Welcome to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. Hello and welcome. If you’re listening to this, you’re probably already a fan of what we do here at A Breath of Fresh Air.
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Please, please, please hit me up. Now I know you’re probably aware that Split Ends were a New Zealand band formed in 1972. They were the first band from that country to gain significant recognition outside of Australasia.
Initially noted for their prog art rock sound, flamboyant look and theatrical style performances, with the years the band moved towards a pop new wave sound and went on to perform with a changed lineup as Crowded House. My guest today is Split Ends and Crowded House founder, singer songwriter Tim Finn, who’s also known for witty, insightful solo material and amazing collaborations. Let me introduce you to him.
I live in Auckland, moved back here about 22 years ago. I did live in Melbourne for a long time and I lived in Sydney, I lived in London, but yeah, I’ve been home for a while. I know Australia’s claimed you always as their own, but you are a native New Zealander and I guess it’s come full circle for you.
It has. Yeah, I was born here for family reasons, I moved back, but it’s been a very creative time. It actually worked out perfectly well for me in terms of my work.
Yeah. The reason that we speak today is because you have a new album out with Irish singer Andy White and it’s called A.T., appropriately for, I guess, and A for Andy and T for Tim. It’s the second time that you’ve come together with Andy.
Can you tell us a little bit about this album? Yeah, the reason we call it A.T. or call ourselves A.T. is because we had a group, if you like to call it that, although we always knew it was just a one-off kind of temporary situation. But myself and Andy and Liam O’Moynly, who sings, I think, still with Hot House Flowers. I met these guys in Dublin when I first went to Ireland.
I’d just turned 40. Anyway, I finally ended up in Dublin and I had the best time ever and really felt like these are my people. And so Andy and Liam and Tim became A.T. and then Liam couldn’t do this record because it doesn’t appeal to him to record things at home because Andy and I were doing it.
He was in Melbourne, I was in Auckland, and lots of musicians and writers these days are sending files around the place and never having to meet up. Liam wasn’t really into it, so we took the L out of A.T. and became A.T. And so it was just really for the fans who would understand that the diminished acronym and its purpose is meant to be a bit humorous, I suppose. Get a longer afternoon Was a time, was a place We went swimming at the 40 foot Life was good I just wanted to say I’m sorry I’ve tried to forget the many ways I’ve let you down But the sea holds the memory And tonight, oh tonight I can feel it rolling over me There was an interview Liam did for the Irish Times in which he used the phrase, the sea holds the memory, because he was asked about that time the three of us were together just outside Dublin.
We used to swim at a place called the 40 foot. It’s a wonderful kind of place to forget your cares. So we basically grew from us reading that interview with Liam when he was asked about it.
He said, oh, the sea holds the memory and boom, I was off. We ended up covering all sorts of things on the record, but definitely grew from that nostalgia and that beautiful memory. You’ve never paid much attention to being commercial, have you? In fact, you’ve gone the opposite way.
I’ve never gone either which way, apart from when we were in Split Enz and we knew that it was do or die around 1979. We were having a lot of trouble getting through to a wider audience. And, you know, just the simple things like having good road crew, good lighting, being able to travel the world and stay in decent hotels.
All those things were still quite a struggle. You know, lots of bands go through it, of course. But we finally made True Colors in 1980 and then and then we were away.
So really, at that time, we knew we had to write something that was going to get on radio. But at the same time, we didn’t know how to do that. It was really just a fluke.
And we kind of rode in on a wave. But other bands were also on, like, say, The Cars, for example, when you listen to I Got You and you listen to The Cars, it’s not the same. But there are elements that made it very palatable to radio at the time, I think.
The sort of dampened guitar and the use of synthesizer in the verses to kind of color the lyrics. Various things were going on in music, but we didn’t plan it or weren’t aware of it. But when I look back, I can see, all right, yeah, we kind of accidentally rode in on a wave.
