Crowded House Content With Current Fame

Since its June release, Crowded House's new album 'Intriguer' has earned great reviews but frontman Neil Finn doesn't expect the record to repeat the success of the band's '80s heyday, when smash singles like 'Don't Dream It's Over' propelled the group to Top 10 status.

"I don't have expectations that it's going to be as big as it used to be," Finn admits to Spinner. "We had a peak back in the '80s commercially that would be probably not something to base any assessment on."

Finn is fine with that, thank you, since he is quite content with where Crowded House is now. "It's more to do with maybe finding yourself in a room of a thousand or 2,000 people -- if they're singing songs back to you and they're interested in what you're doing now then you couldn't really get better than that," he says.

Besides, Finn is a believer in letting the music find an audience, leaving the chart-topping debuts to superstars. "Sometimes they burst out of the blocks, if you're Beyonce or something," he says, "but with a band like ours, you need to hear it a few times. With the first Crowded House it was six months before anybody took any notice of that record, so I try to keep a long-term view on it."

If anybody should understand that, it's Finn, who admits it also takes him a while to full judge a Crowded House album. "It always helps us and our records to let some time pass in terms of evaluating them," he says. "I'm not sure when I've finished a record how it all shapes up."

But he is at least loving the songs live. "Well, I'm only listening to ['Igniter'] on live recordings at the moment because we've been recording every show. We listen to them to get an idea of how we're playing," he says. "It's pretty exciting; they're the ones I like listening to most on the tapes, so I think the songs are holding up really well."

Eventually, he'll sit down with the album. "I don't really listen to the album that much at the moment because we're still so much in the midst of it," he says, "but I think a year from now I'll probably have a listen to it."