THIS IS POP? SPLIT ENZ' AB-ORIGINAL ARTIFACTS

THIS IS POP? SPLIT ENZ' AB-ORIGINAL ARTIFACTS

FEATURES

Toby Goldstein

Amazing, the stuff rock critics get in the mail—items fiendishly clever in design, calculated to adorn the wearer or the home, planned with a prime directive to serve as a nagging reminder that Group XYZ is the best money can buy, so write about ’em, you dolt! One such objet d’art that comes to mind is an earthenware planter sent complete with easy-grow seed packet. The receptacle looked like some unfortunate soul whose head was cloven in a deep V—kinda like a lobotomized clown. And according to its record company, this creature of invention actually resembled a member of an Australian band called Split Enz. More like a buncha freaks, thought I, although the mood of the album being hyped, a debut called Mental Notes, occupied some indeterminate space between smooth and strange.

“We asked for it, and we can’t blame anybody for taking that attitude,” admits Enz spokesman Tim Finn, perched on the edge of his chair in a midtown hotel room. Neither Finn, or his younger brother Neil look particularly outre in the grayish daylight, although at Irving Plaza that night, their soft clouds of hair were twitched into towering quiffs, jutting over brows like precarious mountain cliffs. Absent also are the band’s chalk-white facial masks, contrasted by multi-hued eye shadows that matched their stage suits—six tutti-frutti ice cream cones playing rock ’n’ roll.

Never mind that America’s heartland might choose to view this curious multitude as the rebirth of glam-rock or an imported Kissoid clone. To the Finns, who tend to speak about their place in life quite seriously, the look and sound of Split Enz have always been two parts of an unbreakable whole. “Noel (percussionist Crombie) started doing costumes before he was in the band. We didn’t start out as a concept at all, just an organic thing that grew and grew. The whole band’s like that—we just act instinctively and we don’t conceptualize or theorize at all. I think after the effect we made, we sort of rationalized what we did and why we did it, but while we’re doing it, it just feels right. Naive.”

Actually, with the polished melodic spurts of energy that mark Split Enz’s newest and most successful album, True Colours, supported by their equally accomplished live show, this band is anything but naive. At the time when melodic tunes are too often the province of Manilowtypes, Split Enz got the assembled Saturday night date punkettes to applaud two sweet love tunes smack in the middle of their set. At selected moments, Tim Finn hurtled around doing hand and foot jive in front of a strobe light, and chalked up a few ovations for clever use of the old psychedelic tidbit. After slogging around the Australian boonies for six years, as well as surviving extended out-of-fashion status while living in Europe, Split Enz know what they like. That some of it may be art appears incidental.

Says Tim earnestly, “We’ve done so many gigs in Australia that we can come into a place like New York and not get too worried about it. You are up there to do a job. We’re very traditional in our performing values.,.that the show must go on. Occasionally, we probably move people’s emotions, but we believe that we’re there to entertain, in the highest sense of the word. It’s not a cheap, trite thing. We don’t have any illusions above or beyond that. ”

Throughout much of the rock era, Australia and especially its neighbor, New • Zealand, where most of the Enz Were raised, was not exactly a happening place. Neil, six years younger than his brother, wasn’t yet of gig-going age, but he remembers the odd package tour, like the Who with the Small Faces. It was a musically frustrating location to be in. “We went through stages when we were first starting out of buying every rock magazine we could possibly lay our hands on, ’cause anything over there (meanirlg here) was incredibly exotic to us. We took them to parties!” Now that’s sick.

Adds Tim, “The Pretty Things got kicked J out of New Zealand ’cause they set fire to'| the curtains at one of the town halls. That S was really outragequs for those days. They were seen to be drinking on stage as well, which didn’t go down well. In New Zealand, you didn’t drink after six o’clock. Between five and six, everybody’d go mad, and between six and seven, there’d be hundreds of accidents.” It’s not surprising that stardom for New Zealanders is less than a sometime thing, forcing twangy-voiced pair to hop over to Australia, their current turf.

As the Enz released their first five albums in the mid and late 70’s, they made frequent use of kangaroo-land’s ties to mother Britain, alternating recording between Australia and the U.K., where Phil Manzanera produced an early LP. One result of a lengthy British foray was the addition of English rhythm section Malcolm Green and Nigel Griggs, as well as the substitution of Neil Finn for original Split Enz songwriter Phil Judd.

“He had the nerve to say, let me think about it!” jibes Tim, pointing at his fast-talking sibling. “It took him maybe ten minutes.” Says Neil, “The others had to have a considerable amount of faith in me, looking back. When I first arrived, I hadn’t really played electric guitar before that, so I was really hopeless. They were carrying me. It was a big risk.” What the rest of the band didn’t expect to emerge from their newly added, boyish-looking guitar player Was a songwriter of magnitude. Neil authored.the harmonic, “I Got You,” by a long shot the group’s biggest international hit. “I don’t know what I did right,” Neil ponders. “Don’t think about it, just do it again,” big brother orders.