But yeah, no, I mean, otherwise, early split ends and later on after that and in my solo career, there’s always been pressure. When you’re with a major label, that’s all they want is for you to deliver them a hit song. They don’t know what it is.
You don’t know what it is. So you spend a lot of time kind of going nowhere and chasing your tail. And you can either succumb to that pressure or not.
These days, of course, I don’t. And I’m 70 now. And so I think once you get to about 50, I think your 40s are quite tough because you feel like you’re being squeezed out.
But once you get to about 50, you’re regarded in some ways as an elder. And people know that you’re not doing it for that reason anymore. You’re not trying to be successful.
And they kind of trust that. Those who are still interested in the songs I’m writing, hopefully they know that they’re just coming from a place of inspiration and joy. The struggle for commercial success stifles creativity sometimes? I don’t think so.
I think it can have a really good effect. I mean, look at The Beatles. They were consciously aiming at being huge.
And I think most bands start out thinking that they are going to be the biggest band in the world. I mean, we did certainly in Spadens. It took us eight years to have a record that succeeded.
And I like to remind people, actually, that we were a 70s band, not an 80s band. At that 1972 kind of period, we just thought it was going to be automatic. The door was going to open and we would conquer the world.
Call it young man’s bravado. That’s the way it was. And I think I’m sure it was for The Beatles and The Stones and all those 60s bands.
So I think wanting to be huge can be a spur to your songwriting. And it could also have a very negative effect. We used to love our rehearsals and we were basically inspired by each other.
I mean, I met some of these guys when they were going to art school in Auckland. Phil Judd, Robert Gillies, Noel Crombie. Noel went on to design our clothes, make the clothes and give us haircuts and create the look of the band.
He was doing sculpture at art school. So in a way, we were kind of like a piece of organic sculpture. And every time we went on stage, it was like a piece of performance art.
That was just so exciting and inspiring to me. And so we get in a rehearsal room, you know, we were all just trying to do our best and have a huge amount of fun and joy and inspiration just playing music together. It was certainly novel at the time, wasn’t it? There weren’t too many people out there doing this whole theatrical thing.
Where did he and you, by extension, take the inspiration for the get up, for the clothes, for the hair and for the music? Well, Noel went, you know, he was pretty steeped in 20th century art and knew a lot about painters and sculptors from that time. And so he drew from a lot of that. I mean, there was an obvious reference, for example, of Mondrian and the True Colours artwork and some of the clothing, but also the Commedia dell’arte period in Italy.
Noel would be looking back through art books and history books sometimes. He’d draw his inspiration, but essentially, his idea was, I think, to deconstruct the male suit. And so we grew up in the 50s and 60s when men, all our dads and men generally used to wear suits.
And most of the time they’d wear a hat as well. It was quite formal. And I think Noel, you know, through his own kind of lens and filters, he kind of destroyed the male suit.
So the first set of costumes he made, there was a shoulder, one shoulder higher than the other, one sleeve might be shorter than the other, one pants leg, you know, the buttons would be off, off centre. And he just played with that to an endless degree. And it was amazing because every time he would use a new set for a tour, we’d say, what’s it going to be this time, Noel? He wouldn’t give anything away.
And we’d get to the first night of the tour and he’d open the suitcase because he had these beautiful old antique suitcases. And there would be the suits kind of beautifully ironed and folded on top of each other. We’d pull them out and he would say which was which and who was to wear what.
They were heady days. Ooh, heart to heart, heart to heart. A tender goodbye, a tender goodbye.
Nothing could ever keep us apart as you sip your tequila. You all just went with that. Nobody arced up or complained about it.
You were happy to get yourselves all geared up and you felt like it sat with the music really well. Well, that’s the thing. I think we thought it connected beautifully with the music because in the same way that he was deconstructing the male suit, we were kind of deconstructing the song.
