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It was January 1973 and Neil Finn was the luckiest 14-year-old in Waikato. He’s still amazed his mum agreed to drop him off at the Great Ngaruawahia Festival, New Zealand’s Woodstock, where satanic metal peril Black Sabbath had the nation in a flap.
“I turned up to this crazy rock festival full of gangs of hippies and naked people and Hare Krishnas. It was a wild time,” he says. At one point, “the compere came on stage naked and said, ‘I’ve just taken five tabs of acid! There’s all these aliens out there amongst you!’”
Back home in Te Awamutu, Mrs Finn was perhaps reassured that her older son Brian – soon forever to be Tim – 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.
“I was astounded by what was happening with my brother at university,” Neil recalls, beaming in from a Crowded House stop in Perth to talk up Split Enz’s looming reunion tour of 2026.
“The music was bewitching and fascinating … kind of psychedelic folk, if I had to put a label on it … each song felt like I was entering some kind of magic kingdom.”
“I like hearing Neil talk about it,” says Tim, joining from Auckland. “Through 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.”
The hippie crowd was peaking at eight o’clock on the Saturday night, he remembers, “pretty drunk and out of it on all sorts of different things”. A few songs in, “we were asked to get off!” After 53 years, mild indignation lingers.
Neil remembers the hecklers and the hostility, but mostly his own mystification. “I saw a band that mysteriously no one else got, and I thought was amazing. I don’t recall being perplexed by it. I just thought everyone else was wrong.”
The disconnect was kind of the point. “We saw ourselves as completely in our own niche,” says Eddie Rayner, the piano virtuoso who joined later that year. “‘Try and not be rock and roll. Don’t have anything to do with the music industry aesthetic.’ We became our own little culture in our determination to be different.”
Tim Finn and Noel Crombie perform at the Auckland Town Hall in 1975.
Noel Crombie’s stunning costumes, art direction and quietly eccentric stage presence became crucial. As did Raewyn Turner’s painterly lighting design. At their first Melbourne show in ’75, the Enz experience was a theatrical anomaly. Glitter and denim kids waiting for Skyhooks and AC/DC at Festival Hall were duly flabbergasted.
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But slowly, says Tim, “we 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, ‘I’ve been waiting for this!’ People were ready for something to happen.”
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 – Dirty Creature, Six Months In a Leaky Boat, History Never Repeats, One Step Ahead – are part of the pop fabric now.
After a 17-year absence (the band’s last Australian concert was at 2009’s Sound Relief benefit concert in Melbourne) it was next February’s Electric Avenue Festival in Christchurch that “lured us out of our caves,” Tim says. “Neil’s out there a lot, still on the road, and I am too sometimes…” but that and the Australian dates to follow will be their first with Crombie and Rayner – bassist Nigel Griggs has retired – in 17 years.
“Neil’s been subtly agitating for years,” says Tim. “He’s been keen for the band to do something, and good on him, because I think it’s 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’s very exciting.”
Neil, who stepped in to replace Tim’s original creative partner, Phil Judd, in 1977, has always been the Enz’s biggest fan. As if to ease back into the ultraviolet trousers of those ’80s Countdown years, he performed I Got You and Message To My Girl at Crowded House’s Melbourne shows in October.
“There’s another generation coming through and miraculously, not just with us but with other bands as well, the songs seem to have endured,” he says, perhaps thinking of his recent tenure with Fleetwood Mac. “You see young people that have never seen the band before down the front, mouthing every word.
“I know that’ll 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.”
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’s audio archivist, has been busy compiling the long list for consideration at this month’s rehearsals in Auckland.
“Do we want to hit them between the eyes with all the hits and all the rockers,” he muses aloud, “or 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’t think we’ll make any decisions on that until rehearsals.”
Neil and Tim Finn during Split Enz’s last performance at Melbourne’s Sound Relief Bushfire Benefit Concert in 2009.Credit: Redferns
Rayner’s work on the recently issued ENZyclopedia Volumes One & Two has refocused ears on the origins of the band’s long and twisted tale. Mental Notes, made in Sydney in ’75, remains a rich outlier of the progressive rock age. Second Thoughts was produced in London by art-rock doyen Phil Manzanera of Roxy Music.
Phil Judd’s original painting for the cover of 1975’s Mental Notes album.
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.
“I was 24 years old, I’d 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.” During a random visit to Abbey Road with Judd’s replacement Neil in tow, Paul McCartney told Tim he liked Charlie too.
For his part, Neil remembers “a 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 … Give it a Whirl was the first one I sensed maybe deserved its place in the proceedings.”
Tim wrote lyrics to that one, but “Neil and I didn’t really start writing together until [the third Crowded House album] Woodface, many years later,” he says. “In Split Enz, now and again we’d help each other, maybe suggest a title. But I think we were both keen to figure out our own voices.”
Fast-forwarding, Tim’s solo album, Escapade, would hasten the band’s mid-’80s 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.
Split Enz took time to find their audience but “people were ready for something to happen”, says Tim Finn.
Soon after the Ngaruawahia festival, Dick Finn quizzed his eldest son about his future. Tim said “that Split Enz was his mission, his quest, and … if only someone would finance an album, then Split Enz could be the next Beatles. Dick respected [his] intensity of belief and Neil … well, it just soaked in.”
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Neil says now that “it was a blessing when True Colours was suddenly such a hit … 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’s more special. That was the origin, and it wasn’t in the charts. It was just a golden little moment for me, a formative influence as a musician, as a teenager.
“In New Zealand in the early ’70s, where it seemed like there was an almost overwhelming desire to conform and be conservative, it made me understand that anything was possible.”
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’s TikTok Arena on May 18 and 19, and Adelaide Entertainment Centre on May 25.
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