One of the few times the Finn’s sen§e of c humor comes out in the open is during the £ brother’s performing repartee. They’ve got o their roles down like a vaudeville team, in which Tim, making the most of his position center stage, introduces his brother’s guest vocals by calling him a. schmuck. God knows where he picked that one up, as Tim admits with embarrassment, “I just found out what it meant.” Neil rubs his nose in it, “and he called me one on the radio last night...It is getting less one-sided these days. It’s just ’cause I’m his brother. I occasionally come back, but it’s usually easier to be aggressive than defensive.” “It’s just that I honestly believe he’s,a schmuck,” Tim deadpans. This pungent banter sure beats the lovey-dovey Gibb castrati, whose wobbly three-part harmonies must have joined the Beatles in influencing this lot in the early years at home.

"we like playing with extremes. —Tim Finn"

Far bigger than the jokes of a family feud, there’s a constant cutting edge at work during the Split Enz live show. The group’s dynamism is far too pervasive for this 800-capacity club, and it must seem that next time out, Split Enz will start to climb up the concert ladder. They have, as Rick Neilsen once said of Cheap Trick, “big personalities,” and the analogy between one’s first glimpse of those two bands is not coincidental. An audience might come to look at the weirdos, but after a few minutes, the thrill is gone, and the music remaining has to suffice.

Neil thinks, “to a certain extents the Tubes probably had the same problem we did a couple of years ago. They were remembered more for the way they looked and represented themselves onstage than for the records.” Tim agreed, “back then, we didn’t have the same strength that we do now, I think our music is quite highly evolved.

“We still have an image. The fact that we ..look different is a bonus, I guess, ’cause peopje can see us better—it makes us a bit larger than life, but beyond that if we don’t succeed musically then we’re not satisfied and the audience won’t be either. I don’t care what people say about us so long as they stand and watch and listen, and they usually do. I think even people who hate us have a healthy respect for us, ’cause they see that we mean what we’re doing. Any artist or musician that makes it always looks like they mean it. People can tell on a gut level.”

Like the laser-etched designs on True Colours, which hide the spectrum under b^sic black, Split Enz can quickly transform themselves past normalcy before they go onstage. Less than an hour to showtime, drummer Malcolm Green races down the backstage stairs, unremarkable in buttonthrough shirt and jeans. Forty-five minutes later, he’s been altered into a temporary waxwork. Neil Finn’s white makeup is so thick that daring him to smile might result in permanent damage to his facial planes. And clad in tomato red, Tim Finn does look somewhat like the parrot he complains of resembling. Sure, it’s theater. Some gape, some dance as Eddie Raynor’s keyboards swell into a majestic, murky instrumental introduction to the set. Its air of barely diffused mystery in motion is reminiscent of the Cars, for whose tour Split Enz had been briefly considered as the opening act.

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“We’d like to get to the 2-3,000 level here,” says Tim. “I think that if we were to get there, we really wouldn’t want to go beyond it—lots of people say this, of course. We don’t want to think too far into the future.” As Neil accurately says, “a lot of people, when they get to that stage, are pretty boring anyway.”

The brothers react in lively style when I mention that playing sweet-voiced ballads in the midst of punkitude isn’t done. Neil, his eyes still widened by the height of New York buildings, exclaims, “We really do love having a set like that. Most of the bands I see, no matter how good the songs are, if it’s the same tempo and the dynamics are continuous it’s really hard to keep up with it the whole time. We like talking to people different places.”

“We like playing with extremes,” Tim darkly mutters from his comer of the room. “That’s what we’ve always done, really. It goes against what’s been happening over the last five years, with your heavy metal.” “And your Air Supply,” chimes in Neil, making the first of several references to a pet bother, Australian purveyors of imitation American boredom. “Yeah,” concludes Tim, “You can stick us anywhere, we’ll be all right.” Well, they did survive their New York debut years ago, opening for Henny Youngman'.

Split Enz can be as glossy as a modern Australian city, as unpredictably raw-edged as the outback. Tim Finn is completely schizophrenic: berserk when screaming “l See Red,” calming fevered nerves while crooning * “I Hope I Never.” The group is easily ready, given it’s fervent convictions, for mass recognition, but seems psychologically able to keep playing mutants for awhile. Perhaps their flexibility subjected to' Monty Python parodies. “We’re just the hundredth race in the history of man that’s been rubbished,” laughs Neil Finn, promising further relentless invasions from that strange quick-growing Split Enz song seed. ^