And so when you listen to early split ends, there might be say, you know, eight, a dozen different sections. And sometimes they wouldn’t repeat. And I guess we drew inspiration from the Beatles in that regard with songs like I’m the Walrus and Strawberry Fields, where you hear the demo of Strawberry Fields and it’s a beautiful acoustic song.
And then you hear the recording they made of it and they basically destroyed it to some extent, the initial beautiful song and created something else that was, you know, much more sort of textured and layered and nuanced and just amazing and wonderful. Let me take you down cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields. We would take a song that we’d written, you know, Phil Judd and I would write a song on acoustic guitars and then we’d give it to the band and it would just explode outwards.
Which song best represents that would you say? Anything off mental notes. You know, you could play a song. There’s a song called Walking Down a Road that’s got a lot of different sections to it.
And that’s just the way we wanted to write based on the 60s. So we were nothing to do with prog rock. We felt that our influences came from an earlier time.
It was about 1975 when you first came out to Australia with Mental Notes. We made that at Festival Studios in Sydney. We were very teed up and this was it, you know, our first chance to make an album because we’d started writing those songs in 1973 and here it was 1975.
We were finally being given an album budget by Michael Gudinski who backed us. Anybody who saw us live, they got it, I think. Whether they loved it or hated it, they got it.
It’s difficult. If you never saw the band in its early days, it’s kind of hard to get the gist of it, really. There are some videos and there is the music on record, but the live performance was something else again.
And Michael saw that. He wanted us badly. You did polarise audiences, didn’t you? We did, yeah.
We got booed off the stage a couple of times. We played a festival in New Zealand and the emcee had to come out and tap me on the shoulder and say, you have to get off. I think in the annals of rock and roll, that’s pretty rare.
And we did go off. And there was another time at the Festival Hall in Melbourne where we were playing before ACDC and Skyhooks and that was a pretty dreadful kind of situation for us, you know, because nobody knew who we were and they hated us so much that there was just like a constant kind of booing. But I always remember Magda Stavanski, the great actress comedian, said to me that she was there and she was a Sharpie.
There were a lot of Sharpies in Melbourne at that time. It was kind of a cult. Would you mind just explaining that a bit? Well, because we’d never heard of Sharpies either in New Zealand, but it involved a really severe mullet usually and, you know, sort of tight cardigans and I guess tight jeans.
It was just a look and it was definitely like a polar opposite to sort of mod or anything that would have come from the 60s, anything psychedelic. It was working class, definitely, whatever that means. Was it associated with a particular musical taste? Well, ACDC was their band.
We probably were the polar opposite to ACDC. Actually, I met Bon Scott later that year. He said to me that he didn’t really get what we were coming from, but he thought it was great.
Bon was right. Split Ends quickly grew to become one of the biggest bands of the era.
This is a Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. Let’s just go back to Tim’s story about opening that night for ACDC in Melbourne.
While many in the audience seemed to loathe the band, much to Tim’s surprise, frontman Bon Scott showed up as a fan. He swung out over the crowd that day versus Tarzan, but that was after we’d been more or less booed off. But as I was saying, Magda Zabanski, who people would know from Kath & Kim, the TV series, she secretly loved us.
And I really was grateful to her for telling me that because it’s nice to know that out there in that sea of boos and catcalls and they were literally throwing cans at us, there was somebody who was just loving it, you know, loving us. And, you know, we picked up fans pretty quickly. We had quite a good following after a while.
We were doing suburban pubs and, you know, we’d get 30 people and then we might get 100, then 150, and then it grew up to 300, 400, 500 reasonably quickly. But we had to find our audience and they were definitely there. MUSIC CONTINUES MUSIC CONTINUES There were a lot of people who were obviously liking it, but maybe still not quite getting it.
Oh, yeah, definitely. And, you know, a countdown to the TV show that used to go out nationally in Australia every Sunday. Wonderful show because they’d put on new bands.
They’d actually back you, even if you didn’t have anything on the radio, you know. And they put us on very early on, so we were seen by a lot of Australians quite quickly. I guess it’s, in a way, it’s kind of a good thing to have a love-hate thing.
