Tim Finn’s forthcoming tour will be a chronological wander through his career, one that has taken him in and out of bands (Split Enz, Crowded House) and in and out of songwriting partnerships too (Enz co-founders Phil Judd and Mike Chunn, brother Neil). In the past decade he has mostly turned his hand to musicals – something he tells the Listener is a natural extension of the characters he became in songs of the Enz’s early theatrical era.
“Having done a lot of music theatre stuff recently, as well, I can see where it all comes from, because I was writing character songs like Charlie, and Nobody Takes Me Seriously way back then and always enjoyed that. So, it wasn’t a huge step to get into theatre.”
The tour is called “The Lives and Times of Tim Finn”. So, will he, at a silver-haired 71, be playing Tim Finn, the man with the animated eyebrows poking from the grease paint and the parrot- plume hairdo? Which Tim Finn will Tim Finn be playing?
“Which one? I mean, there’s been a few … and gradually I learned just to be me. Obviously, I can’t be who that guy was in 1977 but I can step back into it like an actor stepping back into a role.”
The tour title and talk of past lives and characters inspired an idea. We asked him to pick five songs that are his most Tim Finn songs – ones that will likely appear in the shows – and give us the stories behind them.
Maybe from Mental Notes (1975)
“And if you all had rooms/ Would you still have room for me?”
A prime slab of baroque-period Split Enz from side two of their debut album with music from Finn and lyrics by Phil Judd. The band performed it on the very first Telethon in 1975 in the middle of a national tour marking their return from their first trip to Australia.
“That was pretty poppy for Mental Notes. I would pair that song with My Mistake because they both have that kind of piano playing eights with a kind of bouncy feel. There were a few of those – there was the ending of that song on Mental Notes called Amy that also had that kind of bounce. It was something we must have picked up, obviously, from the Beatles but there were a lot of other bands doing it as well. Bowie did it on Hunky Dory on a few tracks like Changes and that was very influential on us as a groove and as a group. Maybe was the only time that I wrote all the music, and I gave it to Phil, and he came back with a set of really good lyrics. That’s how the song was born, and we never did it again.
“Phil had this weird sort of prophetic way of writing lyrics, where he would cast himself into the future. In that one he had “and when the day breaks in our stately home, we will sit” – the fantasy of being a rock star in a mansion was what he must have been kind of thinking about. He was very adept at his playing with language. For somebody who was so visual – he was a very good painter, obviously – but he was also really masterful with language. I learned a lot from being around and working with him. I was always good with words too, but I was somewhat waiting for life experience to kind of come and eat me alive.”
Charlie from Dizrythmia (1977)
“Wake up, Charlie, rise and shine/ Pour the tea, I’ll draw the blinds.”
A lament for a friend and a friendship which is among the most heartbreaking of Finn’s many ballads.
“We came off tour in America and Phil had left the band, for the second time actually, and the first time was pretty civilised, because we had a conversation about it. He said he wanted to step back and just be a writer for the band and not be a performer. We did a few buck-a-head shows in Auckland, then he came back into the band when we went to Australia in 1975, then he left the band after the American tour which, admittedly, was a pretty traumatic tour. America was not ready for the Enz, it’s fair to say. We did get some semi-obsessed fans out of it, but they were very few in number. In Atlanta, we had this big fight, punch-up, whatever. Phil had basically left the stage halfway through the set and came back, but I called him out on it. He was probably going through a lot of mental stuff that I didn’t understand. No one did really.
“So, I went back to England with the band and wrote Charlie. I always felt like it was my first real song – certainly the first song after writing with Chunn at school and then later writing with Phil – the first song I wrote on my own. In a way, it was a murder ballad. There was actually a Charlie, and we all knew this guy, though not well, who had committed suicide in our first year at university.
“We were reading a lot of Hermann Hesse, there was a lot of doom and gloom around and tortured this and that and Charlie just played into all of that. But it was really about the death of a friendship, because it never really got back. We had a few goes at it, a few fits and starts, reconciling and getting Phil back in the band but it never really recovered.”
Nobody Takes Me Seriously from True Colours (1980)
“Nobody listens to a word that I say/ And at work I’m just a foreman’s tool.”
The nervy start of side two of the Enz’s biggest-selling album.
“It’s a song I haven’t played for years. I was thinking about all the jobs that I had from the years when I left university in 1972 and then we formed the band and all had lots of day jobs between then and 1975, when we went to Australia. I had – I counted them up – 22 jobs and none of them would last longer than about three weeks. Either I’d make sure that happened or I’d be sacked. I worked at the post office with Noel [Crombie] and Phil, which was a really good job, a government position where there was no accountability at all. It was chaos. I worked out at the freezing works for a while; I worked as a nurse aide in what we used to call a mental hospital.
“I always felt completely out of place, and I was challenged quite seriously by the other guys with the banter and the whole testosterone, macho atmosphere. They kind of know that you don’t quite belong. I was just daydreaming about the band all the time and they probably saw me as quite weak … that was fine. I didn’t suffer any anguish. But I was glad to leave because it was just in and out, making enough money to pay the rent for the next month. So, I can definitely relate to this character in the song.”
Hard Act to Follow from Waiata (1981)
“There’s a lot of good acts around/ Plenty of profound performers.”
The quick-step opening track to the True Colours follow-up album that commented on the high expectations of chasing up a hit album, among other things.
“Because it’s called Hard Act to Follow it was almost a meta sort of moment because there was pressure on the band. We had a launch for this album. A Mushroom [record label] person came into the men’s room after me – he was probably going to offer me drugs or something but no, he just wanted to chat to me about the album. He said, ‘So, have you given us another True Colours?’ and I remember, without even feeling any sense of trying to be ironic or trying to be smart, I just said, ‘I hope not.’ That’s how we all felt. We didn’t want to recreate it but, of course, he did and the label and everyone around us did.
“We once played the Tanelorn Music Festival in Australia up on the Central Coast and there were a lot of surfies there and a lot of Midnight Oil fans and we went on, after Midnight Oil. They had got the crowd off so badly it was just insane, and we knew we were in trouble in the dressing rooms. So, right, we’re going to start with Hard Act to Follow as a homage. So we did. It didn’t really work. We liked it but the crowd were perhaps a bit bemused. But you don’t really follow Midnight Oil anywhere within 1000km of Sydney.
“But that song, the faster we played, the better it got.”
Staring at the Embers from Escapade (1983)
“Staring at the embers/ Of my memory, trying to remember/ Just what you meant to me.”
One of the many perky 80s pop songs from Finn’s breakthrough solo album, Escapade, which outsold the Enz albums of the period and foreshadowed his departure from the band.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever played Escapade songs in New Zealand. I’ve played Fraction Too Much Friction, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone deeper. It’s 40 years this year since Escapade was released. It was such a good time for me getting in the studio with [producer and one-time Beach Boys drummer] Ricky Fataar on drums and amazing backing vocalist Venetta Fields [who was one of Tina Turner’s Ikettes]. She was effortlessly soulful, and I’d never sung with a singer like that and she just took it to the next level in a way that was really pure and simple. It’s a pretty straight-ahead song but time has served it well and I’ve played around the house and thought, ‘I’m going to really enjoy this.’”
Tour dates: Christchurch Town Hall, September 20; Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, September 21; Civic Theatre, Auckland, September 23.
