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Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway play Auckland with Neil Finn and Johnny Marr
Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway played the last of five nights at the St James Theatre in Auckland on Friday, in the guest band Neil Finn put together under the name Seven Worlds Collide. On the closing night Johnny Marr, formerly of the Smiths, started “How Soon Is Now”, saying he had not played it for a while, and it was O'Brien who added the distortion. Afterwards, in a backroom bar and a little drunk, O'Brien said Marr is one of the reasons he picked up a guitar.
Finn, formerly the leader of Crowded House, wrote to musicians he admired and asked them to play, and the shows launched his new solo album, One Nil, due in Britain on Parlophone on 9 April. He and O'Brien have been friends since they met at a European festival in the Crowded House days, when Radiohead had just signed to Parlophone. NME confirmed the lineup in March, after February's report had the two of them playing in late February.
The band rehearsed for four days, 12 hours a day, in a barn at Karekare on Auckland's west coast, learning about 40 songs from Crowded House, Split Enz and One Nil. Marr arrived in time for one day of it. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam came on for part of each night.
Stephen Dowling, reviewing the run for The Observer, says Selway hit the drums on Pearl Jam's “Better Man” far harder than Radiohead's music has asked of him for years, and that O'Brien turned “Suffer Never”, from the Finn brothers' 1995 album, into a wall of guitar noise. Finn sang the Smiths' “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” with Marr playing it.
The last night ran about three and a half hours. Finn's son Liam's band, Betchadupa, came on to play Split Enz songs with Vedder singing; Finn later called seeing Liam play “I Got You” the highlight of his week.
We all felt really moved by the week, because we proved that with a really strong will you can become a band.
Neil Finn1
When Neil played that last note, we were all sat on the edge of the stage, and we thought, “Oh no, it's over”.
Ed O'Brien1