It means you’re provoking people. They’re going to remember you. We never set out for anybody to hate us, you know.
That was very far from our intention. But looking back, I think it actually worked for us in the end. Yeah, well, I guess if they’re feeling passionate about you one way or another, then much better than not giving a hoot.
I think also it shows you the times, you know, because these days you can like, you know, the idols and you can like Taylor Swift. I mean, there’s not that sort of intense tribalism anymore in music. It was very intense then, and we certainly found that out in England when we went over there, and we were just on the cusp of punk rock, and we represented, I guess, an equal alternative to what was happening in the mainstream, you know, the Eagles and all that.
So we got a lot of attention from the press initially, and then punk rock came along, and it was either like you were punk or you were not punk, and there was literally a group of early punks in London in 1976 arguing. As we went out to our van, we heard them arguing about us, and one of them was saying, they’re brilliant, and the other one’s going, yeah, but they’re not punk, are they? And it was like a really intense conversation that kind of fascinated us, you know. What about the Americans, meanwhile? Were they hearing of you and getting you? Our first mental notes was released there.
We went across and did a tour of America, and it went pretty well. I mean, we found people that really loved us, and, yeah, it was, can you imagine? I mean, it was 1976 in America, so when you look at what else was happening in American music in 1976, you can imagine how we stood out, and the same thing, really. It was love-hate, I suppose, but we definitely attracted some fans, but the band nearly broke up under the pressure.
Phil Judd swung a punch at me backstage one night in Atlanta, and we’d been the closest of friends you could ever imagine, so it was a shattering moment, I think, for both of us, and then he left the band, and we were back to England, and that’s when the band asked me to lead them forward from there, and I did, and I’m glad I did. Tim and the band had moved to England to facilitate working with Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, whom they’d met some years earlier in Australia. Phil produced their second album, which was essentially a reworked version of their first mental notes.
MUSIC PLAYS MUSIC CONTINUES Phil had actually produced our first album in England in 1976 prior to that American tour. We’d met Phil backstage in Sydney. We supported Roxy Music for a show at the Horton Pavilion, and Phil was blown away and said he’d love to produce us, and that’s why we went to England.
We remade Mental Notes in England with Phil, so it’s kind of like Mental Notes Part 2, with a couple of tracks that were different. Why? Because we just thought we could do it better in England. I mean, England was our kind of, if you like, our spiritual home, we thought, and it felt like that for a while.
It was where all the music we loved came from, although of course all the bands we loved loved American music, so it kind of all goes back in the end. All the early great rock and roll music which came out of America. So how did you ride that wave then? If punk was coming in with all its heft, how did you manage to stay afloat? Well, you know, it would take a lot more than that to kind of stop us.
We’d already been going for five years, and we loved playing together, as I say, in rehearsals. So, you know, even though it was difficult in terms of the media and the press and all that in England, who are so fashion orientated, you know, so whatever the wave is, they’ll ride it. They won’t create the wave, but they definitely ride it.
And so in a way we became Spindrift, you know. We just shot across the surface and kept going, and, you know, it didn’t matter to us really what was happening underneath. We were just doing our own thing.
It was hard though. In 1978 it was particularly hard. We lost our record label, lost our management, and the band were all on the dole in England.
And after that was when we bailed and came back to Australia at Michael’s suggestion, Michael Gudinski. And we began playing here in Australia again and reconnected with our fans, and then we made True Colours. So it was probably the making of us, all that struggle.
I got you, that’s all I want Forget, that’s a whole lot Go out, shout, that’s no problem Everything, something’s wrong Easy, you show me You can see my eyes, you can’t see my eyes I realised the other day that I’m almost exactly the same age as rock’n’roll, because I think the first rock’n’roll record was 1951, and I was born in 1952. So we’ve sort of been tracking in parallel ever since, which I thought was kind of cool. Yeah, that is cool.
