Barely a day goes by when Peter Green doesn’t think about his friend Paul Hester. As the official archivist for Crowded House and Split Enz, he is, literally – to quote a Hester lyric – “walking into rooms full of you”. 

Peter and Mark Goulding have now gathered all their archives to produce a moving documentary that marks the 20th anniversary of the artist’s passing: HESSIE (A Tribute To Paul Hester). 

In addition to never-before-seen photos and footage of Crowded House on the tour bus, the doco features new interviews with Paul’s sister Carolyn, Split Enz’s Noel Crombie, Crowded House’s Mark Hart, as well as many of Paul’s other musical collaborators, including Andrew McSweeney, and Kevin Garant from Largest Living Things. 

When a friend from the ABC alerted me to Paul’s passing in 2005, I immediately thought of an ex-girlfriend, Therese. Paul Hester was the first pop star she truly loved. “I was totally besotted,” she told me. “He had a sharp wit and this manic energy that could really lift your spirits. I couldn’t get enough of him.” 

Therese and her best friend Katie pinched Paul’s drumsticks and towel after a Rock Arena taping at the ABC in Elsternwick. The two 13-year-old girls then waited for him outside the studio. “When he appeared, we pounced on the poor guy with albums and posters and a texta. He defaced our treasured possessions, drawing moustaches and fangs on Neil and Nick’s faces.”

Paul was happy to pose for photos with the duo. “He poked silly faces, cracked gags, cuddled us, and called us by our names. We walked him to his car, and he waved madly as he drove away.”

Before the drummer departed, the starstruck teen gave him a letter. A few weeks later, an envelope landed in Therese’s letterbox. It was from Paul. “My hands shook as I opened it,” she recalls. “I thought maybe it was a joke, and there were hidden cameras in my room. Amazingly, it wasn’t.”

Paul said he would never forget “you two nutters”. He also broke the news that Don’t Dream It’s Over had bulleted to number 44 on the Billboard charts, and the band’s album had gone gold. “I use the gold record as a breakfast tray,” he wrote. “It’s perfect!”

He urged Therese not to eat “too much sugar” and made her promise that her diet would be “well balanced with plenty of fresh fruit and veggies”. 

Paul concluded his letter: “We’re off to America soon. Anything could happen!”

Sadly, Paul Hester was not built for the touring life. The relentless promotion wore him down, and he missed his family and friends in Melbourne. He often told his mates he never wanted to leave his Melways page. “Being in a band takes you away all the time,” Paul lamented. “You’re always leaving places.”

Paul quit Crowded House three hours before a gig in Atlanta in the middle of their 1994 tour, telling Neil Finn: “Every day is a winding road.”

Two years later, that tour’s support act, Sheryl Crow, released a single called Everyday Is A Winding Road, featuring Neil Finn on backing vocals. “He [Paul] inspired the song because he was such a character and so full of life,” Crow explained. “It’s basically about the search for the meaning of life.”

The night of the Atlanta gig, Neil Finn told Paul’s girlfriend, Mardi: “I don’t feel an ounce of anger in my body. I just feel love.”

Crowded House was never quite the same without Paul Hester. “I couldn’t resolve in my head the dilemma on how to continue without Paul,” Neil admitted, “because there was something not quite as good about the way we sounded.”

At the start of the ’80s, Paul had been the drummer in the Sydney band Deckchairs Overboard, which evolved out of a Melbourne group called The Cheks. Paul shared a house in North Sydney with Deborah Conway, then the singer in Do-Re-Mi.

“Something strange happened and my dear housemate suddenly and without warning became my lover,” Conway confides in her memoir Book of Life. “It was a wild time; certainties drifted into uncertainties and lovely liminal spaces appeared beneath what the day before had been solid ground.”

Rob Hirst got Paul the drumming gig in Split Enz. “Yes, Rob was in Midnight Oil, but everyone was connected.”

When the Enz ended, Paul remained with Neil Finn as they created Crowded House. “By then,” Deborah Conway reflects, “our long-distance relationship was revealing irreconcilable schisms: I was happy when I was with him, and content when I wasn’t; he missed me when I wasn’t there and found me suffocating when I was. We called it a day while we could still stay friends.”

Do-Re-Mi’s A&R manager, Bruce Butler, believes that Deborah Conway wrote Man Overboard about Paul.

Hester and Conway would reunite for the underrated Ultrasound album in 1995.

Conway says Ultrasound “stands as a favourite album for me: inventive, relaxed, sonically and compositionally adventurous”, though she can’t listen to it without thinking of Paul, “my dear friend, who became my lover and then became my friend again, an integral part of my most formative years.

“Through that summer of content, Paul had tamed his demons to fuel his creative output, but 10 years later, those demons got the better of him.”

When Paul died, I reminisced with a radio mate about all the wonderful interviews we’d done with him over the years.

“It was the only time you were happy when you heard you were interviewing the drummer,” my mate laughed.

