What’s immediately apparent upon hearing The Pajama Club’s first single, ‘Tell Me What You Want’, is a prominent, pulsing rhythm section. What’s immediately apparent upon seeing the video clip for said single is that Neil Finn is in the band, with the gentlest grin on his face in the very first frame. And he’s not the only one; what stands out about this clip is that all of the band members seem incredibly chipper about it all, and as Tone Deaf’s Dunja Nedic found out from Finn himself, they pretty much are.
‘We’re just trying to work out how serious to be about it, because we don’t want to make it less fun,’ says Finn of the apparently haphazard twists and turns that have led to a lineup including his wife, Sharon Finn, as well as Sean Donnelly and The Grates’ former drummer, Alana Skyring, alongside him.
The Pajama Club is both a musical project and band name that inadvertently evolved from nightwear, as Neil and Sharon’s longstanding attractions to the drums and the bass respectively led them to make music together at home. Neil describes that it was only when they started listening back to their creations and dancing along to them that they started to consider whether the sounds might make it out of the four walls of their home music room.
‘We found ourselves getting excited listening to it…I always record things that go on in my music room so we had these reasonably good tapes in a great sounding room,’ Finn explains. ‘We put them on just to have a listen to what we’d done and found ourselves jiggin’ around the lounge room to them, [they] just had something enjoyable and charming about them.
‘The beginning of [the band], the genesis of it, was very much about those late night jams and it still carries through.’
In the time since that very first jam, out of which ‘Tell Me What You Want’ was incidentally written, the Finns played their tapes to Sean Donnelly, who the male Finn had recently worked with.
‘He was kind of just around, funnily enough!’ Finn laughs. ‘We played him the stuff, he loved what he heard just as rhythm tracks, and it just seemed like on an instinct we should ask him to be a collaborator. He went away and immediately came up with a great keyboard line on the first song (‘Tell Me What You Want’), which enabled us to get an immediate idea for vocals. It just had a naturalness about it.’
Although The Pajama Club has seemingly been a series of happy collisions, Finn is also open about the contradiction that has accompanied him throughout his career.
‘It’s a complex thing because every artist has probably an unbelievable amount of self-criticism and at the same time, inevitably and necessarily, a lot of ego as well…you have to have that to actually think it’s worth finishing something. But it’s tinged with the contradictory feelings of uselessness and that lack of worth when you can’t do it properly or you fumble or you feel flawed, but it’s a very compulsive thing.
‘What’s nice about this album and this band is that it is significantly different to what I normally do, you know, there’s similarities in some places but there’s also some brand new things and in some ways it feels a little more open-ended and loose and not as buttoned-up, which I like.’
It becomes very clear in talking about the project with Finn that even he and Sharon are unsure about where it’s all going. But although the pyjamas themselves are nowhere to be seen on stage with The Pajama Club, it seems that Finn is unquestionably pro-pyjama.
‘They’re probably due for a comeback, pyjamas, they are nice to wear to bed,’ he considers. ‘There’s a lot to be said for them.’