Recently, I’ve made an album with a keyboard player from Split Enzyme, Eddie Rayner. We call the project Forensics, because we went back to those early songs and took a piece out of some of them and created whole new songs around that piece. So I don’t think anybody else has done that in rock’n’roll, has claimed that as some kind of first to sort of sample yourself and write a new song.
Well, I think a lot of the stuff that you’ve been doing you could probably claim as first. There are not too many that emulate art and take their inspiration from art and work on that basis. Not very many that are as deep and meaningful as the work that you’ve been doing over time.
Singer and guitarist Neil Finn wrote the majority of the band’s hits through the 80s and helped facilitate the band’s shift away from art and rock towards a new wave pop sound. In comes your younger brother Neil. Yeah, that’s right.
Yeah, and Neil was waiting in the wings, I suppose, although looking back we didn’t think of him straight away because he’d never played electric guitar and what we needed was an electric guitar player. But, you know, we sort of knew he could write songs. He’d supported us on tour in New Zealand when he was 16.
He would get out in front of the crowd and sing a few of his own songs. And I always knew that he was talented, of course. He’s my brother.
We sang together when we were kids and our voices sounded really good together. So there were just so many reasons why it seemed like an obvious thing to do and he picked up the guitar and started practising and playing and, you know, it didn’t take him that long to be able to play a fairly basic electric guitar to thicken up the sound. And we had his voice as well and then, of course, his songs.
He didn’t really start writing for the band straight away but by the time we got to True Colours he was obviously writing really, really good songs. What can I do There’s one particular way I have to choose One step ahead of you Always someone Makes it hard to move She says, boy, I want you to stay But I’ll save it all for another day If I stop, I could lose my head But I’m ready for romance Were you concerned with him coming into the band? I mean, I think bands that have traditionally that have brothers in them don’t usually fare so well in the long term. Yeah, I don’t suppose I was that aware of that.
I mean, I’d never heard of, I mean, like the Davies Brothers and the Kinks. I mean, I don’t remember, I love the Kinks. They’re one of my favourite bands.
I don’t remember knowing that they were fighting or anything about that. Now I’m much more aware of those stories like the Gallagher Brothers, the Davies Brothers and, you know, look at the Everly Brothers, you know, who, yeah, you just hear stories where people despise each other after a while and they just can’t be in the same room. Neil and I have had ups and downs but nothing too dramatic in that sense.
And he was six years my younger, so it was my band. You know, we knew our roles and he was quite happy to slot in and be the guitarist, singer, then eventually the songwriter. Lots of great bands.
I mean, even say the Rolling Stones, you know, you’re just hearing endless stories, some of them probably just PR spin but, you know, about the fights between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. I think a lot of bands have that kind of tension or competition and even, you know, say the Beatles, you know, Lennon and McCartney were obviously competing for songs on the album, for A-sides of singles. It just helps.
It’s a little bit of a, you know, free song. It gives you a bit of an edge. Was that change in direction due to Neil being there or was that just evolution? No, well, Neil was, you know, as I say, like younger than us and just wanted to be part of it.
So he wouldn’t have exerted any influence whatsoever and wouldn’t have wanted to. But the way the band looked and the kind of simplification of our songs, I think it was two things. It was one that we in a sense had exhausted the possibilities of that sort of more full expression of visual language that we had.
There was really nowhere else to take it. And also we’d been doing a lot of lunchtime shows at universities and also pubs in Australia where it was perhaps one step too far to go the full staging. And so we’d pull back and start wearing maybe op shop suits and there was slightly distressed or whatever and less make-up and, you know, we’d started doing that anyway.
But the other reason is that we were getting a bit desperate and we needed to kind of have a breakthrough song. And as you say, so kindly remember that my mistake was top 20, but that was our first little taste and then Icy Red did a little bit better and then I Got You went all the way. So we were moving there, you know, through those years, 78, 79.
