Tim Finn - Perfect Pop

After a six-year break Tim Finn is about to release a solo record. GREG DIXON talks to him about marriage, fatherhood and his accidental homecoming.

It's nearly dinner time but Harper Finn is dead keen on watching and listening. He's just not that keen on watching and listening to Dad.

"Wiggles," he intones at the sort of insistent volume only a 2-year-old can generate, "Wiggles."

"You can't actually watch the Wiggles at the moment, Harper," comes the patient reply, "I know you'd love to, but I'm talking, talking to the man. Daddy's working."

Daddy might be just about to release his fifth solo record - Say It Is So, his first in six years - but in the few moments since the "man" arrived at his pop-star Dad's Mt Eden home, it is the bashful, gentle son who has had all the limelight.

He's the home's real star who'd shyly greeted me on the short, steep path from the street to the door of his folks' fashionable 1930s residence.

As I came through the gate calling, "Hello," Finn junior had frowned, not quite sure what to make of the stranger (as it turned out, much like his Dad), before running up behind to effortlessly snatch attention away from my intrusion on the status quo.

"It's the centre of my life now, my marriage and my fatherhood," Finn says. "It's something from which everything springs. But as Tom Waits said, 'Just because it's true it doesn't mean it's interesting.'"

But it is. Finn could be just another father but he is also the 47-year-old guy with a 25-year career that gave New Zild its first really successful export stamped "music." He gave us - as he and the others reminded us in Auckland at New Year - Split Enz, the seminal local act, the reason Finn will always be cherished and remembered.

In the nearly two decades since Enz ceased as a fulltime outfit, his work has had its share of success, though measured at times with indifference, but up till now he has remained singularly focused on writing, performing and charting the next perfect pop hit.

Now he seems just as focused on being a perfect pop.

"I didn't really have any expectations [about parenthood]. I wanted to experience it, I was very open to it."

If Split Enz was Finn's first love, it was never like this. And if it was the first family which first took him from these shores - for what became a quarter of a century based overseas - it is the new one that in many ways brought him home.

And it was literally by accident.

While he and his wife Marie, a former Australian MTV presenter, were over from their Sydney home last year, the toddler had a mishap with hot water and was admitted for treatment to Middlemore Hospital.

"He's fine now, everything's fine, but it was very scary at the time. The whole family came out of the woodwork when that was going on, cousins and uncles, everybody was chipping in and ringing up and it just made me feel very protected, very nurtured. It made me realise I wanted Harper to be among all that."

The Finns started looking around at houses to distract themselves from the seriousness of going to Middlemore every day.

The one they bought and moved into in September turned out to be the first they looked at. And its leafy street - surely the model for any young family - is a close walk to the suburb's well-stocked village, well-funded schools and a major bus route (although there's always the Volvo - the safest family car on the road according to the cliche - in the garage for rainy days).

Above the work-in-progress garden - he's no green-fingers, a friend's doing it - of the Finn's new home the wooden-floored, white-walled interior is dominated by a gallery of modern, original art and objet d'art. The effect is much like Finn himself: serious and arty, cool and interesting. It's also his home's serious, arty, cool and interesting interior that he wants behind him in the picture taken for this story.

Although he later obliges by lithely clambering up a tree to be photographed, inside he has shown a flash of his old "I'm-in-charge attitude" which helped to earn him the nickname "Bull" while in Enz.

But Finn really is in charge of everything these days.

Without a record label deal, Say It Is So is a record he's made himself, is selling himself and he'll manage himself on tour. He says he wanted to do it that way.

The product of a two-year journey, the album was written on road trips with Marie and recorded with American producer Jay Joyce in country's hit factory, Nashville.

The result, while hardly country, is unlike anything he's done before: a low-key, Sunday morning sort of record of rough watercolours and what sounds like potentially perfect pop hits.

"I had the luxury of a lot of time, I suppose. I was not with a label, so I was kind of free to drift around and imagine the next period instead of having a template imposed upon me from the [music] business.

"So when I finally got to Nashville and finally met Jay Joyce, the chemistry was there, it came very fast."

It doesn't sound like it came quite as confessional as it used to. Although he says there are signposts and elements of what's been happening in his life on the record, he concedes perhaps this one is more emotionally upbeat than his past long-players.

"There is more humour, perhaps. I suppose I was very influenced by the Beatles, but especially by John Lennon, who sort of pioneered a certain confessional style of writing. But again the Tom Waits thing: 'Just because it's true, it doesn't make it interesting.'

"Lennon was interesting to us, therefore what he was saying about his life was interesting - there are very few people in rock who have ever been as riveting in their personal life and in their persona as Lennon.

"I am not Lennon, and I've learned to my cost that certain songs I have written were written, I think, because I thought they were valid because they were true, but actually they weren't very interesting. But then other songs have been interesting and they weren't very true."

What seems to be more or less true is that he's happy, well "happy enough." He's just getting sick and tired of having to say so.

"Why are people even interested in whether I'm happy or not? Do they ask every other songwriter they talk to, 'Are you happy'? Is it just me?

"But definitely I'm happy enough for any one man. I don't feel that I've arrived, is the point I suppose I'd like to stress. Why are they even interested in it, you know? The main thing I want to talk about is my work and my music."

Ah yes, the music. It's delivered him pop's prizes - popularity, hits, critical plaudits - even an OBE. But has it delivered his share? He's had, it hardly needs noting, less than his young brother, Neil.

"I've had plenty. Maybe I'll get more, maybe I won't. But I do feel I've had plenty.

Finn says he has - and this must be a first for him - no expectations for Say It Is So. Which is perhaps just as well. While his first solo effort, Escapade, reaped praise and strong public support, subsequent albums haven't consistently done the same.

"In Split Enz it was sort of a quest in a way, and in that sense it was a kind of selfless seeking of glory. But in terms of me and my solo work, I'm just as in love with chords and rhythms as ever. It's a really physical expression for me now. And whatever comes beyond that, I do feel that I've had a really decent share of whatever's going."

Just not his son's enthusiasm for his music - well not yet, anyway.

"He's not a fan. It's so weird. He loves the Wiggles, he loves me to play Wiggles songs live. At least he can accept me being a covers band."

Say it isn't so.