Neil Finn book: ‘Scary’ fans, star described NZ as ‘worst place in the world’ for ambition

Neil Finn said New Zealand was a fantastic place to grow up as a kid and a great place to retire.

Kiwis are leaving New Zealand in droves and taking potshots at the country on their way out. But it’s not a new phenomenon - in 1981, as Split Enz was touring the US, the Finn brothers’ homeland was a talking point, as revealed in this extract from Neil Finn’s new biography.

In Australia, I Got You and True Colours — which reached number 1 and sold strongly for more than a year — were hogging the charts, while Countdown aired the I Got You video every time they did their chart rundown. When the band performed the song live, shrieks of “I love you Neil!” almost drowned them out.

With all this exposure, Neil started to find the most mundane things incredibly challenging. He was in a Myer department store when a group of teenage girls spotted him and before Neil knew what had hit him, he was being chased up an escalator. It was like a scene out of A Hard Day’s Night.

This would become a regular occurrence whenever Neil left his house: someone would spot him and soon enough he would be swarmed by young women. Fans tagged “I Lust for Neil’s Finn” on a fence near where Neil and Sharon lived. Neil later said that all the adoration was “fun for about five minutes” but then became “distressing”. He really just wanted to do his shopping without being hassled.

Split Enz at the Memphis in May nightclub, Memphis, in 1981. From left, brothers Neil Finn and Tim Finn, Eddie Rayner, Noel Crombie and Nigel Griggs. Photo / Paul Natkin/Getty Images

Neil’s old friend Buster Stiggs had joined Phil Judd’s latest band, The Swingers, and moved to Australia. He house-shared with Neil and Sharon in Melbourne’s Glen Iris — Tim remained in Sydney with his girlfriend, an English dancer named Liz Malam — and got to witness some of the madness from close range.

“Neil had a lot of adoration from fans and was becoming a public figure,” Stiggs observed, “but he was always the singer-songwriter first.”

One night, a crowd rushed the group’s vehicle after a Split Enz show, surrounding it, most of them yelling out for Neil. Stiggs, who was in the car, had never seen anything like it.

“It was a surreal, scary and mind-blowing experience, all at once,” he said. It took some time before they were finally able to make their escape.

Neil reacted to the attention by staying home more and more, only leaving to play gigs.

“I don’t think it suited my personality to be that visible,” he said. (Almost 40 years later, he’d write a song called Recluse, proving that some things never changed.)

He and Sharon played lengthy games of Monopoly to pass the time, while she surrounded herself with a reliable group of friends who looked out for her while Neil was away.

And Split Enz toured a lot as True Colours gained traction, spending much of February 1980 in New Zealand, then playing more than 50 gigs in Australia from March right through to the end of June, when they packed Melbourne’s Festival Hall. True Colours was on its way to selling a whopping 300,000 copies in Australia — only Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Glass Houses by Billy Joel sold more copies during 1980.

Split Enz promotional shot for the release of their fifth album True Colours in 1980. Photo / Supplied

Neil Finn, second from left, with bandmates.

On the road, the band spent their downtime indulging in seemingly endless water-pistol fights and what Neil called “general goonery in the bus”. Tim described it as “an idiotic and ecstatic time”.

‘Dark forces’ at play

The Finns’ homeland became quite the talking point when the band began an American sortie in California on 8 May 1981. It was the first of two month-long US visits during a year in which they played almost 100 shows and spent six months on the road.

US TV talking head Tom Snyder interviewed Neil and Tim. Tim gave Snyder a Māori tiki, telling him it was “for good luck”. The topic quickly turned to New Zealand — what was it really like?

“It’s a fantastic place to grow up as a kid,” said Neil, before adding, “and it’s also a great place to retire.” It was the in-between bits that were tricky, Neil explained.

“I think it’s the only country in the Western world that has a declining population,” added Tim.

They had a similar conversation with the ageless Dick Clark, when Split Enz appeared on American Bandstand. Clark asked Neil why so many young people left New Zealand.

“Well, it’s basically the worst place in the world to be if you’ve got any ambition, certainly as far as being a rock band,” explained Neil. “But it’s a wonderful place to have a nice quiet time, relax, play sport, go outdoors, climb mountains, ford rivers” — at this moment Tim burst into an impromptu rendition of Climb Ev’ry Mountain from The Sound of Music.

Clark asked if they’d one day return to make a home in New Zealand, a question that proved to be prophetic for both the Finns. “Well,” replied Neil, “I think we all want to be buried there.” Behind him, his bandmates suppressed their laughter.

They may have been in an irreverent mood, but there were darker forces at work during 1981. Tim was stalked by a mother and daughter when the band toured Canada. Eddie Rayner and manager Nathan Brenner got into a skirmish that left Brenner with a concussion. Even the normally calm Neil argued with hotel staff during one stop.

The label’s choice of Neil’s Iris, meanwhile, as the lead single in North America proved to be a big mistake; the record failed to chart. (Neil confessed that he’d never met anyone called Iris; he simply woke up one day, the name popped into his head “and the song came with it”.) And not shooting a video for the song was also another massive clunker, especially for a band as visual as Split Enz, in an era when an attention-grabbing video could turn an okay song into a hit.

Most critically, Tim’s marriage to Liz was falling apart after less than a year as a result of all the time he’d spent on tour. By the time they returned to Australia, for another big festival show at Tanelorn, in northern New South Wales, on 4 October, Tim was in a precarious mental shape and suffering panic attacks. (He was “suicidal”, according to Brenner.) It was younger brother Neil who came to his rescue.

After the Tanelorn show, their last of the year, Neil and Tim travelled to Phillip Island, off the Victorian coast, home to the smallest penguins in the world. They had planned to write some songs, but instead spent most of their time hiking, climbing and soaking up the scenery, just like they’d done on holiday in Mount Maunganui when they were kids.

It was a key moment in their sibling relationship, a genuine turning point. As Neil recalled, “I suddenly found myself in an unfamiliar position of being there for Tim and offering support when he was feeling quite fragile.”

Typically, some great music emerged from this difficult time, including a song that would become Neil’s first great co-write with his brother.

Don’t Dream It’s Over: The remarkable life of Neil Finn, by Jeff Apter, published by Allen & Unwin, RRP $37.99. Out August 8