Here we go. It was what to do without you Squeeze me out of your life for me When my pain is walking down the street Icy Red, Icy Red, Icy Red I can’t stand to think it won’t break free Icy Red, Icy Red, Icy Red Icy Red Yeah, boy Icy Red, yeah I’m fed up with crying My despair is dying Turning into rage Day by day Green before you met me In a pink room you let me love you I was blue when you let me down It was great because we could, as I said earlier, we could afford now to have a good crew, good gear, stay in decent hotels, you know, like move around the world. We toured in England, we played Hammersmith Odeon in London, which was very exciting.
We played the Greek in Los Angeles, which I think was 8,000 people or something. So we were starting in certain cities to play to big crowds and certainly in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, we were right there in the top of the charts. And so we were playing those rooms that were booed off the stage on a few years prior.
We were now filling them to capacity. So for these young boys that set out wanting to conquer the world, those years must have felt like we’ve made it, we’ve done it, here we are. Yeah, it was great.
It was an amazing time and it just went by in a blur because we were so busy. I think everybody who becomes successful always says that. It’s when you’re right on the edge of that that it’s the best.
I think for bands it’s true, like when everybody in the audience, let’s say you’re just playing in a club and there’s 1,000 people in there and everyone knows that you’re about to make it and there’s that feeling. It’s the most delicious kind of feeling because you’re sharing it with your fans and then it grows beyond those fans into the mainstream and some people are coming to see you for the first time based on one song, you know, and it’s very exciting. There’s something about the intimacy of that just before that stage that’s the best, I think.
But there is a pressure, a subtle pressure, that begins to grow as the touring starts to wind down on the back of that big hit album. There’s a feeling of, yeah, okay, well, now we have to do it again. And you certainly get that from your label or from, you know, people around you.
They try and be careful and say the right thing but inevitably one of them will say, so are you going to do it again or are you going to give us another True Colours? And, you know, everything in me would go, well, no. Split ends were riding the crest of a wave, but often what goes up must also come down.
This is a Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye. It’s a beautiful day. The whole thing about Spurred Ends was each time to sort of reinvent, reinvent.
Again, very influenced by the Beatles. That was just the template. You know, every album had to be different, even the way you look had to be different.
You know, we just followed in their footsteps. So, but, you know, having said that, the next album, After True Colours, Corroboree Australia, Waiata New Zealand, had some similarities. And it’s not like we were going to, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And we were so busy touring and that, that we didn’t have a lot of time to write. But we still managed to have a very successful record. And then the one after that, I think, was where we reinvented the sound.
And you think of the song Dirty Creature and contrast it with some of the songs from the prior two albums. It was a very different moment for the band musically. And that’s what we were, you know, excited about was this felt like a very new record.
This was the birth of MTV, which would have suited you guys perfectly with all the new video clips. You’d been doing video clips for a while, but now they started getting played out everywhere. That would have worked well for you, too.
It did. I mean, yeah, we coincided beautifully with the beginnings of MTV. And so that was a big part of the momentum that came in behind I Got You.
And I Got You was moving very quickly up the charts. And at a certain point, it stopped. It was going like 120, 80, 40, you know, big jumps.
And then it just stopped at 38, I think. And it’s all water under the bridge. But there was some fascinating sort of terrible stuff going on behind the scenes that we only found out years later.
A couple of years after that, and you’d started to become a little bit more mainstream again, the album Escapade produced the top ten hit, Fraction Too Much Friction. Why was it at that stage then that you announced you were going to leave the band? I didn’t leave the band straight away. In fact, I felt pretty guilty, as if I’d gone off and had an affair or something.
It was a really interesting time, because I had this huge success on my hands, and we only ever did five shows. It would have been the obvious thing to do, would be to have done a big Australian tour. But because I was in Spit Ends, and I loved Spit Ends, and I was very loyal to them, I didn’t do that.
