Interviews about EnzSO

Eddie Rayner is having one of those; a day from a Split Enz song, perhaps "Under The Wheel" where Phil Judd screams "it's not fair". Locked in an Auckland recording studio where he's desperately trying to mix the new Exponents album, Rayner's already missed two interviews in a four-hour schedule, has the "boss" - Crowded House and Split Enz long-time manager Grant Thomas on his back, and he's anything in but ENZSO mode. "Oh, what a morning," he laughs. "It's just not working. I've got my head into this album and talking about ENZSO doesn't gel with it. I had Grant on the phone and I said 'I can't do it' (the interviews) and he said 'who's paying you more money - ENZSO or the Exponents?'. I said 'point taken'. "But he's great. Bullshitting as much as normal. You don't talk with him, you get talked to by him. He tends to talk a lot. But we go so far back. He calls me Tall and I call him Tall. That's our pet names for each other and we just call each others' bluff constantly." Eddie's not short of a word either. And he sounds remarkably like Neil Finn. Dammit, he sounds exactly like the younger Finn, who just a few weeks before has done the ritual shedding, leaving Crowded House as a memory and a lot of questions unanswered. This act obviously intrigues Rayner who's quite happy to spend the first half of the interview speculating on things Finn and travelling down memory lane to the halcyon days of the Enz. First though that split. Rayner's known Neil since he was a little jockstrap - they all come out of the same neighbourhood - and spent those years of the second phase of the Enz when Neil joined as a baby-faced teen and brought both pop and appeal to the greatest progressive band of their time. The Enz were mighty but struggling then. An eccentric outfit of strange twisted ruminations and psyche songs, costumes that flared and assaulted, geometrically matched hairdos. Concerts of wonderful airs and graces, marvellous twists and turns, massive sounds and irresistible harmonies and melodies that veered loony and bizarre across the musical spectrum. So they go back a way. "Who knows what's going to happen," Rayner muses. "Neil's over here mooching around. I saw him yesterday, mooching around, didn't know what the hell to do. He's recording in his own studio at home but I can tell his heart's not really in it, right now. Even though he's effectively stripped all his support system away from him, he's going to miss it. And he knows he's going to miss it because you need a support system." Nick Seymour reckons he's made the worst decision in his life and thinks he'll live to regret the day. "Yeah, I think he may as well," Rayner continues. "It's really hard know. It depends on what he decides to do but one of the basic philosophies I had is that you work with people. That's what working is all about - for people, with people. Other peoples' ideas are very very valuable even if you don't think so at the time. You can't just drop it away and forget about it and expect to everything by yourself. "I mean what a decision. Look at the legacy. Look at the songs they left behind. The albums - every one of them is fantastic in some way. But I don't agree with what Nick says, that they never attained their full potential. "I don't think they were ever going to do a better album than 'Together Alone'. In fact, I don't think anybody could really do an album that's better than that. The quality of the songs - although there are a few that aren't all that great ... but that's one of my qualms about some of the Finns stuff: they tend to make some strange decisions about which songs to put on and which to leave off." Like on the "Finn" album, maybe. Half generous, half nonsense. "Yeah, that's what I think," Eddie says. "Although I think they were probably pushed for songs with that record. I don't think they had that many but now Neil's at home working by himself in his own home studio with just an engineer there - just him and nobody else. It's kind of a bit sad to go round. I feel like saying, 'Well, do you want me to play; can I help by playing with you?' but I wouldn't because I prefer to wait for an invitation. "With the split, we knew about the chance of it months ago and I thought the band must have known about it as well so I was surprised to find out they virtually only heard about it just before Neil made the announcement. I guess I just see Neil everyday when he's around so I know what he's doing, what he's thinking as well. I think it was pretty much a very, very difficult decision. He could have gone either way. He could have decided at the last moment not to split the band up, you know. "Oh my God ..." What? "I've just got another guy on the phone. He'll call back in 10 minutes. This just isn't working. I'm never going to talk to all of them. Oh well, yeah, I think it could have been a spur of the moment thing of Neil's in the end. Kind of he almost dared himself to do it." So there you have it; one more look at THAT split. So what's it got do with ENZSO, which is why we're all here? Probably as much as the next bit of memory lane historics. ENZSO isn't an isolated event. Sure, it's Eddie's symphonic scoring of old Split Enz songs but why it works and what it represents is something else. ENZSO is the latest chapter in a story that began nearly 25 years ago; another page in the book of the