Be Mine Tonight (1999)
(Th' Dudes 1979, re-recorded for Overnight Success):
There was something special about that, especially as it was probably one of the first songs I wrote and it seems a whole lot longer than 20 years ago. I just wanted to get a big E-B thing happening, that kind of Byrds-y drone. Lyrically it was just whatever was happening at the time - smoking pot listening to my record collection, trying desperately to figure out how you talk to women. I guess it's the sound of sexual frustration and the Catholic variety tends to be more angst-ridden than the rest. But I think it's still got bells on it so that is probably why we went for it again.

Devil You Know (1982) 

Outlook for Thursday (1983)    
Oh, I can't listen to the original because it's structured all wrong. I was thinking of re-editing it. But if I had started working on it that would have turned into something else ... It's a pretty stupid song. We were having too much of a good time to figure what was going on. After it went off here we came over to follow up the success of it and do a bit of a tour to hopefully drag in some dollars and that is when the [Queen St] riot happened and the whole thing blew up. So Outlook for Thursday was among that.

Magic (1984) 

Whaling (1984)     
The thing about Whaling is I haven't recorded it properly yet. I actually did a version with [producer] Mitchell Froom which was one guitar, bass and drums and maybe a squeeze box. I've got to dig that out at some stage. It's a pretty concise version without all the histrionics and the bells and whistles. I kind of got the chord progression from listening to that English band The Beat. They had a song called "Save It for Later". I really loved that and thought, 'Let's just slow that down a little.' It was one of those songs that wrote itself because I didn't have to refer to an instrument. It was a very late night in the Barclay Hotel in Kings Cross. A broke band on 70 cents a day, which brought us a bucket of chips by the time we had bludged our drinks and fags. It was one of those songs where it took at least 10 years to get back to writing that well.

Guilty (1984)   

Slice of Heaven (1986)   

Oughta Be In Love (1986)  

Loyal (1988)     
That is one of those ones which has gone on to become something else. I get people coming up saying, 'I played that at a wedding ... oh, we played that at the birth ... and the funeral' - a lot of funerals, that one. That's scary but it's turned into something else on stage because it's different every night. Just like Whaling is and probably Beside You will be like that, too - one of those songs that will just stay in the set forever.

Love You Like I Should (1988) 
The lyric from 'Love You Like I Should' is directly related to another song, 'I Wanna Know You,' (Loyal, 1988) which is about television and how it numbs you. More and more I find it strikingly abhorrent, and that's why I'm much more selective, media-wise: the untruths coming down caused by the media barons and oligarchs.

Belle of the Ball (1993)    
I had it for a while and it wasn't completely there... the last thing I wanted was another sweet one. It finally ended up on the tape the right way - had I done it earlier, it would have been too sweet. Now it's got a mixture of loss as well as a love song aspect.
As soon as I started with [Bruce Thomas and Pete Thomas], it just dovetailed. Then Mitchell put another piano on the one I had played - he sort of tracked what I had played and threw in a few flourishes. It was like The Fabulous Baker Boys.

Lament for the Numb (1993)
That's one of the Catholic songs. Basically it became apparent to me that I had experienced a whole lot of things and hadn't really experienced them. From hiding behind mum's apron strings to being half-cut through something gigantically important. I always felt that I had been disinfranchised from an experience, so it's a song just lamenting that. Living but not living. Not really experiencing  anything with any sort of depth.

Language (1994)   
I first had the idea for Language while living in a teensy apartment in Sydney. Some schoolkids were walking by outside, as I was strumming through the song I got the chorus and half a verse together and suddenly I heard shouted out up through the bushes 'Good Song, Good Song'.
It's a question of being misunderstood really. There were days when I just couldn't be bothered communicating, which is a mistake because you just end up being further away from the people who care about you.
I used to do Language rather slickly with an acoustic guitar, and it only ever worked solo. With the band it somehow sounded a little bland. We managed to wrestle it a bit and put a lot of energy into it, and I'm extremely happy with the result. It was an extremely energetic session, we had a few people around and the band was fresh. Actually the engineer who recorded it, Paul Streekstra, he had his work cut out for him because the energy flowing around the room was just nuts, and he was going nuts too. He did an eighteen hour session on it one day, and there were all these people just lying around exhausted after it, and Neil Finn and I were twanging away on acoustics, coming up with other stuff.

Naked Flame (1994) 
It has a lot to do with sex, and the result of it, and that's quite an internal song, but it's full of imagery as well. We knew we had to have that horrible aaarrgghh sound. It was sort of a whining feedback, something quite nasty. It is towards the end of the song. It just sort of growls away there. You put a power screwdriver on near an electric guitar, and the guitar will just go crazy, make all these bizarre noises. Perfect accompaniment for the weaving, exotic Naked Flame.

Hanging in the Wire (1998)
The title image is of a soldier seeing his buddy on the perimeter wire, hanging there, not being able to do anything about it. It's a harsh image, but it doesn't carry on. It's a reassurance song, a buddy song. What captured me was the middle eight section, it's like a song within a song. I had fun with the arrangement. It needed to be fairly joyous: out of the dark images you get all sorts of things. Cole Porter's 'I Get a Kick Out of You' gave me the violin line around the melody. There's a bit of Mott the Hoople about the guitar riff.

Beside You (1998)  
On the last album [The Islander] it was one of those songs that Tom Waits calls 'a red-haired stepchild,' because it was so simple but it was really hard to get where the feel would come from. It took a long time to get that to come around but it goes down extraordinarily well live.

Hallelujah Song (1998)
That started as a story, I didn't even know what I was going to do with it. I kind of knew it would be a song. It struck me that doing a vaguely gospel backing would keep you involved in the story. All the lyrics happened in one night, sitting in front of the computer telling a story. That's how it started. I had all sorts of chords and arrangements, but thought that narrative was the main thing and I didn't need to mess around with it too much. To do a pastiche gospel thing wouldn't have been right: backing singers, horns, that Leon Russell soul thing. It's an exorcism of dealing with Catholicism, the imagery we've all got. Look what these people do in the name of God. And this is part of me. But you don't have to believe all that stuff to be able to express what it's doing to your heart. That was my way of dealing with it as a fable or psalm. That may mortify traditional Catholics, but it's good to give it an airing. It's just a story, after all.

Madeleine Avenue (1999)
It was just over the hill, straight out of Once Were Warriors. Calling it 'the street of shame' was insulting: it was a place where people lived and died.