I kind of, you know, held it back, held it back, went on with the band. We did another record. But it’s like when you try and, I guess, patch up a relationship after somebody’s had an affair.
It’s never the same. Some people manage to survive it. Some people don’t.
And so the cracks were beginning to show, I suppose, and my loyalties were there emotionally. But I also had my eye on a different kind of life, because I’d met all these other musicians and other people, really. It just opened me up, and I realised being in a band is really like a perpetuation, in a way, of your adolescence.
You know, it’s your gang. It’s your… Safety net. Yeah, in a way.
And it sort of, I broke out of all that, and it was wonderful. And then I went back into that world, and I just wanted to get back out, I suppose. It was a hard decision.
Was it a really strong artistic calling that took you out to do more solo work? Yeah, it was. I mean, just working with different musicians, I just found it exciting. And I think a lot of people who are in bands go through this.
And then some of them just manage to keep both things going. See, again, the Beatles, because we’d been going 12 years, and I think the Beatles only went for 10 years, it just felt like a natural thing that a band should end. Whereas nowadays, you get a lot of situations where a band will take a hiatus.
They’ll say, well, we’re going to take five years, and we’re going to do solo projects. We could have done that. Again, I don’t regret it.
It’s just the way it panned out, yeah. A different way of looking at it. You know, I could have said, guys, I just want a couple of years off.
Let’s all do our own thing, and we’ll see you in 1987 or something. Yeah, right. I can imagine during those heady days, too, you’d be completely exhausted, and you’re kind of on this treadmill that you just want some time out from.
Yeah, I think that’s right. That happens, yeah, after endless touring. It was almost a romantic thing if a band has to break up.
You know, you do a certain amount of time, and then you break up. So during this time, then, when split ends did split up, Neil met Paul Hester and went on to form the internationally successful Crowded House in 1985. You went on to do your second solo album, Big Canoe, 1986, and then you joined Crowded House.
What happened there that you came back to them? Well, just don’t forget also that Paul Hester was the last drummer in Split Ends, and he’d been recommended by Rob Hurst from Midnight Oil. He knew that that was worth following up, and Paul was wonderful and immediately just part of the band. And so when the band broke up, Neil had already formed that relationship, as we all had with Paul.
So it was a natural progression. I think so. But for the two of them, and then Nick joined, and they became the three-piece initially.
That was then, and Neil felt guilty too, I’m sure, about breaking up the band, because they’d wanted him to carry on and be their songwriter. So that was that. How did you come to join them then? Oh, well, that was strange, because Neil and I were doing a Finn Brothers record, and we wrote Weather With You, and It’s Only Natural, and Chocolate Cake, and All I Ask, and There Goes God, and all these songs.
And we said, wow. It was very exciting. We knew we had a great bunch of songs.
Well, there’s a small boat made of china, it’s going nowhere on the mantelpiece. Well, do I lie like a lounge room lizard, or do I sing like a bird released? Everywhere you go, I always take the weather with you. Everywhere you go, I always take the weather.
Everywhere you go, I always take the weather with you. Everywhere you go, I always take the weather, the weather with you. I think it was tormenting Neil, because he was sort of halfway through a crowded house record.
I think the label had said, we don’t hear a hit. There was some kind of thing going on with the label. And then we jumped in and did our writing.
But ostensibly, he was supposed to be kind of writing for Crowded House. So in his head, he must have had two parallel universes going on. And in the end, I could see that it was kind of tearing him apart.
And so instead of him being just excited about the songs we had, he was like, yeah, but I’ve got to, you know, there was two things going on. So in the end, I said to him, why don’t we just pull the whole thing together and call it Crowded House? And I guess it was a bold thing to say, but it didn’t sound bold to me. It just seemed like, well, there’s only one way out of this.
It’s just to make one project out of it. So we did. And, you know, I was in the band and loved it.
It was great fun. We did one tour. I think anybody who saw that before piece, me, Neil, Nick and Paul, I reckon they were lucky, because they saw something really special.
