The lives and times of musician Tim Finn

New Zealand musician Tim Finn hasn't toured in a decade but something "clicked" when he played a small afternoon show in Sydney recently.

This September, the Split Enz co-founder will perform some of his biggest hits at live shows around Aotearoa and Australia.

Finn tells Kim Hill that at the Sydney show, he decided to play his songs chronologically for the first time ever.

"I started with songs from 1977 and then came right through to more recent times. I'd never done that … and it really interested me afterwards how the connection with the crowd had been so strong. It just felt like they went with me through those years and I thought 'I've got to do this again'."

Music allows us to "reach back" collectively, says Tim, who is now 70.

"It's not just nostalgia or memory. There's something that happens right there and now within the crowd. It's very exciting, actually.

"Songs, when you inhabit them fully, they are actually happening right there and then and the crowd is feeling it right there and then."

Finn says that in some ways he's the same person who fronted the cult 1970s band Split Enz with his brother Neil. But he also feels fundamentally changed by becoming a father and also happier now.

"I'm more aware of the people around me, trying to be a bit more present. I think I was very self-absorbed, which isn't to say I'm not still, but I think I was very, very self-absorbed when I was 25, with [Split Enz]. It was all so important and serious and I was on a quest, you know?

"Our template was kind of The Beatles. So it seemed to be set in stone that you kind of had to reinvent yourself every time. We just thought that was the natural way."

Although he's "pretty safe and secure" these days, Finn says his mental health wasn't good around the time he wrote Split Enz's 1982 hit 'Six Months in a Leaky Boat'.

The 'leaky boat' metaphor was something that helped Finn process the hellish six-month period that followed him ending a six-year relationship.

"It was one of those [relationships] where you know it's over quite soon after you start but you kind of get caught up and swept along.

"I only had some of myself available, I was so engrossed with the band… it just wasn't meant to be and it was very difficult.

"I felt very sorry and guilty and all of that was quite tormenting for me… plus I was kind of exhausted, the band had taken a lot from me at that point. I'd been in the band for 8, 9 years and given it my all, really and truly, and I was exhausted.

"I was having a series of panic attacks and just feeling like a shattered person, really.

"That song and that metaphor was rich for me and carried me through."

Tim can see the origins of his journey into opera and musical theatre in the theatricality of the 1980 Split Enz track 'Shark Attack'.

"I writ it large, it wasn't just a metaphor. I was in that water being torn apart. I do it every time I play, I can feel that. So I think I was always meant to be involved in theatre somehow."

After Split Enz broke up, Finn had a career as a solo artist but in recent years has worked a lot as a composer and lyricist for theatre, penning the Tahitian opera Ihitai Avei'a and the award-winning musical Ladies in Black.

Finn says it was a big thrill to adapt an uncharacteristically funny short story by one of his favourite writers – Come Rain Or Come Shine by Kazuo Ishiguro – into a musical for the Melbourne Theatre Company and later get a complimentary email from the Japanese writer himself.

Finn lived between Australia, England, and America for around 25 years until his baby son (the musician Harper Finn) had an accident while the family were on a visit back to Auckland.

After Harper was burned by some hot water in a hotel room, Tim and his wife Marie were forced to spend an extra two weeks in Auckland for his medical treatment. Over that time, the city began to feel like home.

"Friends were coming out of the woodwork and asking if we were alright… We quickly moved into a house in Mt Eden then hopped over to another house there a couple of years later and we eventually ended up on the shore in Devonport. It's a beautiful place for the kids to have grown up over there, water everywhere… they're very fortunate."

Tim Finn's favourites:

'My Regeneration' from the 2023 album AT by Andy White and Tim Finn

'Poor Boy' from the 1980 album True Colours by Split Enz

'Ono Marama Takerehāia / Six Months in a Leaky Boat', recorded for the te reo Māori revitalisation movement Waiata Anthems

'Shark Attack' from the 1980 album True Colours by Split Enz

Related:

Tim Finn on his new project FORENZICS 

True Colours 40th Anniversary - The Sampler Summit

Enzology: an RNZ audio series about New Zealand's most iconic band