Finns; and, most importantly, the thread that ties a glorious past to an unknown future. ENZSO takes the greatest of all New Zealand bands - yes, greater than Crowded House - to a place in history of which they might never have dreamed. In the real, conservative world, ENZSO legitimises the eccentricity and sheer innovative bravura of the Enz, takes their marvellous songbook and puts it on another level. Ultimately, ENZSO is the immortalisation of Split Enz. In rock, few bands gain both popular and classical acceptance. Such is the quality of Rayner's achievement in association with conductor Peter Scholes - an open-minded fusionist if ever there was one - and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra that those crusty classical types - many of whom railed against the project when it was first announced - are now the first to buy front row tickets. What that's says is that the Finns and Phil Judd wrote songs that have a life beyond pop - that is their quality. That Rayner and the remaining Enz scored music that already had its feet in contemporary classicality: the distance between art/prog rock and classical is often only in the instruments used and the leap of faith required. Everything then is a tapestry. The Crowded House split falls within it, for as Seymour hinted at when we spoke recently, Crowded House always lived with the shadow of the Enz, Finn and the Finns just a step behind. Sitting on the floor of the Sandgroper Hotel in suburban Leederville, Western Australia, in 1975, watching the "Mental Notes" era Split Enz on their first Australian tour was as revelatory as it was a slice of heaven. We knew nothing about them then, apart from the fact they looked weird, dressed weird, acted weird and had come from New Zealand - and I'm damned if I can remember anybody else who had then. This then was one of the two great Enz line-ups. At its core Tim Finn, compere, showman, catalyst, craftsman and spiritual romantic; Phil Judd, dark, uncertain, almost manic, lost in a world where art and muse collided in fear and uncertainty and sparked imagination and soul-searching emotion; Rayner, the maestro who coaxed great and voluminous sheets of sound from his keys or rippled piano lines with Finn; Noel Crombie, visionary, stylist, designer, percussionist and manic spirit. The bottom end was still in flux. Wally Wilkinson, Jonathon Chunn and Paul Crowther would soon be replaced by Nigel Griggs and Malcolm Green. For three nights this vision of post-art school musical polemics were as frantic and inspired as any band I've seen; a dangerous, unpredictable meld of the best music can offer. And always they came to the indescribable brilliance of "Stranmger Than Fiction" and its beautiful anthemic companion "Time For A Change". Rayner laughs. "Oh man, we loved that time. That's one of the best times we had in Perth. That was the first tour of Australia we did. I remember the Sandgroper vividly. That's the time to catch a new band, hey. Fresh and unrestrained. "If I had to define what it was about the band between 1975 and 1978 that made it so unique it was a sense of commitment that these days is sadly lacking. We used to look pretty strange and be pretty strange musically. We used to love the music, we used to love the whole lifestyle and we used to ... the hairstyles, the outfits, everything that was our daily wear - we used to walk around like that and it was the way we were. We lived it. We didn't come off stage, take off the gear, the make-up, flatten our hair down and look normal for the rest of the time. We had a commitment to it - without realising it at the time. It was just basically kids being in a band but we were totally committed to the music as well. "It was pretty much a unique team. In those days we were young and impressionable and kind of had a boarding school ethos about us. We were very elitist. It was band of very creative people all pulling in one direction and injecting ideas into the songs which wouldn't have been there if there'd just been a songwriter and lots of music which I was able to pick up on and use in the arrangements for ENZSO. The Split Enz around 'Mental Notes' was very orchestral already. It was all there I didn't have to write anything new." So, finally, we reach ENZSO, this extraordinary meld of contemporary and classical - that works. For the next 10 minutes Rayner walks through its history, rarely stopping for a break or question. Its birth came of need: arriving back in New Zealand after several years away, Rayner found that his services as both a musician or producer weren't going to be tested. There was very little going on. It was a matter of own project or nothing. "I'd heard about this Rolling Stones thing (Scholes' Symphonic Rolling Stones) and it had been in the back of my mind for years to try and do an orchestral Enz thing. Hearing about the Stones album rekindled the idea. Then I sat on it for a year hoping it would go away and it never did. Everybody I spoke to about it, loved it. The record company, Sony, was right there from start, saying 'well, how much money do you want' and all that sort of stuff. So at that point it was 'how else can I convince myself not to do it' because not knowing about orchestra and things classical or understanding the orchestra at all or how it works, it looked very difficult. "I've never had to read or write music in my whole