Peter Green and Mark Goulding shared many good times with their friend. “Those fun moments, like lemon fights with him and his kids,” smiles Peter, who was the founder of the legendary Split Enz fan club Frenz of the Enz. 

Peter also fondly recalls being on tour “with Hessie ‘bus jogging’ while trying to eat watermelon, [his] fine art of being brutally honest, and sharing toasted cheese sandwiches after a gig in some remote part of America while watching Aussie basketball on VHS tapes sent from home.” 

Peter and Mark also remain in awe of how creative their friend was, “and sometimes annoyed that the world never got to hear some amazing songs”.

A Hester rarity, Walking Into Rooms, provided the poignant soundtrack to a teaser for the documentary.

One line in Walking Into Rooms always brings a smile to Peter Green’s face: “Some surfers arrive before they get tubed.”

“That was penned many years before when Paul and myself had a little road trip to Byron Bay. I had Paul’s black boogie board and he had a new gold one, and we thought we’d show the local surfers how shit-hot we were. And we failed; missed the wave totally. Paul scrawled down that line at the beach while we sat around a campfire.”

Peter and Paul would have a cup of tea every Thursday and were due to catch up two days after he died. “None of us can understand his death,” Peter says sadly.

Paul Hester died on March 26, 2005. He was 46.

A month before his passing, Paul had filmed an episode of RocKwiz at the Espy. He was in fine form. The following day, I sent an email to the RocKwiz producers that said simply: “Great stuff last night. I reckon the Paul Hester episode is gonna be the best yet.”

Paul had also just played on Sophie Koh’s All The Pretty Boys album. Crowded House is Sophie’s favourite band, and she’ll never forget when producer Richard Pleasance remarked, “I know this drummer who’d be good for this song … Paul Hester.” Paul enjoyed the experience and offered to be Sophie’s full-time drummer.

The day after Paul’s death, an invitation arrived in the mail for Foxtel’s MAX Sessions with the Liberation Blue artists, including Stephen Cummings, Joe Camilleri and Nick Barker.

The invitation read: “Join our MAX Sessions host Paul Hester for this once-in-a-lifetime performance by a selection of some of the biggest Australian icons of all-time … your host is former Crowded House drummer Paul Hester whose experience as an entertainer ensures a natural affinity between ‘the artist’, ‘the audience’ and ‘the television experience’.”

Paul was a natural on TV and radio. He was a much-loved regular on the Martin/Molloy radio show in the ’90s. In one episode, he recounted filling in for Rob Hirst at a Midnight Oil gig in Adelaide.

After Crowded House, Paul released two EPs with the Largest Living Things, who he relished making music with. They were the house band on 1999’s ill-fated The Mick Molloy Show.

Paul also had his own TV show, Hessie’s Shed, on the ABC, which was wonderfully loose and anarchic. On the final episode, Tony Martin read from Paul’s diary from 1967. Eight-year-old Paul wrote about his ambitions: “To become a leading drummer in the world and have a successful pop group.”

“You win!” Mick Molloy declared. 

Seven months after Paul’s passing, Neil Finn performed Better Be Home Soon at the ARIA Awards, dedicating it to his beloved bandmate.

“It was absolutely beautiful,” Kasey Chambers recalls. “It was really incredible to see a room full of people that are normally trying to be pretty cool with tears in their eyes … it was a really beautiful moment.”

“There was an incredible, beautiful atmosphere in the room,” Missy Higgins remembers. “Suddenly, it was not an awards thing. For once, I just felt that everyone was paying attention.”

Paul’s passing helped reunite Crowded House. “Part of the coming together of Neil and I was shared at Paul’s funeral service,” bass player Nick Seymour reveals. “All these musicians gathered in Melbourne to bid farewell to Paul. It was an incredibly intense musical day, but we realised how much we enjoy playing with each other.”

Crowded House dedicated their comeback album, Time On Earth, to Paul. Neil Finn explained the closing cut, People Are Like Suns: “Part of it is the idea that people burn brightly and then they fade out.”

HESSIE captures the joy that Paul Hester brought to the world.

The documentary was a labour of love for Peter Green and Mark Goulding, who will never forget their mate who always made them smile.

When asked for their lasting impressions of Hessie, they simply say:

“He’ll be forever in our hearts.”

Neil Finn remembers the early days of Crowded House: “I have a great affection for when the band was at its best, and certainly that included Paul. He was an incredibly good foil for me on stage, made me feel more confident. And he was a genuinely, screamingly funny character.

“All the times that I remember the most fondly were when we were laughing the hardest and sending the whole thing up. That was the great thing about Paul. This business takes itself too seriously at the best of times, but Paul had this ability to continually send it up. At his best, he was able to make us all feel that we were just swimming through it and having a good laugh.”

Trying to come to terms with Paul’s passing, my ex-girlfriend read an old interview that she treasures. 

When asked to comment on the meaning of life, Paul Hester replied: “Who cares! Just keep on laughing ’cause it feels nice.”

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