1981@40: COROBOREE - SPLIT ENZ

Choruses soar from tense verses with a tight reign kept on minor tonality and it's a new Split Enz album. At this distance it's difficult to tell how much self-reflection there was in starting the follow up to their worldwide breakthrough with a song called Hard Act to Follow.  True Colours showed the band either catching up to the shifts in the culture or perhaps finding the reverse. Either way, the sophomore effort after the reset shows a struggle to do more than stay put. That might be a strange observation to make considering the presence of two Neil Finn penned hits but that's the problem, they don't just stand out as obvious singles; they are the only two songs on the album you recall after hearing it.

That doesn't mean there aren't strong melodies or good ideas here it's just that the rest of the record feels like album tracks and b-sides. That it's buried under contemporary modern production only accentuates this. To my mind it feels rushed, the production barely concealing a lack of finish in the writing. Two more Eddie Rayner instrumentals that sound like chase scenes in cop shows. A song that mentions dancing that has a verse over a chugalug  backing and a call and response chorus form fitted for a blue light disco. Tim Finn's attempt at developing the sublime I Hope I Never in Ghost Girl oddly leaves out the eeriness and everything gets served up with side dishes of sequenced synths. This is a producer's album rather than a band's and it would get worse along those lines and let anyone who had worried that the tidier lines of the visual image and absorption of top ten style were heralding the end of the Enz keep worrying.

But emerging from this troubling anti-entropic push towards order by the old merchants of chaos is a pair of songs that became the singles, having no opposing candidates. History Never Repeats slashes into life with a fanfare of chorused guitars over a rumble and the chorus beginning before the drums. There's a freefall to it but the band comes in for the verse with a rhythm that pounds and shrieks and the choruses just keep getting bigger to the point that the block harmonies that come out of a short guitar break threaten to sound like the hell of ELO or The Eagles until the last verse bashes them aside. One more chorus and powerchord fade out and you've got a 1981 hit single. Repeatability maximum.

One Step Ahead was released in advance of the album and then trusted enough to go on as track 2. A strange descending figure on the bass and palm muted guitar. Neil Finn enters with a near whispered plea about his girl gaming on the edge of danger and its kept hushed and spooky with muted keyboards and vocals that don't quite break out with the rest of the band to the point that a wordless verse of la-las feels like going down a corridor in a horror movie. At no point is this anything but pure commercial pop music. It never plays it for spooky camp but never gives up its suggestion of danger. 

If you were listening years later as I am now you might well think it was the sound of Neill Finn bracing himself for the exit at the end of the darkened hallway. That would happen a few albums on as Split Enz drifted ever further from the quirk that made the anti guitar solo in I See Red such fun. Neil Finn would stretch himself with nothing but credibility when he formed Crowded House for songs not bound by a tradition he had come late to. By the time the new band were claiming world wide high chart positions only the voice sounded the same, the craft had expanded, not with the times, just for better times.

This is not to bury Split Enz as they had years yet before they ran aground. Time and Tide had some superb moments on it. Tim Finn's solo effort (which sounded like the AOR numbers on Enz albums) was also a hit. But the sound Neil's restless invention here, set in an increasingly radio friendly loss of flavour is telling. The world doesn't know it but they are waiting for his escape. Until then there were tours, interviews, videos and the whole shower of malarky for an act in which he was a tenant who dreamt of owning his own home.

1980@40: TRUE COLOURS - SPLIT ENZ

 

Muffled voices, instruments warming up and suddenly a punky barre chord buzzes out with tight but light drumming. Tim Finn's urgent vocal does easy local gymnastics around a deceptively simple melody when the verse ends with the cry of the title: Shark Attack! Add momentum for each verse and race on. A brief break to add some orchestral drama and then an impossibly rapid piano solo before the last verse flies past to the fade. Split Enz have burst through the door and let us know that they made it into the '80s, leaner and meaner and are ready for their closeup.

Proof? Neil Finn takes the mic after an introduction on still fashionable palm muted chords. Neil's vocal is more fluid and warmer than big brother's and his way with a vocal melody and songcraft are going to win him more a-sides and take the band further away from their prog rock cabaret than they'd so far dared go. I Got You is all hooks and charm. A keyboard solo with a quirky turn away from the main progression pays tribute to both the old prog and the new wave at the same time. The song is pure joy.

And so is the rest of it, from the punchy rage of What's the Matter With You? to the quavering comic book figure of Nobody Takes Me Seriously Anyway, the soaring instrumental Choral Sea, the classically strong I Hope I Never. This set in its sleeve of spiky, Dutch tilted artwork and compressed production is a manual of assimilation that couldn't be approached as the generational kin like Billy Joel tried to do with some yelps and palm muting. With Split Enz the cultural exchange rate felt like dollar for dollar. Very slight shifts to their look but such a paring of their arrangements and songcraft made them indistinguishable from bands much younger making bigger splashes.

Neil Finn's influence cannot be underestimated here as he emerged as the kid brother that could and continued to prove his chartability in future singles like One Step Ahead and History Never Repeats. Brother Tim, no slouch himself, seemed outclassed and perhaps it wouldn't be until Neil's Crowded House years that he could break from the constraints. Until then, his fast, snappy songs that had fewer quirks than hooks sounded like everything else on the top 40.

But what did this mean? The next LP sounded much like this and the one after was more expansive with real orchestras and folk instruments and had a kind of concept to it. The direction suggested the kind of development that the boomers who ran the big radio stations and the record companies that fed them would recognise as orthodox; a little Beatles never hurt anybody, after all? Back in the land of the long white cloud the mighty mice of the Flying Nun label were producing miniature wonders for the ages with the likes of The Clean and The Chills aided and accessorised by the great Chris Knox who seemed to do what he did for the love of it. As the Enz grew and broadened they must have felt this pinch and even sting. In Australia, The Go Betweens were still quirky and low key and Nick Cave returned to Melbourne with a better defined bad boy saunter that you didn't have to believe for a second to enjoy it. Where could Split Enz go after they had finally cracked the code of charting in the new, short haired video arcade of post punk? They went boomer because the boomers finally gave them the money they'd been starving for over the decade just gone and cared to starve no more. They were selling to fans half a decade younger than their first fans had been and that's how you build a consumer base.

Until then, this disc, forty plus minutes of joyous hard edged pop that you will still like and sing along to forty years later, still stands. If you don't know any of the context that's all you need to hear. The band that had gone from obscurist art rock to teenybopper without ever going through a cool phase could at least write a good song and fill two sides of vinyl with them.

I'm saying all this as I didn't have this record at the time and a little later picked up the singles second hand as they worked so solidly well. My face might redden to admit that I turned my nose up at them for being oldies while really enjoying the songs. Well, I was seventeen and you're allowed to be as shallow as the bounds of human interchange will permit. Finally hearing the record after decades of all but forgetting it had been released was a strange experience as it felt old and familiar and unheard at the same time. But I still play it now because there are songs because there are songs because there are songs.