career and this meant all of a sudden getting into that realm of theory and the ranges of instruments and what they sound like and look like. Then I thought 'well, I can get somebody to do it for me' but talking to the band and arrangers around town it soon became apparent that the band was never going to be happy with somebody else putting their stamp all over it and I wouldn't be happy either so thought I'd better have a go at it myself. "I had a go at a couple of tracks and played them to the Finns and they went 'sounding great, carry on' so I did all the tracks and sent them a tape. Actually I arranged 17 songs which took me four or five months. They were in England promoting the 'Finn' thing and they rang me from the M4 (highway) and said 'Hey this is great. We're really out of it and we're having a great trip up to Liverpool and it's all sounding great so you go ahead and do it. That was enough for me to get started with the orchestra and make a few concrete plans." In December '95 during an interview about "Finn", Tim mentioned he'd just come back from NZ where he'd recorded some vocals for this symphonic version of Enz songs that Rayner was doing. He seemed overwhelmed by it, talked about how Eddie had got into the dark corners that exists in most early Enz songs and brought them out, about its intensity, how the orchestration brought a new dimension to the Enz. It is no surprise then that as ENZSO approaches its Australian performances - which feature vocally, of course, both Finns - that it is Tim who is championing its cause. Neil has already expressed reservation publicly about whether pop and classical lie easily together but he doesn't have Tim's background. The elder Finn has been through his own dark nightmares over the years and he understands what Rayner has built - a new sonic temple to the extremes of emotion that live in the music of the Enz. Tim is the man, after all, who in the same interview expressed admiration for Scott Walker's dark, frightening, masterpiece "Tilt" - an album that looks death in the face. Not to say "ENZSO" does but the mortality of man was always at the heart of both Finn and Judd's early songs. The grim reaper and his scythe were a constant companion to their life-loaded emotional portraits. Pain was as constant as joy. Just as life begat death and vice versa. "I think Tim was confused about ENZSO at that time," Rayner says. "I think everyone was confused about it. Now it's been nine months since we recorded it and we've seen how it's gone, how successful it's been and how people seem to really like it. For instance, it's the first time the orchestra here has been on the charts and all that sort of stuff. It's given me time to get a bit of distance from it and see it for what it is. I can see there's a lot of flaws in the recording but I'm really happy with the arrangements. "If I was going to do another one which I probably will - no, I will, I've got plenty of songs left - I'd make a better job of it next time. I think I'll get an even better performance out of the orchestra." He talks for a while about the initial problems he and Scholes had with the orchestra, the "attitude problem" many of its older members had towards the project that reached a nadir in open hostility to something that as far as they were concerned "wasn't kosher". All that, of course, has changed. "ENZSO" smashed into the charts, debuting in the top 10 and soared to the top outselling even its creators' greatest expectations. And new generations - both young and old - discovered the songs and music of the Enz. If Neil Finn has a problem in life, it is just that: it is something he can never escape and it will most likely always be bigger than anything - no matter how brilliant - that he does. The Enz are legend. That is as irresistible as it is romanticised. The past will now always stare back at him in the future. Eddie Rayner chuckles quietly, "It's such a different concept isn't it - ENZSO. I mean it's not like Deep Purple with the orchestra or Elton John with the orchestra in which the orchestra is like a backing, a very small part of what is going on. With this the orchestra is the band. There are no drums, there are no guitars, there's nothing, nothing - just the orchestra and the singers. From that point of view, it is certainly new, where as it was never intended to be. "I don't hold any claims to wanting to do anything new, it's just the way it turned out and I was very surprised. It was the sort of album that could have sunk like a stone. And there's the fanatical Enz fans and now their new fans. Hey, isn't that great. I reckon we're going to get a gathering from like 8 years old to 88 years old. That's fabulous." And we're all spellbound, once again. There is a special time, place and spirit reserved for Split Enz. There has to be. This was a band who strode quirky, sentimental, romantic, invigorating, daring, avant and pop through the mist of rock's normality; a visual, sonic force that understood the fundamental rule of music was to exceed boundaries, the fundamental role to entertain. Such was the impact of these New Zealanders that when they first appeared outside the shaky isles in late '74/early '75 the post-hippie backlash to conservatism that had set in was momentarily awoken from its slumber. Those who saw and heard immediately jumped on the good ship Enz and within a year