#splitenz

The way I SCREAMED when I found this!!! He looks so beautiful it actually hurts.

Freshman year of high school and wanting to decorate the inside of my locker, I somehow figured out that CD longboxes were the perfect width to fit inside the door. So I cut up the two for these Crowded House and Split Enz albums, among my earliest compact disc purchases. I actually think these were part of a triptych, with the front of the Crowded House album as the top panel, as evidenced by the paper residue attached to the bit of tape at the top of the Split Enz panel.

The new Crowded House album finally graced my doorstep, having been pre-ordered in February. It came with a signed 12x12 promo flat which is definitely not pre-printed with signatures because there’s little blops of gold Sharpie ink on the back, surely from being passed around a table and piled up as they dried. It looks lovely; now to find a few minutes to actually play the record!


Neil Finn biography, March 1980.

•••🌟second end post of the whole blog - can't believe it's been so long since I last talked about them... this is part 1 of the pre-atom age [that's to say, before xtc's multipairing world won my writing life] icons me and dear @heartbeatkittie used on Tumblr - as you see they bear the old logo. here's a very young phil judd taken from one of his earliest enz photos, when the band was still called split /ends/. this non-studio picture sent back to the awakening times of 1973, when the band was coming to life and about to pop on the musical scene [almost contemporarily to the young lads of xtc, who were rockin' round under the name of helium kidz]. looks very natural, touched by the sunlight and is harmonised by the roundness of his shirt collar. behind phil, the angry skies of whitianga show the glorious beauty of this as one of the northwards landmarks of new zealand's northern island. the sand of its shores is very dark, so dark when I placed the b/w it looked already gun-grey. in placing phil on the towering blue cumulus clouds, I took care in making his presence in the pic look very collage-like, that's why his hair are roughly cut. I then added the brush swirl to recall of maori moko. to match the collage/zine aesthetic i picked courier font and scribbled down the title of a later tim-penned 8os song melancholically (whata wordsmith) rests among my favourites. written around 1978, performed in the luton sessions [bringing an equally intense feeling], this song evokes the tribal, primal feeling of native life in new zealand's wilderness. it was the song that made me start the fic I will tell you about on part two, but in this occasion, it came as a natural choice - it felt like tim shouting in the wind to a far, distant phil, 'you remember when we were me and you, free, doing everything together? I can, can you as well?' 🌟••• #splitenz #newzealand #whitianga #shores #darksand #stormy #clouds #northwards #northernisland #awakening #music #70smusic #philjudd #bside #rememberwhen #collage #maori #moko #icon #fanzine #courier #font #lettering #bluehues #blue #timfinn #song #tumblr #calling

Radio band of gold Gonna listen til I grow old

This picture disc of Crowded House’s difficult but oh so rewarding second album, Temple of Low Men, was only released in Australia back in 1988. Leave it to a worldwide pandemic to finally make it affordable to mail-order this thing (from the UK, not Australia ironically). This rekkid was cheap!


This was a great find because it was unexpectedly awesome to listen to. I stumbled across this Australian pressing of Mental As Anything’s Cats & Dogs album a few months ago and picked it up purely because I vaguely remember liking the music video of a song on it when I was a kid. I mean, vaguely to the point that I didn’t remember how the song went, only that I once liked it. It sat on the shelf for a few months and I finally put it on, only to discover that I’d been missing out on a really charming, sweet-natured pop album. A 1981 release from the Australian band, it is sort of Split Enz-y without the quirkiness and synths, replacing all that with killer harmonies and a penchant for subtle 50s rock n roll styles. This is great fun.