Split Enz are back on the road for the first time since 2009, and Tim Finn is already talking about a possible new studio album. After the third show of the Forever Enz tour, he and Noel Crombie were resting at their hotel in Wellington, with Auckland next and Australia following.
Tim Finn in Wellington
“I think we should make one more; I think we’d make a really good record now,” Finn said while discussing the group’s return. He also said a new Split Enz album nearly happened about 20 years ago, which turns the current tour from a nostalgia run into something that could lead somewhere else.
The band’s first tour since 2009 matters because Split Enz have only had very sporadic reunions since the Finns went their own ways. For a group that began in Auckland in 1972 and became one of Australasia’s biggest acts from 1977 to 1984, touring again is the clearest sign that the machinery is moving, not just the archive.
Noel Crombie and the archive
Crombie kept the door open with a short answer: “Never say never.” That line fits the way the band is being marketed now, with a new box set called Enzyclopedia out, an 18-month rollout of separate vinyl reissues of Split Enz’s nine studio albums underway, and a forthcoming coffee-table book dedicated to Crombie’s visual presentation of the band.
Those releases do more than fill shelves. They give the tour a second revenue stream and keep the group visible while the current run moves from Wellington to Auckland on Saturday and then into Australian concerts next week.
From 1972 to 2021
Split Enz’s return also pulls the group’s lineup story back into view. Neil Finn replaced founding member Phil Judd on guitar in 1977, and the band’s best-known run followed with songs including I Got You, Six Months in a Leaky Boat, Message to My Girl, One Step Ahead and History Never Repeats.
Finn also revisited the band’s old image with a line that sounds half horror story, half memory: “How did I not die?” He was talking about the hairspray and stage look of the era, when “Noel would lacquer merciless amounts of this toxic spray … the makeup would start to run but the hair would just somehow … sit there.”
The practical takeaway for listeners is simple: this is not just a catalog tour. Split Enz are onstage again, their archive is being repackaged across vinyl, film-style presentation and a box set, and Finn has put a new album back on the table in public. For a band whose big returns have been rare, that is the real story now.
