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It was January 1973 and Neil Finn was the luckiest 14-year-old in Waikato. He\u2019s still amazed his mum agreed to drop him off at the Great Ngaruawahia Festival, New Zealand\u2019s Woodstock, where satanic metal peril Black Sabbath had the nation in a flap.<\/p>\n
\u201cI turned up to this crazy rock festival full of gangs of hippies and naked people and Hare Krishnas. It was a wild time,\u201d he says. At one point, \u201cthe compere came on stage naked and said, \u2018I\u2019ve just taken five tabs of acid! There\u2019s all these aliens out there amongst you!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Back home in Te Awamutu, Mrs Finn was perhaps reassured that her older son Brian \u2013 soon forever to be Tim \u2013 was also on site. Though only a few tiny gigs old, his band Split Ends, as they were then known, had fluked a prime slot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was astounded by what was happening with my brother at university,\u201d Neil recalls, beaming in from a Crowded House stop in Perth to talk up Split Enz\u2019s looming reunion tour of 2026.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe music was bewitching and fascinating \u2026 kind of psychedelic folk, if I had to put a label on it \u2026 each song felt like I was entering some kind of magic kingdom.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI like hearing Neil talk about it,\u201d says Tim, joining from Auckland. \u201cThrough the eyes of a 14-year-old, I can see the magic that we had felt in rehearsals and writing songs. But the reality up there was brutal.\u201d<\/p>\n
The hippie crowd was peaking at eight o\u2019clock on the Saturday night, he remembers, \u201cpretty drunk and out of it on all sorts of different things\u201d. A few songs in, \u201cwe were asked to get off!\u201d After 53 years, mild indignation lingers.<\/p>\n
Neil remembers the hecklers and the hostility, but mostly his own mystification. \u201cI saw a band that mysteriously no one else got, and I thought was amazing. I don\u2019t recall being perplexed by it. I just thought everyone else was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
The disconnect was kind of the point. \u201cWe saw ourselves as completely in our own niche,\u201d says Eddie Rayner, the piano virtuoso who joined later that year. \u201c\u2018Try and not be rock and roll. Don\u2019t have anything to do with the music industry aesthetic.\u2019 We became our own little culture in our determination to be different.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Tim Finn and Noel Crombie perform at the Auckland Town Hall in 1975.<\/p>\n
Noel Crombie\u2019s stunning costumes, art direction and quietly eccentric stage presence became crucial. As did Raewyn Turner\u2019s painterly lighting design. At their first Melbourne show in \u201975, the Enz experience was a theatrical anomaly. Glitter and denim kids waiting for Skyhooks and AC\/DC at Festival Hall were duly flabbergasted.<\/p>\n
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But slowly, says Tim, \u201cwe found our crowd. It was small at first, but they were avid. I remember somebody coming up to us in Sydney after a Bondi Lifesavers show and she said, \u2018I\u2019ve been waiting for this!\u2019 People were ready for something to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would take five more years, a revolving cast of players and mixed receptions in Britain and the US before I Got You and True Colours made history for NZ pop on the world stage. That album and later hits \u2013 Dirty Creature, Six Months In a Leaky Boat, History Never Repeats, One Step Ahead \u2013 are part of the pop fabric now.<\/p>\n
After a 17-year absence (the band\u2019s last Australian concert was at 2009\u2019s Sound Relief benefit concert in Melbourne) it was next February\u2019s Electric Avenue Festival in Christchurch that \u201clured us out of our caves,\u201d Tim says. \u201cNeil\u2019s out there a lot, still on the road, and I am too sometimes\u2026\u201d but that and the Australian dates to follow will be their first with Crombie and Rayner \u2013 bassist Nigel Griggs has retired \u2013 in 17 years.<\/p>\n
\u201cNeil\u2019s been subtly agitating for years,\u201d says Tim. \u201cHe\u2019s been keen for the band to do something, and good on him, because I think it\u2019s kind of now or never. As long as we keep our health and strength, why not? We get to breathe a bit of new life into the band, and it\u2019s very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neil, who stepped in to replace Tim\u2019s original creative partner, Phil Judd, in 1977, has always been the Enz\u2019s biggest fan. As if to ease back into the ultraviolet trousers of those \u201980s Countdown years, he performed I Got You and Message To My Girl at Crowded House\u2019s Melbourne shows in October.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s another generation coming through and miraculously, not just with us but with other bands as well, the songs seem to have endured,\u201d he says, perhaps thinking of his recent tenure with Fleetwood Mac. \u201cYou see young people that have never seen the band before down the front, mouthing every word.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know that\u2019ll be part of the story when we get Split Enz back out there because those songs are still in the ether. If you play them live you get to enjoy the response from an audience, but also somehow bring them into the modern world in a good, meaningful, soulful way.\u201d<\/p>\n
