Last week I made a Crowded House playlist in anticipation of their new album, but I've loved the Split Enz songs "History Never Repeats" and "Six Months In A Leaky Boat" for a long time and have always meant to dig into their catalog. 

Tracks 1 and 2 from Mental Notes (1975)
Tracks 3, 4 and 5 from Second Thoughts (1976) 
Tracks 6, 7 and 8 from Dizrhythmia (1977)
Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from True Colours (1980)
Tracks 12, 13 and 14 from Waiata (1981)
Tracks 15, 16 and 17 from Time And Tide (1982)
Tracks 18, 19 and 20 from Conflicting Emotions (1983)

Only 6 of the 9 Split Enz studio albums are available on Spotify in full, but I was able to pull tracks from Second Thoughts from a compilation. So there's nothing from the 1979's Frenzy or the final Split Enz album, 1984's See Ya 'Round, although my Crowded House playlist kicked off with a re-recording of that album's single, "I Walk Away." 

Split Enz's lineup and their sound changed a lot over the course of a decade. Tim Finn and Phil Judd split singing and songwriting duties on the first two albums, which have some really fascinatingly intricate songs, very proggy and experimental, with saxophonist Robert Gillie really shaping the sound of the songs a lot. Phil Judd was out of the band by Dizrhythmia, but they still included some songs he wrote on the album, including the great "Sugar And Spice." 

Neil Finn was 19 when he joined his big brother's band for their third album, and gradually came into his own, singing and playing guitar at first, co-writing a couple songs on their 4th album, and then emerging as a major creative force on their fifth album True Colours, writing and singing the band's biggest hit, "I Got You." I think there's a real 'steel sharpens steel' dynamic in the best Split Enz albums, when Neil was growing as a songwriter and Tim took his writing in a more pop, melodic direction as well. Keyboardist Eddie Rayner does some incredibly cool textural stuff on these records, too, and wrote a few wild tracks like "Wail." In 1983, Tim Finn launched a successful solo career, so Neil Finn wrote the majority of Conflicting Emotions, and when Tim left the band, Neil led the band for one final album, See Ya 'Round, before launching Crowded House. 

I've always been fascinated by New Zealand, my wife and I went to Australia for our honeymoon and nearly made NZ part of the trip but decided not too rush through too many different places in one trip, so it's really on my bucket list to go back and see New Zealand. And it feels like a band like Split Enz has an interesting perspective, being from this tiny country that's often in a remote corner far away from most of the English-speaking world. In some ways Split Enz sounds like a lot of their British and American contemporaries and charted a similar arc from the proggy mid-'70s to the new wave early '80s, but in some ways it feels like they were very much in their own world. And I think it's cool that they tipped a hat to indigenous people with the title of Waiata, a Maori word for song and singing (in Australia, the title of the album was Corroboree, an Aboriginal term with the same meaning). 

One thing that fascinates me about Split Enz is how they were a very visually oriented band from the beginning. Noel Crombie has been the 2nd percussionist for Split Enz throughout their history (and the primary drummer on Time And Tide) but he was also the creative force behind the band's album artwork, promotional material, costumes, and music videos. And they really made a lot of videos for a relatively small band who released most of their records before MTV existed (although "History Never Repeats" was the 12th video played on MTV's premiere broadcast). This video for the early non-single "Sweet Dreams" is a really incredible example of the early Split Enz visual style, bizarre customized suits and face paint and strange choreography. In later years they weren't quite so outwardly strange, although Crombie's videos continued to have really interesting sets and staging and camera angles. 

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