The Tyranny of Distance

Rip It Up, Issue 105, 1 April 1986, Page 8

The Tyranny of Distance

Tim Finn Takes a Pun

In 1984 Tim Finn made his escapade from Split Enz. Now he's reappeared, with a new band, new record, new company and new country.

Finn, a household name here and in Australia after 12 years with the Enz, is making a determined effort to become known in Europe as a solo artist. Now based in England with the weight of Virgin Records behind him, He has just released his second solo album. Called Big Canoe, it’s been made with English musicians and an English producer. Home for Finn is now London, where he lives just south of the Thames with his companion, actress Greta Scacchi. “I like it there a lot,” he says. “Through Greta I’ve got to know quite a few English people, and once you get to know the people, you get to know the place. I like recording there. I’ve found a whole new energy. It’s just the sort of challenge I needed after peaking in Australia. “In New Zealand we were part of the tapestry, and there were many peaks, but in Australia after the Split Enz peak and I did my album, which did well, I didn’t want to sit back on my laurels and just cruise. I felt like I needed to get out — to fresh pastures and all that.” While Split Enz may have had moderate success in England, Tim Finn is virtually unknown there, “except amongst the people who are bordering on the fanatic about music in their lives,” he says. “They may know the name, but the masses don’t. Only the single of Escapade was released there — it didn’t do much, so they didn’t bother putting the album out.” Now that Finn is signed to a major English company however, his chances of a breakthrough there are much higher, and the word is that Virgin have big things planned for the boy from Te Awamutu. Finn says he was a lot more “painstaking” over the making of Big Canoe. ‘‘Escapade took about six weeks and was just a fun album really. It was quite poorly received by the critics, which I can understand — compared to a lot of Split Enz stuff it was bordering on the middle-of-the-road. The lyrics might have been romantic, boy meets girl, but that’s what I was living at the time. Big Canoe has better album tracks and is probably deeper. There’s a lot more colour in the arrangements; it's a harder sound, a bigger and better sound. I certainly think it’s a good step on from Escapade”

Unlike Escapade, with its line-up of top names,

none of the musicians on Big Canoe are famous. ‘‘They’re all about to be names," says Finn. “Jeff Dugmore [drums] and Steve Greetham [bass] both played on Joan Armatrading’s album straight after mine. John McLoughlan played guitar. They’re pretty busy now, they’re being noticed, so I got in just in time. They’re in their early 20s and aren’t session musicians, they’ve been in bands. We rehearsed for two weeks and it didn’t feel just like me with some session musicians, it felt like a real band. I was lucky — I wanted it to be like that.” Making music with strangers didn’t create any problems. “For me, working solo isn’t being on my own, it’s working with groups of people,” says Finn. “I’m into spontaneity. I don’t like to stand around in the studio and say, play this. I don’t have any preconceived ideas. I don’t do a lot of home demos and things — people who do that tend to get fixed ideas about arrangements. I just write songs in their basic form and let people take them how they want. If I don’t like it, of course...” Nick Launay is an English producer known for his work with INXS and the Models. “He took each of them quite a bit further says Finn. “He’s quite adventurous with sounds, having come up through the engineering school, where he worked with bands such as Public Image Limited and Killing Joke — pretty left-wing guitar bands. So his first thoughts aren’t, ‘Let’s make this