And a few years later, Paul Hister rang me up and said he’d been listening to live recordings of that first tour we did. And he said, mate, we were the best band in the world. So, yeah, it was a brief shining time where we had me and Neil singing together on stage and just everything about it felt right.
And then it didn’t. Many battles are lost But you’ll never see the end of the road While you’re traveling with me Hey now, hey now Don’t dream it’s over Hey now, hey now When the world comes here They’ve come, they’ve come To do the war between us No, they won’t win My toe in my car There’s a hole in the roof My possessions are causing me suspicion But there’s no proof I also had been writing and I’d written Persuasion and a few other songs that I wanted to record. And so I was quite glad in the way to pull the pin.
I think it was getting too much for everyone. It didn’t feel the same to them. It was too Fin-centric or something.
The overwhelming fin factor was too much. And the relationship between you, of course, weathered all these storms, didn’t it? It never caused any distress to the two of you. Well, no, I mean, it did cause distress.
But we were brothers first, I suppose, before anything else. How would you describe the writing process with Neil and being up there and singing with him? That must be wonderful. It is, yeah.
I’m not sure we’ll do it again. I hope we do. I’m sure he would like to, too, but it’s just something strange that happens where we just know that this is the time.
And when we start writing, we can just sort of draw on the same well of memories and feelings and it just happens. And then we sing together and, yeah, it’s like the blood harmony. I mean, you just can’t beat it, really.
So why do you question whether it will happen again or not? Well, I mean, we’re both pretty busy. In the last year alone, I put out, I think it was three new albums, opened a new musical and opened a new opera. Sometimes it’s just hard to find the time because you get excited about something else.
I’ve done this album with Andy and we found a nice little window for it to be released, so we’re hoping we might even do some shows, but we’re not sure, you know. What’s your favourite track on this album? Oh, that’s a good question. I do really love a song called It’s Family because it was written after Dad passed away during the recording of the album.
He was 97. So he had a very good life and there was sadness but there was also just wanting to remember that all the things he’d been through in the 20th century and when we lose older people now, we’re losing a witness to so many things that, you know, there’ll be nobody else in the world soon who was there in World War II or, you know, the Great Depression, the invention of, you know, television, computers, the whole thing. So he was there for such an extraordinary century of bloodshed and innovation and art making and just so many things.
So the song is kind of a homage to him and all those things that he saw and heard. Our daughter sings a line on it, Family Forever. She just repeats that little phrase and she had a very close relationship with Dad, so there’s a real ache in her voice.
When I asked her to sing it, she was happy to do so because she was so close to Dad. In fact, she inherited his watch, which she sometimes wears, and an old sweater of his that she likes to wear. It’s just beautiful, those things.
Really nice. They’re the important things, aren’t they? Yeah. It’s fair we’re keeping us together Bearing witness to each other Navigating centuries The beauty, terror, and the splendor The smile of someone who I long to see And when I do, I’ll tell her That I love her Sweet silence of surrender Sweet silence of surrender So, Tim Fingen, you started off being this super confident young man that was going to conquer the world, and for all it seems like you have.
Is the moral of the story here self-belief and determination? Oh, I think I’d probably boil it down to something even simpler because, I mean, on the one hand, you’re right about the belief, but it was belief in the band. I didn’t really have a lot of self-belief. In fact, it suited me well to wear the clothes and put the make-up on because I wasn’t a natural performer.
Even as a kid, when I used to sing with Neil, I’d run off and hide before I’d be dragged out to do it. So I’d much rather be a writer than a performer, and that’s what I’m a lot more now these days. An absolute pleasure chatting with you.
Thank you for sharing your stories and your time with us here. Whatever you do is brilliant. Even if some of us don’t get it all of the time, we all do love it.
Thanks a lot. I enjoyed it. Bye-bye.
Because it’s a beautiful day You’ve been listening to A Breath of Fresh Air with Sandy Kaye.