Something to watch tonight: Thursday 23 January

7 Worlds Collide (Casserly, 2001)

A month ago, I read this piece by loc­al music journ­al­ist and friend of F&S, Chris Schulz, about the sad state of the St. James Theatre in Auckland.

In short, over the past dec­ades, this beau­ti­ful inner-city ven­ue has fallen into increas­ing dis­repair and the cur­rent may­or of Auckland appears to be on a mis­sion to sab­ot­age any attempts at restoration.

I lived in Auckland from 1996 to 2000 and the St. James was still an import­ant work­ing ven­ue at the time. I was work­ing for a tick­et­ing agency and we would get free tick­ets to shows occa­sion­ally which is why I’m sure I remem­ber watch­ing Michael Barrymore* be very funny there dur­ing that peri­od where he was liv­ing in New Zealand.

While the Civic was being refur­bished, the St. James was also the main ven­ue for the New Zealand International Film Festival and I recall many great screen­ings there, includ­ing my first watch of Citizen Kane on the big screen.

In Chris’ art­icle, he men­tioned Neil Finn’s fam­ous 7 Worlds Collide series of con­certs there in 2001, and the new owner’s for­lorn hope that such an event might be recre­ated in the new ven­ue. We should live so long.

But that encour­aged me to see if the video of Finn’s con­cert was avail­able online any­where. The CD was a staple of many New Zealand house­holds for a long while and I still have that (and the DVD which fea­tured nine addi­tion­al tracks).

7 Worlds Collide was the first major example of Finn using his remark­able address book to cre­ate a super­group of sorts and he per­suaded Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway (from Radiohead), Lisa Germano, Johnny Marr, Sebastian Steinberg (Soul Coughing), Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) and vari­ous mem­bers of the Finn fam­ily to spend a week out at the beach in Piha rehears­ing a bunch of Finn, Crowded House and Split Enz songs, and then play them in a series of gigs at the St. James.

When I remin­isced about this online the oth­er day, a num­ber of friends told me they had been at one or oth­er of those concerts.

Pre-Christmas, when I was plan­ning this update, I was sure I’d seen that this was avail­able on Prime Video but now I can only find the 2009 edi­tion (which I am less famil­i­ar with and less fond of).

Rewatching the DVD, I was thrilled at how ter­rif­ic it soun­ded and how good it looked (in a let­ter­boxed 4:3 present­a­tion of the ori­gin­al stand­ard defin­i­tion video, my Blu-ray play­er blew it up to look very fine indeed – mod­ern gear is good!).

There does appear to be a playl­ist of clips from the show on YouTube which is in now way as good an exper­i­ence as the DVD (or watch­ing it live!) but it’s the best I can offer at the moment.

I’ll high­light one track, a song that nev­er fails to give me pause when it shows up in my iTunes shuffle It’s a song that at the time hadn’t been recor­ded by Neil and Tim Finn but they prom­ised it was to be on their next album due in 2002. That album didn’t arrive until 2004 (Everyone Is Here):

(Paying sub­scribers get some bonus mater­i­al after the paywall.)

Where to watch 7 Worlds Collide

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Not cur­rently avail­able online

The DVD is still avail­able used from eBay, TradeMe or oth­er dealers.

Bonus material

From Eddie Rayner’s YouTube chan­nel, here’s the 2013 ENZSO ver­sion of “Edible Flowers” (sung by Jackie Thomas):

And from 2015, Neil Finn and strings at Auckland Town Hall per­form­ing the same song (recor­ded and mixed by RNZ’s André Upston):

And finally, the Finn Brothers video from Everyone Is Here:

Nothing beats that ori­gin­al 7 Worlds Collide ver­sion, though. Still spine chilling.