a hit single,’ it’s ‘Let’s make this interesting.’ Finn wrote many of the tracks on the album to lyrics by a young English playwright called Jeremy Brock, and he says “it’s the best collaboration I’ve had since Phil Judd.” They met in Bristol after Greta Scacchi had auditioned for a play of Brock’s. “We were sitting in a pub — theatrical people are always in the pub — and I asked if he had any poems. He’s a very passionate Englishmen, a lot of them are cynical but he’s got a lot of passion. It was very refreshing. “Being a playwright, Jeremy thinks in characters. So, not so many of the songs are about me or I, but they take on characters, which I’ve always wanted to do but I just don’t think like that. I found it exciting, a liberation really. It was uncanny how it worked. The title song ‘Big Canoe’ had quite an elaborate verse structure — it wasn’t just four lines and then the chorus — he gave me the lyrics which fitted precisely. It was uncanny. And I trusted that — I always trust things that seem to happen naturally.” Within a short time, Brock and Finn had written over a dozen songs together, most of which are on the album. Now, the pair are working on a musical together. “Jeremy's making that his main project this year, he’s coming out in April to research it,” says Finn. “Hopefully there’ll be a script by the end of this year and by the end of ’B7 the film will start to be made. It’s that far off but it feels more real now than it ever dix. I’ve wanted to do it with John Clarke [Fred Dagg] but he’s a hard man to pin down, he’s so busy in Australia. The musical’s been kicking around for years — I made the mistake of telling a few people, so it sort of haunts me now.” As you’d expect from the composer of ‘Six Months in a Leaky Boat; ‘Big Canoe’ refers to the migration of the Maori to Aotearoa. “But it’s also about migration in a general sense,” says Finn. “For me, it was from here to England. It can also be seen as a spiritual and mental travelling onward thing. But that’s the only imagery on the album that’s specific — more generally, it’s about a spiritual journey.” Although Split Enz spent so many years in Australia, their songs always had many references to New Zealand. “Australia looked at us very kindly,” says Finn. “We lived there for so long that they came to regard us as their own, even though we weren’t. They didn’t mind the New Zealand references. It was a very natural thing for us. Because we lived outside New Zealand for so long we tended to look back at it and see it through childlike eyes; you tend to see the myth more than the reality and it strengthens your attachment to the place.” Finn will be back, probably in August, to tour New Zealand and Australia with a band that includes some of the musicians on the album, if they’re available. It’s not the first time he’s per-

formed without Split Enz — at the time of Escapade he did five concerts in Australia with a 12-piece band. “It was a great experience,” he says. “That was another reason why I ended up leaving the band. I got a taste of what else was possible.” 1985 was Finn’s first year without the Enz, a band in which he’d spent a third of his life. Did it take long to get over? "The breakup happened over a long period,” he says. "I did Escapade, then those concerts, so I had one foot in and one out. I thought I could juggle the two things, so there was a period of adjustment over a few months. When I left the band, within three days I was out of Australia and in Italy, and that was such a shock anyway that I burnt out any residue that was there. It seemed a very natural time to finish it.” Do you ever miss the companionship of the band? “Now and then, of course, nostalgia comes back, and there were times during the recording of the album — when you’re all there in the control room, everybody’s supporting you, but when you’re on your own, it’s just you and the producer. I found it desperately hard at times to know if what I was doing was good or not. The producer might say it’s great, but when you’ve known people for a long time you tend to trust their opinion more.” Finn says there are rumours of Noel Crombie, Nigel Griggs, Eddie Rayner and Phil Judd playing together. “I don’t know if that’s come to anything yet. Phil played on my album, of course, he played guitar on a few tracks and a solo on a song called ‘Spiritual Hunger’ — it’s classic Judd. He’s been doing a lot of painting in Melbourne but I think he’s getting itchy fingers again. He never stays away from music that long.” In 1983, when Escapade came out, Tim Finn said he “didn’t want to become the Rod Stewart of the 80s” Was that still the intention? “I’m a solo artist now,” he says. “At the time it had those connotations for me— the ageing statesman of rock. I hate that stereotype of being in a band, then going solo, and yet you can’t help becoming one. When we were in Split Enz we hated the idea that we’d become a stadium band. Because you see it — bands loose their sleekness and their hollow look. Like Simple Minds — I can’t help noticing — they had that lean and hungry look, and now they actually look plumper. They’re just as brilliant in a way, but you do lose something.

“I think basically I’m a songwriter more than anything else — that’s when I feel a whole person, when I’m at home writing a song. For me, solo is just a chance to work with different teams. I’m not on my own, the musicians and the producer all put in ideas, so I’m not really solo. I just write the songs.”

Chris Bourke