.e. the one with "Don’t Dream It’s Over" as shown here), Paul Hester is the winged man flying away on the album cover art (painted by the third core Crowded House member, bassist Nicholas Seymour).
I’m going to listen to some Crowded House now.
Jennifer, it’s so wierd to see someone outside Australia note Paul’s tragedy.
All his mates here are saying “but we thought he was doing so well!”. Obviously not.
Nick Seymour’s brother, Mark (lead vocals/guitar/writer for Hunters and Collectors) has some amazing songs you might also appreciate. Some are undeniably similar to Crowded House’s sound, which I’m sure is purely osmotic!
If you’re interested, I can forward some samples…
Paul will be missed.
I don’t know why CH never really got to superstardom status over here. Maybe because their songs were actually better and more interesting than standard pop fare. 🙂 I do know that many of my musically discerning friends are big CH fans — in fact, I got back into the band years ago because of one of my friends. Alas, I never got to see a live performance, but I am so glad that Paul’s playing is preserved on the records.
Re: Mark Seymour. Thanks for the tip. I just found the Mark Seymour site via Google and bookmarked it for future listening, but anything else you can point out would be great.