Music
See Ya Round
by Nick Bollinger
This month Split Enz have reunited to play a series of concerts – although, according to Tim Finn, “you never leave a band”.
“History never repeats,” Split Enz once sang, but a glance at today’s music media can give you a strong sense of déjà vu. Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Genesis, the Police, Crosby, Stills & Nash – it’s as though every stadium-rock act that ever walked the Earth has risen from the dead, casualties notwithstanding, to reclaim its place in the pantheon, or at least replenish its pension fund.
Alongside the undead are thousands of young bands, from Kings of Leon to the Checks, that look and sound as if they stepped out of the same era as their stadium-strutting forebears. Is history repeating or has it simply come to an end, 50 years of rock’n’roll passing before our ears and eyes in a huge postmodern pile-up?
Against such a backdrop, the series of concerts that Split Enz are playing in New Zealand this month seems strangely normal. In many ways, it is as though they have never been away. Since the Enz officially split in 1984, they have regrouped to celebrate both 20th and 30th anniversaries, the 20th wedding anniversary of Neil and Sharon Finn, and the end of the millennium, among numerous one-off reunions.
“I think you never leave a band,” muses Tim Finn. “You never truly can. That’s one of the great perspectives you get after 20 years or more. You’re looking back and sideways and forwards all at the same time. [Former Enz member] Mike Chunn said recently that everybody’s been damaged in some way, not in a negative way, but we’ve all been part of that grand adventure and were changed by it and always will be connected to it quite deeply.”
The connection extends not just to the five Enzers who will be playing this month – Tim and Neil Finn, Noel Crombie, Nigel Griggs and Eddie Rayner, more or less the line-up at the time of the group’s break-up in 1984 – but to most of the 17 members the group have had since they formed in Auckland in 1972.
Early Enzer Wally Wilkinson, who left soon after the first album, Mental Notes, calls it “a family”. Chunn, who quit in 1977 suffering from agoraphobia and tour-induced anxieties, and became the group’s chronicler with his book Stranger Than Fiction: The Life & Times of Split Enz, has occasionally participated in the reunions and pops up often in Finn’s conversation.
Finn also mentions violinist Miles Golding, a founder member who left for London in 1973 and went on to play with the Royal Philharmonic. Finn and Golding have recently begun recording together for a projected Finn solo album.
But one relationship remains problematic: that of Finn and Phil Judd, who were student flatmates and fellow explorers in an early 70s world of music, art and drugs. The Enz was initially the product of their intense friendship, mutual admiration and combined vision. At first they shared writing credits, like Lennon-McCartney. “The essential energy and tension of any great band is there has got to be two people who are almost in love with each other,” says Finn.
But Judd’s erratic moods and propensity for leaving and rejoining the band at inconvenient moments led to an estrangement that continues to this day. When the Enz were planning the Australian leg of the reunion tour in 2006, it was mooted that Judd, who had just broken a long silence with a typically twisted solo album, Mr Phudd and His Novelty Act, might play support. Judd was keen, yet the plan never materialised.
Judd isn’t scheduled to appear in the New Zealand shows, either, though Finn doesn’t completely rule out a future reunion.
“We could do a Mental Notes show. It would be really interesting to have those songs revisited. I think we would probably all love to do that, if Phil and I could get it together. Unfortunately, Phil and I are just hopeless at being friends, so there’s a dysfunction there right at the heart of the band, really. But we could do it one day, you never know. I’d love to hear Phil singing, ‘I think I’ll get on back home to my mother …’ and I don’t mean that ironically at all.”
The idea of a concert in which an album such as Split Enz’s progressive, preposterous, madly musical debut would be performed in its entirety is tantalising, though not unique. On their recent New Zealand visit, New York noise-rockers Sonic Youth performed their seminal Daydream Nation as a set piece, while elsewhere the likes of Patti Smith and Elvis Costello have been revisiting their classic albums in concert, as though they were symphonies or concertos.
Could this be related to the trend of reunions and the way in which younger bands, rather than rebel against their elders as new groups have in the past, are now fashioning themselves on 30-year-old prototypes?
“I think that there’s an acceptance of a classicism that’s occurring in pop culture,” observes Finn, “where it’s not about the new or eclectic any more, it is about recurrence. And it’s not a bad thing. I mean, originality is great if you can achieve it, but it’s not necessarily the quest any more. Just absorbing everything that’s happened over the last 30 or 40 years and saying, ‘Well, let’s do it again’, rather than ‘What’s next?’”
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