Crowded House Sounds Like Fun in Ventura

Attention Hollywood TV producers: There’s a sitcom-in-waiting in the band Crowded House. As anyone who saw the Aussie-based outfit at the Ventura Theatre on Saturday knows--as anyone who’s ever seen the group knows--it may offer prime pop songs with melodies and lyrics to savor, but its real strong suit is witty exchanges of banter. Heck, even its name sounds like a sitcom title.

But the sad truth is that television might be a medium of last resort for the band, which also plays at the Universal Amphitheatre on Tuesday. Radio, save for the breakthrough 1987 single “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” has pretty much ignored it, and at the Ventura show you could almost see why. It’s not for lack of hooks--primary singer-songwriter Neil Finn plies them with ease and in abundance. Nearly every song played in the 90-minute-plus set Saturday turned into a sing-along for the vociferously loyal crowd.

But the songs require some digging to appreciate, as the lyrics are full of trapdoors, the melodies reflected in fun-house mirrors . . . just like the relationships that most of them describe. So Crowded House may have to resort to the funny-guys angle to get attention.

And why not? Even the recent addition of Finn’s more dour older brother Tim to the original trio hasn’t diminished the volleys of repartee on stage. The half-hour encore set, in which the group was joined by opening act Richard Thompson, was full of more off-the-cuff zingers (mostly from drummer/lead cut-up Paul Hester) than an average TV comedy.

Let’s see: a sitcom about the antics of a neo-Beatlesque quartet, . . . nah, it’ll never fly.