History, repeating: inside Split Enz’s triumphant return

For a band whose best-known song insists history never repeats, Split Enz are doing a remarkably good job of proving themselves wrong.

Nearly two decades after their last full New Zealand run, Tim Finn, Neil Finn, Eddie Rayner and Noel Crombie, joined by James Milne on bass and Matt Eccles on drums, are deep into the Forever Enz Tour. They opened in Hamilton on May 2, played Christchurch on the 4th, and rolled into Wellington for two sold-out nights at TSB Arena. Auckland’s Spark Arena closes the New Zealand leg on May 9 and 10 before the band heads to Australia.

The reviews have been, to put it mildly, glowing.

Writing for 13th Floor, Luke Grbin described the Claudelands Arena opener as “a jolt of electricity, the kind that makes your hair stick up and singes your eyebrows,” and called the experience of being in the room “like witnessing history in the making.” It’s a sentiment echoed across every masthead covering the tour. Rolling Stone AU/NZ‘s Éimhin O’Shea, reviewing the Wellington show, wrote that “at their best, the band are truly dazzling,” noting that Eccles and Milne “more than held their own alongside the Finn Brothers.”

The staging has clearly been engineered for maximum theatre. Grbin’s account of the Hamilton entrance, with two figures draped in scarlet and gold silk crossing the stage like spectres before the gold sheet is whipped away to reveal the band launching into “Shark Attack”, reads more like performance art than rock spectacle. The Waikato Herald‘s Tom Eley took a more practical view, describing the band as entering “shrouded in what could only be described as the world’s largest sleeping bag.” Both, somehow, are correct.

Then there are the suits. Noel Crombie’s costume design has been a Split Enz signature for half a century, and the new tour wardrobe has been a hit with reviewers and audience alike. “The music was loud and so were the suits,” Grbin wrote. Metropol‘s Nancye Pitt, reviewing the Christchurch show with her thirty-year-old grandson in tow, was even more taken: “I loved the suits. The band’s legendary flamboyance was on full display.” She noted, with the authority of someone who was there the first time, that she had “some similar versions in my wardrobe back from when Split Enz were first famous.”

The setlist has hewn close to the hits (Shark Attack, History Never Repeats, Six Months in a Leaky Boat, I Got You, I See Red, Message to My Girl, Stuff and Nonsense, Hard Act to Follow, My Mistake) and the band’s command of them has been universally praised. Mike Mather, writing for Stuff and the Waikato Times, observed that “Neil Finn remains an incredibly skilled guitarist” and that Tim, “although a little hoarse this evening, still has plenty of timbre in his tonsils.” Grbin called the performance “that of seasoned professionals, near perfect and highlighting a mastery of songcraft.”

The crowds, interestingly, have warmed up as the tour has progressed. Eley described the Hamilton audience as leaning “more toward ‘polite appreciation’ than ‘loose limbs and spilt drinks’,” with the brave few who stood feeling like “rebels in a very well-behaved room.” By Wellington, O’Shea reported a quite different atmosphere: an “arena-wide spooky sing-along” to My Mistake that “only grew over the following songs until every aisle was filled.”

Pitt, reviewing Christchurch from her unique vantage point as a self-described boomer at a show with her grandson, captured something the younger reviewers couldn’t: the cross-generational pull of a band whose songs have soundtracked half a century of New Zealand life. “Split Enz has a true Kiwi strong Art-Rock genre that appeals to all ages,” she wrote, and her grandson, she noted approvingly, knew all the words.

That cross-generational draw is what’s bringing the tour to its symbolically loaded close. Auckland’s Spark Arena hosts the final two New Zealand shows on May 9 and 10, both sold out, with the second added by demand once the first went in minutes. The venue carries its own weight: when it was still called Vector Arena back in March 2008, it hosted what would turn out to be Split Enz’s last New Zealand concert for nearly eighteen years. The band that formed in Auckland in 1972 is closing the loop in the same room where it last played, in the city where it began.

There’s a wistful undercurrent running through every review: the suspicion that this might be the last time. “It felt like witnessing history in the making,” Grbin wrote in his closing line. “History that just might never repeat.”

Pitt, watching from Christchurch two nights later, wasn’t having it. “This show feels like witnessing history,” she countered, “history that, despite the song’s insistence, has indeed repeated.”

By Sunday night at Spark Arena, we’ll know which of them was right.