became "Frenz". With their roots in prog and art rock, crossed by an ear for melody and harmony, an understanding of the essence of great song, an art and boarding school mentality that manifested itself in strange quiffed hairdos, face paint and geometric patterned, multi-coloured suits, Split Enz were music for thinkers and travellers, an aural glissando that ranged from epic waltzes and explorations on the edge of avant, to spunky little rockers and blindingly gorgeous pop. Lyrically through the twin pens of Phil Judd and Tim Finn they bestrode some quasi-psychedelic nightmares and dreamscapes, poked into the dark corners of the psyche, offered love unremitting, unforgiving, delightful and destructive, drew mental notes of a sea of images, took a straight old line through their own serious leanings and pricked the edges with a humour that verged on the bent. That they supported Frank Zappa on his mid-'70s Australian tour is statement enough. And when Judd left in 1976, never comfortable with the limelight, constantly fighting his own demons, they enlisted Tim's little brother Neil - as fresh-faced as they came - and in one unsuspecting move began the legend of the Finns. Next year is the 25th Anniversary of the formation of Split Ends, the band that became Split Enz a year later, and it's fitting the year should begin with the Australian tour of "ENZSO", the symphonic rendition of the songs of Split Enz as scored by their keyboardist Eddie Rayner and performed by a stellar cast of New Zealand's finest including the Finns, Dave Dobbyn, Sam Hunt and Annie Crummer with choir and orchestra - on this occasion the South Australian Symphony Orchestra. "ENZSO" stands tall as one of the great surprises of 1996, a remarkable fusion of pop and classical, that not only gave the Enz repertoire a new, deeply moving and darkly brooding magnificence but also crossed generations offering the Enz to an audience that - at its New Zealand shows - ranged from literally eight to 80. Finally, the legacy of the Enz was recognised on the grandest scale and its music as something deeply sustaining and timeless. Conductor Peter Scholes has waved the baton, controlled the ebb and flow of the "ENZSO" from its very beginning, even, as he says, before Rayner had rewritten the first notes. Scholes is making a bit of career of this fusion business, something he laughs about and hopes will be seen in future history as a successful combination of the essence of both forms. He's currently just finishing off another symphonic crossover project, working with the Auckland Philharmonic on the live presentation of the 'Symphonic Pink Floyd' which was released on disc about 18 months ago, with a brilliant scoring by Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke. "Did you know his first symphony has just been released," Scholes says. "It's the Symphony No 1 for Edervoll and was recorded two years ago. His Symphony No 2 is due for release next year and parts of it were used in a high tech computer fantasy game that's coming out soon. "You wouldn't believe it's the same person from Killing Joke. It's extraordinary. In his symphonic works he's a neo-romantic. Extraordinarily beautiful lines. There's a touch of Philip Glass in there with some of the more ambient cyclic structures and the same time - especially with the First Symphony - really epic scales. Killing Joke have over the years become accepted as Killing Joke, no longer an experiment. Now Jaz has a new sphere in which to work as well and he's really very good." It's probably no coincidence either that the last two Killing Joke albums 'Pandaemonium' and 'Democracy' have been their finest for a decade and reinvented the Joke as a stunning force for the mid-'90s, albeit - like the best Enz - a semi-mystical force. Scholes remembers those mid-'70s times but mostly as a classical musician. Aware of the Enz and oddly drawn to them when he had the opportunity to listen outside his field, it wasn't until the early 1980s that - as part of an unemployment program - he found himself working with four three other classical musicians and four rock musicians - including Ben Staples of Woodentops and Tim Marne of Blam Blam Blam - in a project that resulted in Avant Garage, a fusion band that released one album and toured over 18 months. From that his interest in fusing styles was born. Since then apart from the "Symphonic Pink Floyd", he has also done the "Symphonic Rolling Stones" and the "Symphonic Songs of The Who" which has yet to be released. "I think it's important to emphasise that these projects aren't as simple as they sound," Scholes says. "It's got to be done carefully especially if you're going to do it and just make it instrumental. When you translate into purely symphonic terms you've really got to go right back to first base as opposed to when you are taking the songs as well and keeping the structure and rhythm of the songs. So in something like 'Symphonic Pink Floyd' there's a lot of original Jaz Coleman in there because you can't just go into the song and swap the idea of the song for an instrument. "When Eddie came to me with 'ENZSO' there wasn't a single dot on a page. We talked about it and I just passed on all I knew about it in the sense of what we'd done with the previous projects and left it to him. "But Eddie did have one big advantage in that right back in the original band he was working with all the synthesisers and background arrangements and stuff. I think if they had of had the budget specked in, Split Enz would have had an orchestra. Eddie was a one-man band as far as that side of it, all of the arranging, went and he did it with all with the synthesiser - the technology of the time. Now he's given the opportunity to actually have an orchestra - instead of strings pared to a Roland or whatever brand he used - to make that sound. Now he's got the real thing. "He's got a 14-piece first violins, a 30 or 40-piece string section to make that sound in the flesh and the same with all the winds and brass and percussion and everything else." It became an interesting equation. Rayner knew, by admission, very little about scoring for a full symphony orchestra; the orchestra on the other hand has its own problems which people of pop and rock also know little. And there is a rivalry, a two sides of the fence, competing camps, social and cultural divide which at best over the years has maintained an uneasy peace that's been splattered and shot with some memorable unifications - mostly in the late 60s and early 70s and notably live and/or studio performances captured on record by Procol Harum, Deep Purple and the Moody Blues with full symphony orchestras - and more often outbreaks of 'us and them' sniping. "Orchestras have a hard time because they've been around a while," Scholes says. "There's a whole side of the orchestral thing that pop music really likes to get its teeth into - the formality of it, the fact that most of the composers are dead. They really have a field day with it. Now what's happening is ... no, let me go back a step. "Throughout history what orchestras have done, the people that work in and with orchestras, is taken the music of the day that is around them. There are precedents that go back, right back to Beethoven's time. They've taken a popular melody and brought it into one of their pieces in a variation form or whatever. "What's happening today is a far cry from that and it isn't going to happen to every pop band but where - as time passes - a band gets established in terms of its psyche and in people's consciousness, then - speaking now for orchestras - orchestras are going to say 'well these (bands) are just as important as composers and writers of music so let's do what they do, let's play with those melodies, let's play with those moods and colours and harmonies and let's just do it because it's good music'. "And a good song is going to work in any format. Whether it's jazz, rap, whatever, you can make songs appear in different genres once they've been established as good songs. Split Enz have reached that point where their songs have insinuated their way into a collective psyche and consciousness and their songs are recognised as good songs, some are great songs. "It's this test of time. A hundred years from now we'll all be dead but the music is still going to be there and I hope it isn't only on CDs or whatever medium they have. I hope it can still be experienced in some kind of live way. Of course, so much of the original art, of the musical creativity, of the actual composition is buried in the CD, that you're never going to say 'we've done it better' but we can say 'we've done it differently' and it's live and it's a unique experience in that alone." Scholes is also interested by an analogy drawn with the famous Boston Pops lightweight classical interpretations of pop songs in the '60s; Is the current trend towards classical/pop/rock fusions a deeper - but similar - '90s expression of the concept? "It is," he says, "but in saying that I've never been one to like people who do a Beatles medley or something. They grab the tune and they string it together and there's kind of a four-bar bridge that leads into another key and onto the next one. "It's really naff all that stuff and I hope that time doesn't make me feel the same thing about all of this. I don't think it will because you get a gut feeling when you are doing something. It's the respect you give the original song. You aren't just taking a bit from here and there, you are taking the original song and giving it the maximum kind of respect but you're also doing something new to it. That is its beauty and, believe me, when suddenly it all transfers to the live arena and you've gone from the studio where the orchestra has worked - in the case of 'ENZSO' - without having the singers there or their vocal parts or Eddie's piano lines which he wanted to save to last so that he could alter them in the final mix as he wished, it's quite astonishing what happens, how it feels. "I have to say that when 'ENZSO' reached the stage and the orchestra, the singers, Eddie and the performers came together it was absolutely magnificent. 'ENZSO' is unique because you have a guy from the band who's actually the creative force from it so that you can use that word which is much favoured now in classical circles - authentic. It's his vision, his dream and, of course, he's moved on and he's revisiting that earlier work in a new form. And I think it's a triumph." Not only a triumph but also an a immortalisation. Now the music of the Enz will stride into those dreamscapes a hundred years hence. Not a hard act - but an impossible act to follow. The living Enz with future Frenz. How fitting. How zany. How delightfully right.