The question of which songs is naturally a little daunting. As Crombie labours over an iPad somewhere in Melbourne designing the latest Enz set and costumery, Rayner, the band\u2019s audio archivist, has been busy compiling the long list for consideration at this month\u2019s rehearsals in Auckland.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo we want to hit them between the eyes with all the hits and all the rockers,\u201d he muses aloud, \u201cor do we mix up a bit of the old stuff? Should we maybe do a whole other concert tour sometime, just playing the old stuff? I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll make any decisions on that until rehearsals.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Neil and Tim Finn during Split Enz\u2019s last performance at Melbourne\u2019s Sound Relief Bushfire Benefit Concert in 2009.Credit: Redferns<\/p>\n
Rayner\u2019s work on the recently issued ENZyclopedia Volumes One & Two has refocused ears on the origins of the band\u2019s long and twisted tale. Mental Notes, made in Sydney in \u201975, remains a rich outlier of the progressive rock age. Second Thoughts was produced in London by art-rock doyen Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music.<\/p>\n
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Phil Judd\u2019s original painting for the cover of 1975\u2019s Mental Notes album.<\/p>\n
More reissues are scheduled through 2026. In between the acid trip of Volumes One & Two and the classic pop years of True Colours and beyond lie the strange, vintage-sounding likes of Bold As Brass, My Mistake, Stuff and Nonsense, and the song Tim regards as ground zero in his solo songwriting adventures, Charlie.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was 24 years old, I\u2019d come back [to London] from America, Phil had left the band again and I was devastated. I played it to Eddie and he liked it. So that was really the start for me.\u201d During a random visit to Abbey Road with Judd\u2019s replacement Neil in tow, Paul McCartney told Tim he liked Charlie too.<\/p>\n
For his part, Neil remembers \u201ca very barren year in 1978 where nothing much happened from a career point of view. But I was living in Chorleywood with Noel, and I started to get a few songs going \u2026 Give it a Whirl was the first one I sensed maybe deserved its place in the proceedings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tim wrote lyrics to that one, but \u201cNeil and I didn\u2019t really start writing together until [the third Crowded House album] Woodface, many years later,\u201d he says. \u201cIn Split Enz, now and again we\u2019d help each other, maybe suggest a title. But I think we were both keen to figure out our own voices.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fast-forwarding, Tim\u2019s solo album, Escapade, would hasten the band\u2019s mid-\u201980s demise. Neil promptly took Crowded House to the world. But one passage in the excellent Enz biography, Stranger Than Fiction, by former bassist Mike Chunn, paints a telling scene of big-picture synergy.<\/p>\n
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Split Enz took time to find their audience but \u201cpeople were ready for something to happen\u201d, says Tim Finn.<\/p>\n
Soon after the Ngaruawahia festival, Dick Finn quizzed his eldest son about his future. Tim said \u201cthat Split Enz was his mission, his quest, and \u2026 if only someone would finance an album, then Split Enz could be the next Beatles. Dick respected [his] intensity of belief and Neil \u2026 well, it just soaked in.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Neil says now that \u201cit was a blessing when True Colours was suddenly such a hit \u2026 But with hindsight, I was a massive fan of the band in its early incarnation and some of that stuff that happened then, within my heart, it\u2019s more special. That was the origin, and it wasn\u2019t in the charts. It was just a golden little moment for me, a formative influence as a musician, as a teenager.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn New Zealand in the early \u201970s, where it seemed like there was an almost overwhelming desire to conform and be conservative, it made me understand that anything was possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
ENZyclopedia Volumes One & Two is out now. Split Enz play Bluesfest, Byron Bay, on April 4, Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on May 13, Sydney\u2019s TikTok Arena on May 18 and 19, and Adelaide Entertainment Centre on May 25. <\/p>\n