SPLIT ENZ – LIVE: REVIEW
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SPLIT ENZ
ICC Theatre, Sydney, May 18
IT HELPS, OF COURSE, but ye olde bands don’t really need to have many, or indeed any, great songs or be particularly proficient anymore to succeed on the nostalgia circuit. While they’re the excuse for us gathering, the exercise is at least as much about what we were doing and who we were when those songs were first heard, so their first order of business is making us feel younger, unencumbered and maybe just that little bit looser again. Do that and we’ll forgive just about anything, be you Al Green, Duran Duran or [insert act of your choice here, there are so many].
Then, to prove me wrong, there’s Split Enz.
Here came the six-piece band of four originals – the brothers Finn, Noel Crombie and Eddie Rayner – and two excellent junior blow-ins in bassist James Milne and drummer Matt Eccles (who even looks a bit like early Enz drummer Malcom Green), all suitably dressed in Crombie-designed loud checks, vivid patterns and wide stripes. The senior men may be well aged, but they were not going quietly, peeling off Shark Attack, which still feels like a teenage frenzy done by arthouse punks, History Repeats, a synth pop song that forgot to get rid of guitars, and Poor Boy, ostensibly a straight pop song but one that can’t hide its oddness.
Biff. Bang. Pow. What a cracking opening of energy and vividness, and the songs weren’t bad at all were they?
Then 80-odd minutes later, the main set would close with another flurry of a kitchen pots and pans clatter Hard Act To Follow, a joyously proggy Six Months In A Leaky Boat, and the spunky simplicity of I Got You, before everyone, from leaping-about-with-better-knees-than-ours Tim Finn to the lost in the darkness lot at the back of this cavernous theatre, was set loose with I See Red.
This was nostalgic but it was not in aspic – see also the very early songs Time For A Change, played as a boarding house ballad meeting Roxy Music, the kazoo-spiked Matinee Idyll, and Spellbound - and even the flaws ended up serving a purpose. The room’s limitations in managing volume and clarity in Give It A Whirl, allowed Fleetwood Mac’s erstwhile touring guitarist (one Neil Finn) to show how to distract with flair. A messy, mistake-riddled That Was My Mistake circus-walked its way through on sheer fun, and a Crombie-as-Hendrix guitar solo, to set up the mood for that last stretch of the set. (Crombie closed the night with a spoon solo in Strait Old Line that turned epic. Because of course he did,)
And in the encore, as I Hope I Never began and a collective intake of breath was felt (could Tim’s voice make this work or at least not crash it?), the raggedness and imperfections remade its vulnerability and brought surprising satisfaction.
Tim had earlier created an absolute highlight with Stuff And Nonsense, a young man’s errant foolishness about life – now sung by a less vocally stable but more emotionally grounded version - given more weight and delicacy than any of our pronouncements at that age deserve. What a song.
Lest we forget among the stomps and hooks and fun and reminders of singing along to these songs in the bedroom, on the bus or watching Sunday night Countdown, the swirls and little dabs infiltrating History Repeats, the melodic vamps in Nobody Takes Me Seriously, the weird little noises along with the rising chords in Dirty Creature, the elegant runs in Message To My Girl, the jaunty seafaring chords of Six Months and drunk sailor piano in I See Red, confirmed that this has always been Rayner’s band at its heart.
Nice of him to share though.
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Split Enz play:
RAC Arena, Perth, May 22
Adelaide Entertainment Centre, May 25
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A version of this review was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald