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The hits of Neil and Tim Finnread like a checklist of recentpop history. And to think it allbegan in sleepy, rural TeAwamutu, New Zealand, whereBrian Timothy Finn fell in lovewith the Beatles, an obsessionthat would also work its waystraight into his younger brotherNeil’s DNA.

Success for the brothers was along time coming: it took severalturbulent years in Split Enzbefore they produced a genuine

hit and connected with the mainstream. And it was achieved by oneof Neil’s songs, ‘I Got You’, which wasn’t the sweetest pill brotherTim had ever tasted. After all, Split Enz was his band, his odyssey, hisobsession.

When the Enz came undone, their paths split. Neil led world-beatersCrowded House, while Tim immersed himself in a series of bold, ifnot always successful, solo projects. Eventually the brothers reunited,leading to Woodface, an album considered by many to be CrowdedHouse’s finest.

Based on interviews, critical analysis, extensive research and theauthor’s 30-plus years of following the Finns, Together Alone is thefirst biography written about the Finn brothers. This is a story ofbreakthroughs, breakdowns, sibling rivalry and respect – and some ofthe best pop songs this side of Lennon and McCartney.

Front cover photo: Paul SpencerBack cover photo: Alan WildCover design: Darian Causby/Highway 51 Design Works

BIOGRAPHY/MUSIC9 781741 668162

ISBN 978-1-74166-816-2

www.randomhouse.com.au

**Final Cover Art:Layout 1 6/4/10 9:54 AM

Copyright © Jeff Apter 2010. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A William Heinemann bookPublished by Random House Australia Pty LtdLevel 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by William Heinemann in 2010

Copyright © Jeff Apter 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices.

National Library of AustraliaCataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Apter, Jeff, 1961– Together alone: the story of the Finn brothers. ISBN 978 1 74166 816 2 (pbk.) Finn, Tim, 1952–.Finn, Neil, 1958–.Split Enz (Musical group).Crowded House (Musical group).Composers – New Zealand – Biography.Composers – Australia – Biography.Rock musicians – New Zealand – Biography.Rock musicians – Australia – Biography.Rock groups – New Zealand – Biography.Rock groups – Australia – Biography. 782.42166092

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Chapter 1‘Ten pounds of boy’

Like any songwriter with a fully functional imagination, Tim Finn is sometimes prone to exaggeration. So in 1982, when

he sang in ‘Haul Away’, one of the most blatantly autobiographi-cal tracks from a guy who never thought twice about sharing, that he was born in ‘Te Awamutu, 25th of June 1952, ten pounds of boy’, he was playing with the truth, just a little. The real story is that Brian Timothy Finn, the first son of Dick and Mary Finn, actually tipped the scales at eight and a half pounds when he came into the world at Wharenoho Hospital, Te Awamutu’s first maternity facility. But what’s a pound and a half among friends when it works better in a lyric? Carolyn was the Finns’ firstborn, followed by Brian, Judy and, finally in 1958, Neil, the youngest of the Finn family.

From Elvis Presley onwards, the history of popular music is littered with the unlikely stories of stars who have emerged from the toughest of upbringings to rise to the top of the heap, seem-ingly defying both logic and society’s natural order of things. Not

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‘ T e N P o u N D S o f B o y ’

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so with the Finns. Dick Finn was a solid-state citizen, a partner in a Te Awamutu accounting firm, a reserved, well-mannered man described by Tim as the ‘more chilled’ of his parents, fond of snooker and good whiskey. 1 Dick and his wife, Mary, were resolutely middle class – the Finns were no Gallagher brothers, fighting both society and the odds to make a name for them-selves. ‘I had great loving parents,’ Neil said of Dick and Mary, and that was clearly the case.

Mary Finn was devoutly Catholic. Her spiritual belief may not have been practised with any commitment by her famous sons later in their lives, but it always lurked somewhere in the background, guiding their decisions and influencing their states of mind. Catholicism also provided them with plenty of source material, if their lyrical stocks ever ran a little dry (‘Into Tempta-tion’, anyone?). As Neil readily admitted in 1998, ‘I was Catholic through and through. It’s still ingrained, and you know, it’s a great fertile ground for pulling lyrics out. [There’s] lots of good stuff going on in there, good rituals and imagery and lots of guilt. It’s a very potent combination. I think you’re blessed, really, to be brought up with some kind of weird dogma like that.’ 2 When a book of Neil’s lyrics was published, one reviewer zeroed in on this undeniably strong aspect of Finn’s wordplay. ‘It’s fair to say,’ the critic noted, ‘there’s more than a whiff of the fire and brim-stone of a rural Catholic upbringing about his imagery.’ 3

‘Dick and Mary were very protective of their family – espe-cially their baby [Neil],’ said a Te Awamutu friend of the youngest Finn, who’d spend time at their house with a collection of Neil’s schoolfriends. ‘And of course none of us were Catholic, so I’m not sure we were ever really accepted.’

Not surprisingly, this emphasis on all things Catholic emerged



T o g e T h e r A l o N e

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from Mary’s staunchly Irish side of the family. Mary Mullane was born in Limerick and at the age of two, along with her mother and sister, joined their father, Tim, who had shifted to New Zea-land six months earlier. Tim Mullane was a farmhand, who’d been invited by his Protestant employer – who was being pursued by the IRA – to follow him and settle in New Zealand. Running dairy farms in the towns of Te Aroha and Putaruru, the Mullanes set up their home in the Waikato province in New Zealand’s North Island. 3a Mary may have only lived in her country of birth for two years, but her Irish blood ran deep: her eldest son would often refer to her as an ‘Irish poet’ and, many years later, both her boys would make significant efforts to connect with their Irish roots. Neil even considered relocating to the Emerald Isle when he felt the time was right to move his young family out of Australia. And he did name his firstborn Liam. ‘I wanted an Irish name,’ Neil would tell an American radio DJ, ‘because of my mother.’

Dick Finn, meanwhile, was the son of a Waikato farmer, who took up accountancy during World War II, studying for his exams in Wellington while tuning into the sounds of big bands on his radio. Dick’s brother served in the air force, and Dick would also serve, in the army in Italy, towards the end of the war. Before his path crossed with Mary Mullane, he had little involvement with the Catholic church. But that would change soon enough.

If the Finn brothers’ ‘Irishness’ came from Mary’s people, it’s fair to say that both Mary and Dick contributed heavily to their love of music. Mary’s mother, Nora, was a natural singer, with a good ear. Mary took piano lessons for a year and then began to lead the Mullane family singalongs (a tradition that would soon enough spread to her own brood). It was at one of these




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parties where she first met Dick, who, among other things, was impressed with her singing and dancing skills. Dick would ask her to sing ‘My Happiness’, a maudlin number that was recorded by silky harmonisers the Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald, but more famously was the first song ever cut by a Memphis truckie named Elvis Presley as a gift for his dear mother, Gladys. If Dick and Mary had a song – and it must be said that, as Tim once told the ABC’s Andrew Denton, his mother was ‘not an overly sentimen-tal woman’ – then it would be ‘My Happiness’.

Dick’s mother also played the piano, and Dick briefly took lessons from a German woman who had a tendency to rap his fingers with a steel-tipped ruler whenever he missed notes. This occurred often enough to warn him off any further tuition. Clearly, he wasn’t cut out for a life making music – he needed his fingers for his accountancy gig, for one thing – but that didn’t stop him from developing a passion for music. He embraced the swinging sounds of Americans Gene Krupa, Tommy Dor-sey, Artie Shaw and others in much the same way his elder son would one day fall for the vanguard acts of the so-called British Invasion. Dick’s collection of big band 78s was sizeable and well chosen; he had both enthusiasm and taste.

‘My Happiness’ and family singalongs weren’t the only thing that connected Mary Mullane and Dick Finn: they shared a sort of musical ineptness. Dick was tone deaf, according to Tim. ‘He couldn’t sing a note [even though he was] a massive fan and great at whistling as well.’ As for Mary, while she was a lovely singer and dab hand on the piano, it didn’t cross her mind to change key while playing, hence a certain lack of modulation. ‘They were per-fect together,’ Neil dryly mentioned in a 2004 interview. 4 Before Dick and Mary could marry, however, Dick had to undergo three




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rigorous months of ‘instruction’ in the Catholic faith. With that accomplished, the relationship that had been born around the piano was finally made complete and they were wed.

On the cover of their album of brotherly melody, 2004’s Everyone Is Here, Neil and Tim stand together on the banks of the Waikato River, which runs near their hometown, Te Awamutu. The Finns viewed water as a powerful symbol of their personal and pro-fessional relationships – sometimes the water was smooth and tranquil, other times choppy enough to ground a tanker. As they sang on ‘A Life Between Us’: ‘And we’re staring at each other / Like the banks of a river.’ 5 Te Awamutu, which translates as ‘the river cut short’ or the ‘end of the river’ – the original set-tlers could only paddle their canoes as far as Te Awamutu and then had to travel overland by foot – and whose name, as Neil famously declared, ‘had a truly sacred ring’, was where Dick and Mary Finn settled soon after they were married. (In a shot that wasn’t used for the Everyone Is Here cover, Dick’s hand can be seen resting on his sons’ shoulders.)

Though you’d hardly know it from a stroll along its sleepy streets, Te Awamutu, commonly known as the rose capital of New Zealand, is a town with a lively backstory. ‘Te Awamutu isn’t exactly sleepy,’ corrected Dean Taylor, a local who was also a close friend of Neil Finn’s, ‘but it is pretty conservative.’ As early as the fourteenth century, Tainui Maori settled in and around the Waikato area. Due to the first-rate crop-growing conditions and the river access, it was a desirable area for settlement; many ‘pa’ (pronounced ‘pah’, the word referred to a fortified Maori village)




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were set up in Te Awamutu and surrounding districts. Two key ‘pa’ were established at Te Awamutu: Otawhao, on the hill that is now known as Wallace Terrace, and Kaipaka, which can be found at the end of Christie Avenue. When a Reverend Ashwell visited the former in 1839, he asked the Whare Kura (Christian Maori) to establish a separate community at ‘Awamutu’; this led to the establishment of the Otawhao Mission Station. John Mor-gan, who lived at the mission with his wife, Maria, from 1841 until 1863, encouraged significant developments in education, agriculture and, of course, religion, during his lengthy stay. He also oversaw the establishment of St John’s Church in Te Awam-utu, which threw open its doors in 1854 and still proudly stands today in Arawata Street.

This extended time of peace was duly interrupted in 1863 with the outbreak of the Waikato Wars, which came out of the seizure of the government press by Ngati Maniapoto and the expulsion of Europeans from Te Awamutu and surrounding districts. (St John’s was actually used for a time as a garrison.) At the conclu-sion of the wars in 1865, Europeans – specifically ex-militia and settlers – returned to the area. European settlement increased in 1880 when the railway line was extended and connected Te Awamutu with Auckland, some 160 kilometres to the north. By the time Dick and Mary Finn settled at 78 Teasdale Street in Te Awamutu in the early 1950s, it was a farming town with a popu-lation of several thousand, which today stands at around 10,000. 6 (Nowadays, Te Awamutu doesn’t operate a train service; the nearest line is Otorohanga.)

In 1957, a year before Neil was born, five-year-old Tim – who was still known to one and all as Brian – began attending St Joseph’s Convent, an institution guided by the steely hands of a




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gaggle of local nuns. Their sense of discipline and propriety, how-ever, didn’t deter Finn, who even at such a young age was always on the lookout for a little agitation. When he was seven, Tim had an encounter with a nun that became part of Finn folklore.

Her question was innocent enough: what would her young charge like to ‘be’ when he grew up? Perhaps an accountant, like his father? Not quite. Tim grinned and snapped back, ‘A bodgie!’, his cheeky nod to a disreputable teen subculture that took their cues from the UK’s Teddy Boys and the American ‘greasers’. Sister Mary Aloysius nearly had a fit: ‘A what?’ Finn may have dreamed of becoming a bodgie, but he sure didn’t look like one. He was way too fresh-faced for that. The Finn boy’s interest in stirring the pot, just a little, came even further to the fore when he started writing pieces for his fellow students to act out on the school stage. The most noteworthy of these was a twist on My Fair Lady, which Tim called My Fair Laddy. To his dismay, when the lead actor fell ill and withdrew the night before the premiere, Tim was now writer and star. This wasn’t what he planned at all. ‘When I was a boy,’ Tim said, ‘I was always writing little plays and things, but I never wanted to be in them. Writing was more my natural place. I’m not a natural show-off.’ 7 Well, not yet, anyway.

But while he may have experienced massive discomfort appearing before an audience of his peers – in future years, Tim’s stage fright would be misread as arrogance, or worse – there was one audience member who was suitably impressed by his performance: Neil Mullane Finn. A star, at least in the eyes of an admiring younger brother, was reluctantly born, as My Fair Laddy unfolded before him. ‘It was very glamorous for me,’ Neil would recall, speaking about their early relationship, ‘because




15

I was looking on [and] everything that Tim was doing seemed deeply romantic to me.’ 8

Neil Finn – later known variously as ‘the Ant’, a nod to his steely-eyed determination to make shit happen, or more commonly ‘Fang’, a nickname he inherited from his older brother – was born on 27 May 1958. He weighed a few ounces less than Tim and was slightly shorter. Neil’s eyes were green whereas Tim’s were blue, and Neil’s hair was a lighter brown. It also lacked the wildness that sometimes gave his older brother the look of a two-legged dog. There were many times, both as kids and adults, that people refused to believe the Finn boys were actually related. They simply didn’t look much alike, although their personalities would develop along similar lines: both possessed a moodiness and a drive to succeed that wasn’t quite at home in a country that viewed meekness and circumspection as commendable person-ality traits. ‘Humility is the great quality of New Zealand,’ Tim would admit with a straight face. ‘You’re not up yourself, you know, which is kind of restrictive.’ 9

Tim, admittedly, would lighten up as he grew older, especially once he became a parent, whereas Neil, as one observer told me, ‘always seemed more wary, more cautious. Tim, on the other hand, was always very open, friendly and accessible.’ But while Neil may have become inscrutable, Tim had a dark side. Buster Stiggs (then known as Mark Hough), Neil’s first bandmate and a friend of the younger Finn for the past 30 years, said this to me about the brother’s relationship: ‘Neil will always be the younger brother; that pecking order is always there.’ He once witnessed




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Tim in an especially black mood after a Finn brothers gig in Perth. When the brothers clashed, ‘Tim said some really cruel things to Neil that had obviously been said before. The insults and putdowns were dispensed with a venom that Tim had nurtured or rehearsed over the years. Immediately they became the teen-ager and primary school kid again.’ An apologetic Neil turned to Stiggs and said, ‘I guess you’ve seen both sides now.’

By the time Neil was born, Tim was already undergoing some basic training at the piano. In keeping with the strong Catho-lic presence in their early life, Tim was schooled in the keys by one Sister Mary Raymond, who apparently exercised a little more restraint than his father’s heavy-handed teacher. Whereas his father opted to be a listener, not a player, Tim thrived. He took to playing the organ at church, which made for quite a sight, espe-cially for his hero-worshipping younger brother. As Mike Chunn recalled in his memoir Stranger Than Fiction, ‘Up high in the loft, [Tim] would weave through chants, hymns and modal pieces, with Mary conducting him, his thin legs pumping away.’ 10

Neil would proudly state that he and Tim inherited their par-ents’ ‘inspiring admiration of music’. 11 But it must be said that the brothers were born into a duller-than-dishwater musical climate. Elsewhere, the mid to late 1950s was a period of massive cultural upheaval, thanks in no small part to Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips, yet this ‘cult of the teenager’ took some time to make its pres-ence felt in the Shaky Isles. As John Dix wrote in his cogent and authoritative study of New Zealand music, Stranded in Paradise, ‘It became a cliché: I went to New Zealand and it was closed.’

The New Zealand music industry, such as it was, was pretty much dictated by the sensible standards maintained by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service (NZBS), who swiftly deemed




17

rock-and-roll ‘decadent’ and thought it was best left to fade away as swiftly as it emerged. Or so these moral gatekeepers thought, anyway. Country and western was the live music of choice for many Kiwis, while stay-at-home types, such as the Finns, spent nights gathered around the wireless, listening to serials, soaps and quiz shows, or at the family piano. Neil would recall the intensely Anglophilic nature of his youth; to him, looking back, it seemed to be all about ‘the Lion comics, Coronation Street and the Beatles’. 12 The British Isles may have been another world away, geographically speaking, but it still felt very familiar to families such as the Finns.

If New Zealand had any real popular ‘stars’, they came in the dumpy form of singing cowboy Bob Lane (aka Tex Mor-ton) – who, in a neat parallel with the Finns, quickly decamped to Australia, where he enjoyed a lengthy career – and golden girl Pat McMinn, crowned New Zealand’s Queen of Pop on the strength of her novelty hit from the mid 1950s, ‘Opo the Crazy Dolphin’. Then, of course, there was also the country’s first borderline legit rock-and-roller, Maori hip-swiveller Johnny Cooper. In 1955, his mediocre cover of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – itself a makeover of a 1952 recording by black singer Sunny Dae – was not only the country’s first rock release but was probably the first rock-and-roll recording made outside of the US. It was a few more years – 1958, to be precise – before Aussie wildcat Johnny O’Keefe slicked back his hair and began shaking it until it hurt.

In the late 1950s, Wanganui native Johnny Devlin was chris-tened ‘New Zealand’s Elvis Presley’ and, like Cooper, also fashioned a career out of remakes, first hitting it big with his take on Presley’s ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’. But in the main it’s fair to say that the Finns opted to look beyond the shores of their island




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home for early musical inspiration. What little homegrown pop music that did exist was a pale knock-off of the testosterone-heavy swagger peddled by Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and the rest, and witnessed in such teen flicks as Rock Around the Clock and The Blackboard Jungle. And, of course, the NZBS had to deem it worthy of airplay in the first place. As John Dix saw it, the music of Haley and Presley had been dismissed by the older generation as ‘a fad, condemned by the prudes and sniffed at by most dance band musicians.’ 13 The very family-friendly Howard Morrison Quartet fast became New Zealand’s favourite sons of song, and they were about as dangerous as a church fete.

Unlike the hardscrabble upbringing of many of these new musical icons – the Presleys of Tupelo, for one, redefined the term ‘dirt poor’, while Jerry Lee Lewis was hot for in-breeding – the four Finn children enjoyed an idyllic childhood. Dick’s busi-ness, maintaining the books for local farmers, was steady and financially rewarding, while Mary was a dedicated, if somewhat unsentimental, matriarch. (Mind you, Dick was also a pragma-tist: after donating the family piano to a Finn brothers exhibit at the Te Awamutu Museum in 1998, he called a few months later and asked for it to be returned. The family home felt empty without it.) Dick and Mary were actually an interesting study in contrasting personalities: Tim believed he inherited his ‘buzzy, hyper energy’ from his mother, whereas Dick radiated a more relaxed vibe. 14

In the Crowded House standard ‘Private Universe’, when Neil sang about the ‘highest branch on the apple tree’, he was flashing back to his days growing up in Te Awamutu. As a kid, he spent a lot of time in the family orchard. The plum tree was a favourite hideaway of Neil’s; when the fruit started to appear, he’d climb to




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his usual branch and stuff his face with the ripe red fruit. It also provided him the chance to check out the activity next door, as he peered over his neighbour’s fence. ‘There was so much of our childhood here which was wonderful,’ Neil said upon revisiting the site of his upbringing in 1995. 15 When pressed, Tim remem-bered their Te Awamutu home as ‘a place of fecundity and life and youth’. When Dick and Mary left Teasdale Street for Cambridge, the site was turned into a rest home for senior citizens. The irony wasn’t lost on the brothers: a home that helped bring them into the world was now used as a final stop on the way out. The swimming pool, another favourite family spot, was filled in and turned into a car park, of all things. As Neil drove away from what used to be his family home, he muttered, ‘They’ve completely fucked it.’ 16

The Finn boys were both musical and athletic. Apart from swimming, they’d take lengthy bike rides and play tennis at the nearby Te Awamutu Croquet Club. (Tennis would become the sport of choice for various members of Split Enz, when they weren’t designing high-tech paper airplanes or roaring along hotel corridors wielding water pistols.) The family’s annual holi-days were spent at Mt Maunganui, in the city of Tauranga at the Bay of Plenty, a popular summer destination. It took about an hour to drive there from Te Awamutu. Even if the temperature sometimes dropped a little lower than your typical coastal par-adise – this was New Zealand, after all, the country where the weather was as mild as its citizens – Mt Maunganui still offered all the usual beachside indulgences: swimming, snorkelling and the rest. Neil and Tim became keen swimmers and surfers; as an adult Tim would try to swim every day – he likened swimming to religion – and he wrote enough songs with watery themes to fill several albums.




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As Tim grew older, their annual retreat also offered a few tempting twists on the typical family holiday, as Mike Chunn documented in Stranger Than Fiction: ‘In an idyllic setting of white sand, even surf . . . a vivid array of cool surfers, teenage girls, quart bottles of Lion Red [a local beer] . . . and Rothmans cigarettes, the social focus was nothing less than pure romanti-cism.’ 17 (The video for Crowded House’s ‘Private Universe’ was shot at the nearby – and wildly remote – White Island, an active volcano just off the coast of Mt Maunganui, a very hairy helicop-ter ride away from the mainland.)

Just as important as the ‘recreational’ facilities on offer was the musical attraction of Mt Maunganui. It was here that the Finn family connected with Scottish brothers Matt and Peter Durn-ing, who were Jesuit priests – brothers in blood and in God, as it turns out. They would stay with the Finns – one would bunk with Dick, Mary and the kids, another with an aunt who also joined them on holidays – and sing for their supper at every given opportunity. The Durning brothers’ knack for harmony singing would connect very deeply with the Finn boys. ‘They taught Neil and me by osmosis, really,’ Tim said. ‘We absorbed this quality of harmony singing and then we’d be dragged out to do it, which we’d copy.’ 18

Speaking on NZ National Radio’s Top o’ the Morning show in 1996, Neil had his own memory of the Durnings. ‘They both had very fine voices and sang in beautiful harmony. They were priests but, like most Catholic priests, they knew how to party.’ Neil and Tim were fast learners: they realised that once the party was in motion, and a few drinks had been consumed by all in attend-ance, house rules were changed dramatically. Most of the guests gravitated to the piano, leaving the brothers free to do what they




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wanted, as long as they agreed at some point to contribute a song or two. ‘We could run into the kitchen and grab whatever we liked, and no-one would stop us,’ Neil said. It was at these singalongs that the Finns quickly learned what a powerful sway music could hold over a group – be it 10 or 10,000. 19 ‘The Finns were a social family,’ said Dean Taylor, ‘and the boys, especially, were happy to perform. That’s still a long way from Split Enz, though.’

It would be a monumental stretch to describe the songs they were sharing as edgy. Instead, the brothers Finn and Durning would wrap their lungs around such G-rated favourites as Harry Belafonte’s ‘Kingston Town’ – one of the first tunes Neil and Tim ever mastered – and the truly soppy ‘Poor Little Lambs’, a fave of the Durnings. But no matter how saccharine the latter clearly was – ‘we’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way’, the Durnings would wail with conviction – it was guaranteed to leave both Neil and Tim a blubbery mess. Tim, especially, was spellbound by what he described as ‘that Celtic melancholy, [it was a] beauti-ful sound’. 20

It’s impossible to overstate the impact the Durnings had on Neil and Tim’s singing style, if not necessarily their musical tastes. They certainly weren’t benefiting greatly from what they were hearing on the government-run radio of the day, whose idea of ‘new sounds’ came in the shape of such easy-listeners as Helen Shapiro, Bobby (‘Mack the Knife’) Darin and Eddie Hodges, best known for his 1961 chart-buster ‘I’m Gonna Knock on Your Door’. The so-called ‘British invasion’, with the Beatles and the Kinks at the helm, was still yet to emerge from a dank Liverpool club. As for Australian acts, the Finns’ sum total of knowledge amounted to little more than the mainstream basics: hirsute wobble-boarder Rolf Harris and squeaky-clean warblers




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the Seekers, as well as the far more interesting Easybeats. But that was pretty much it.

Back home in Te Awamutu, Mary and Dick’s fondness for both good times and round-the-piano singalongs helped the brothers master what they had absorbed on holidays. Other members of the Finn family would join in, and actively encourage young Neil and Tim to get up and sing. Their uncle George was, according to Neil, the ‘main culprit’ in these settings. Neil believed their broth-erly performances were the end result of a ‘sort of coercion’ on the part of George and the family. ‘He was a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer – and we were the cute little nephews who could actually sing,’ Neil recalled. 21

At a certain stage of the evening, while Dick and Mary looked on proudly, family friend Colin O’Brien would step up to the piano and really get the party started. O’Brien, a jukebox on legs, was quite a sight at the keys: he’d have a fag hanging from the corner of his mouth and a tumbler of gin at hand as he pounded out request upon request. ‘We’d sing all night,’ said Neil. ‘It was very much part of our upbringing. And it did actually mean that the idea of engaging with people and singing was less scary. That was the first inkling of the seduction of live performance.’ 22 To prepare themselves for their starring role, Neil and Tim would huddle in a nearby hallway, nervously clear their throats and work out what they should sing. Harmonising with Tim would become Neil’s strongest and most vivid memory of his childhood. They became very good, too. Years later, Tim insisted that these family events were ‘some of the best gigs we’ve ever done’ – a massive call, considering their sprawling musical history. ‘There’s noth-ing like singing together,’ he continued. ‘Especially with family, because you share all these memories.’ 23




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Swept up in the good-timey atmosphere at Teasdale Street, no-one really stopped to consider what the Finn boys were singing. Their standout piece was a five-tissue weepy called ‘Terry’, which Neil felt was a somewhat incongruous song for a five-year-old and his big brother. Written and recorded in the early 1960s by a long-forgotten Brit known simply as Twinkle, ‘Terry’ spelled out, in turgid detail, the demise of a young guy who was totalled in a motorcycle wreck. It was a ‘Leader of the Pack’ for the pre-teen set. (Curiously, Twinkle was a two-hit wonder; his ‘Golden Lights’ was covered by the Smiths, whose guitarist, Johnny Marr, would become good mates with Neil.) Not only was ‘Terry’ a particularly morbid number to be dusted off so late in the night, it did seem odd, upon reflection, for two boys to be crooning a sappy ballad told from a love-struck female’s point of view. ‘It was a girl song, but more heavy than “Leader of the Pack”,’ Tim told a reporter in 1991, amid chuckles from his Crowded House bandmates. ‘No-one questioned why two boys were singing it.’ 24

Regardless, it became a singalong staple. According to Neil, ‘At parties in those days everyone sang, everyone had their item. It was usually the same song, and it didn’t matter really if people had heard it a hundred times.’ 25 One night, after yet another ster-ling rendition of ‘Terry’, Mary had some priceless advice for her sons. She pulled them aside and told them a good tune is hard to come by and should be treasured. This stuck with Tim and Neil for the rest of their lives.

When not leaning up against the piano, watching his sons bemoan the loss of some wayward motorcyclist, Dick Finn would document family events on his trusty super 8 camera. And he was a steady hand with the camera, too. ‘They were a very pre-cious thing for the family,’ said Tim of these films. So precious,




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in fact, that he and Neil would use them as a sort-of warm-up tape for their shows in the mid 1990s. Dick’s home movies would also run on a loop at the True Colours exhibit in the Te Awamutu Museum. ‘We’ve got dozens of beautiful old movies,’ Tim told the ABC’s Andrew Denton, ‘and of course [in them] we would dress up, do stuff like hula hoop and concerts.’ 26

As is obligatory with any family video, there were moments that would come back to haunt the famous Finns. Tim’s youth-ful penchant for cross-dressing was caught on super 8, capturing him in a fetching selection of women’s clothing. As for Neil, his star turn as baby Jesus in a family nativity scene would provide plenty of material for fans who felt he possessed a God-like skill for penning pop tunes. Tim, dressed as Joseph, looked on with due reverence; sister Carolyn was cast as Mary.

There was very little friction at the Finn family HQ. They certainly weren’t the Californian Wilsons, a family led by a domi-neering patriarch, Murry, who drove his Beach Boy sons so hard that musical prodigy Brian was too scared to press the keys of his piano when his father was near for fear of hitting a bum note. When Dick and Mary Finn did clash one night while holidaying at Mt Maunganui, Neil responded in the strangest fashion. Clad in only his ‘shorty’ pyjamas – it being summer – he arose from what he called a ‘deeply anxious’ dream and sleepwalked a block or two down the road while his parents frantically searched for him, fear-ing he’d wandered into the nearby drink. ‘Mum and Dad had a blue that night,’ said Neil, ‘and it was very rare, so it kind of freaked me out.’ 27 Neil would also sometimes mutter in his sleep, which was a family trait. He’d one day write the song, ‘Sister Madly’, which documented his sister Judy’s nocturnal murmurings.

This walkabout at Mt Maunganui wasn’t the only time Neil




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would lose himself in a strange night-time wander. When he was aged 12, totally out of character, he experienced a ‘weird, primal urge’ – nothing sexual, he insisted – that led him to strip naked, climb out his bedroom window and cavort around the backyard, under a full moon. ‘Luckily,’ Neil laughed, ‘I wasn’t spotted by the neighbours or my parents.’ 28 It, too, became ripe for revisiting in song, when he sang in the track ‘Sinner’: ‘Under moonlight I stood wild and naked / Felt no shame just my spirit awakened.’ 29 In fact, the Finns made a habit out of replaying the most vivid (often pleasurable, sometimes mischievous) moments of their childhood in song. ‘Angels Heap’, from their Finn album, recalled a time when an anxious Tim was forced to bribe his four-year-old brother into not telling Dick and Mary that their babysitter had taken them for a joy ride in her pick-up truck. It was a great ride, too, apparently, one that inspired Tim to sing, ‘She made me come alive / In a red vinyl seat.’ 30

It was obvious that Neil regarded his older brother with awe. Not only did he literally look up to him – a snapshot from the Finns’ 1965 holiday to Queensland’s Gold Coast, with the boys being towed behind a speedboat, shows how Tim towered over his brother – but he saw him as equal parts hero and role model. Whatever Tim took on, Neil was hell-bent on doing likewise, as he stated in the Enzology radio doco. ‘I was endlessly fascinated by music, partly by looking at it through Tim’s eyes, because he was six years older than me and what he was doing seemed incredibly evolved. I learned to play guitar and piano around the same time as he did.’ 31




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Tim was no fool. He could see the regard in which his brother held him and even referred to Neil as his ‘pet project’. While he may not have been so bold as to try and shape Neil into a ‘mini Tim’, he did see the benefits of having an acolyte; it was a massive ego-stroke, if nothing else. But the situation was reversed, briefly, one day in the schoolyard at St Joseph’s, when Neil stumbled across his brother in the thick of a punch-up, which he seemed to be losing. It was another incident that forever found its place in the brothers’ shared history, and it also proved just how handy those lazy afternoons at the tennis club had been.

Neil, who’d only recently started school – he enrolled in 1963 – was walking through the schoolyard, tennis racquet in hand, when he heard Tim yelling out his name with increasing intensity. Neil spotted his brother wedged in a headlock, his assail-ant on the verge of inflicting more serious injury than merely a sore head and messy hair. ‘So I was standing there with a tennis rac-quet,’ Neil recalled, ‘and I started whacking this guy over the head and actually fought him off.’ Tim got off the ground, dusted him-self off, grabbed his brother and ran home at full speed. As Neil saw it, ‘I think that might have secured me a safe passage through childhood.’ From that day onward, Neil insists, Tim became ‘a very benevolent older brother figure’. 32 According to Neil, his older brother refused to conform to type and ‘never beat me up, ever’. 33 And that would be the case until one fateful night in Aussie hippie haven Byron Bay, when their Crowded House ‘experiment’ started to come undone in a very public and unsavoury way. But that was a long way down the track. As adults, Neil admitted to his brother: ‘You know, it was pretty cool that you never beat me up,’ to which Tim replied, ‘Oh, it was just my way of controlling you.’ Neil never quite understood what Tim meant by that. 34




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Having learned as much as he could about the piano from the by-the-book Sister Mary Raymond, Tim, at his father’s sugges-tion, began studying with local jazz pianist Chuck Fowler. When Neil heard his brother stumble his way through ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago, he made a silent commitment to master the piece himself: the resolve of Neil, even as a kid, was unmistak-able. Neil, too, was undergoing his own musical education, but in a more public way. St Joseph’s had an annual talent quest, with a hefty 10 shillings pot for the winner. Buoyed by his at-home performances with Tim, Neil stepped forward and belted out the irrepressibly chirpy ‘You Are My Sunshine’, and the booty was his. He couldn’t get home quickly enough to boast of his victory, his first of many.

Yet despite the brothers’ constantly evolving interest in music, they could never imagine that it offered any type of seri-ous career. It seemed that the few musicians they’d encountered also had ‘real’ occupations like their accountant father. Given the strong Catholic underpinning of their childhood, and their reg-ular encounters with the Durnings, both brothers briefly toyed with the idea of going into the priesthood. What could please Mary more? As Tim admitted, ‘I told my mother [about entering the priesthood] and bathed in the love that issued forth.’ 35 But that was about as close as either Finn son would come to being ordained.

It wasn’t long after Neil’s playground heroics that Tim would undergo two major life changes, left-turns that would point him in a direction he could never have envisaged. Tim, who was an excellent student, sat for, and then won, a scholarship to Sacred Heart College in Auckland, a Catholic boarding school. It was one of only two scholarships offered to a field of 100 contenders.




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A whole new world of experience was about to open up for the wavy-haired kid from Te Awamutu. But it was preceded by a life-changing few hours in a darkened Hamilton theatre.

Tim’s sister Judy had talked him into seeing a touring Brit-ish band, of whom he knew very little. As Neil once noted, with a mixture of fondness and bemusement, Te Awamutu was the kind of place where you’d have to walk miles in order to reach a museum – any museum – only to be met by ‘an old man’s col-lection of twigs’. 35 The town – and New Zealand itself – may have been a solid, safe and dependable place to be raised, but thrills were hard to come by. And, as various biographers have noted, that’s exactly what drew Tim Finn to this show: the lure of the unknown. Sure, he had heard of the Beatles – they’d swept through New Zealand the year before, and his green and pleasant home-land was still feeling the cultural shockwaves – but who, exactly, was the Dave Clark Five? All the gangly 13-year-old knew was that they were English and played what some people referred to as ‘pop music’ – and that Lew Pryme, the guy with bleached hair and big-toothed grin who’d just opened the show with his band the Impacts, was a fellow Kiwi. He was as big a pop star as they had at the time, too, fresh off the chart success of his single ‘Pride and Joy’, which had reached the Top 5 of the Lever Hit Parade. To Tim’s limited understanding, what he was about to hear from the headliner wasn’t the kind of music you’d catch on the radio.

Picking at the smattering of zits on his chin, ruffling his hand nervously through his hair, Tim looked on uncertainly as the lights inside the theatre dimmed. To misquote Bob Dylan, another trailblazer soon to appear on the Finn boy’s radar, something was happening here, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Drummer and bandleader Dave Clark ambled onstage, followed




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by the rest of the group, who plugged in and quickly tuned their instruments. They weren’t just a band – right now, they were the coolest, sharpest gang in town.

Within seconds, as they began to play, a strange thing hap-pened: a deafening roar erupted inside Founders Theatre. Tim was a little disorientated. The roar that engulfed him wasn’t com-ing from the stage, because you could barely hear the group, this being well before the days of sophisticated PAs and mixing desks. No, the sonic eruption was emerging from the audience – the combined screams of all the teenagers in the room, several thou-sand girls unleashing their pent-up desires. What the hell was going on?

Carolyn, who was 16, had no intention of quietly sitting and taking in the spectacle from a distance, ‘babysitting’ her brother. No way. As soon as the band launched into their most recent hit, a ridiculously catchy slice of Anglo guitar-pop called ‘Bits and Pieces’, Carolyn, along with her equally fixated girlfriends, left her seat and her brother (and her reserved middle-class manners) behind and rushed the stage, totally lost in the moment. What security there was in the theatre had no chance of restraining this unified surge of hormones. While Tim didn’t dare leave his seat, he experienced what could only be called a revelation as he watched the era-defining event unfold before him. ‘It was awe-inspiring because of the effect it had on my sister and her friends,’ he would later confess. ‘Until then she was fairly sedate, very sen-sible. Then I saw them all become primal and scream their heads off.’ 35

To his understanding, at least until about five minutes ago, guitars were best kept unamplified and softly strummed, not scratched at or used in a way that seemed to unleash wild sounds




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he’d never heard before. And while suits on performers were de rigueur, Tim wasn’t quite sure that they were meant to look so sharp, so sexy. Up until this night in Hamilton, he was fairly confident that ‘real’ music was the cool jazz he’d sampled while learning piano, or the sweet harmonising of the Brothers Durn-ing. What the Durnings would make of this, though, God only knew. The Dave Clark Five, with their hint of danger, their brash guitars and urgent, powerful harmonies, was unlike anything Tim had encountered before.

Tim may have been a vivid shade of green in matters of the world, a virgin both literally and metaphorically, but he was also a quick learner. It only took a few songs before he figured that it was rock-and-roll, not jazz – or the priesthood, for that mat-ter – that had the potential to open up a whole new world for him, something that he wasn’t likely to experience in Te Awamutu. Tim’s future lay elsewhere – and if these screaming girls came with it, then all the better. The sight of singing tub-thumper Dave Clark set loose Tim’s own inner drummer. ‘I was amazed by the idea of a singing drummer,’ he said in 1989, ‘which still inspires me to this day.’ 35c In fact, a few decades later he would get to drum at the very same theatre, playing alongside Neil, in a powerful few hours of déjà vu. ‘I’ve always wanted to be a drummer who sang,’ he said on that night in 1996, flashing back vividly to his close encounter with the Dave Clark Five. But for now, he was headed to Sacred Heart.

Opened in 1903 by the Marist Brothers, the austere, somewhat forebidding Sacred Heart College was set on 60 acres of land




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overlooking the Tamaki Estuary in Glen Innes, where it relo-cated in 1955 (the original site was in Ponsonby). It’s the oldest existing Catholic boys’ secondary school in Auckland and cur-rently caters for around 1000 students, both boarders and ‘day boys’. The school’s motto is: Confortare Esto Vir – Take Cour-age and Act Manfully. Several Sacred Heart old boys, including future All Black rugby captain Sean Fitzpatrick, took that very much to heart, always playing hard yet fair. In many ways the school motto also summed up the approach of the Marist Broth-ers themselves, with their strong-armed approach to academia, sport and God – although that order would sometimes vary.

Sporting culture, with a heavy emphasis on rugby, was prev-alent at Sacred Heart and something that both Finn brothers would embrace with almost the same vigour as music. Fitzpatrick wasn’t Sacred Heart’s only All Black; the school also produced such internationals as Isitolo Maka, Xavier Rush and Percy Erceg, along with a smattering of musicians (including future Finn con-sorts Mike Chunn and Dave Dobbyn), plus the odd author, bishop and captain of industry. In many ways it was the ideal school for a high achiever such as Brian Timothy Finn, who wrote with a nat-ural flair and love for language. ‘I was always good with words,’ said Tim, whose essays would often be read out in class. 36 But Tim was also a natural athlete, keeping it tight on the rugby field and squash court. He would become a natural fit, and quite the big man on campus, at Sacred Heart.

Yet it would be a massive stretch to call Sacred Heart’s new-est recruit ‘worldly’. By his early teens, Tim hadn’t yet kissed a girl – the closest he’d gotten was a session of ‘doctors and nurses’ with a local lass, conducted beneath his bed back home at Teas-dale Street. As Tim recalled, ‘We had the clothes off, going hard




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at it’ when mother Mary’s approaching footsteps put an end to their mutual examinations. 37 Mary then set about vacuum-ing his room, as Tim and his nurse squashed themselves into a tight corner underneath his bed, hoping to avoid detection. (Tim has admitted that ever since, the sight of a vacuum cleaner does strange things to his libido.) Mary’s staunch Catholicism put paid to anything else vaguely sexual: when the Finn family attended a screening of Ryan’s Daughter, director David Lean’s mildly racy examination of a wartime affair between an Irish girl and a Brit-ish soldier, an offended Mary insisted that they leave – now! ‘Dad wasn’t so keen,’ Neil remembered, ‘he was quite enjoying it.’ At home, when Tim attempted to draw what he called ‘an anatomi-cally correct, primitive kind of guy’, Mary paused, pointed to a prominent part of the illustration that caused her some distress. ‘Cross that bit out,’ she insisted.

‘Sex was always taboo in the house,’ said Neil. ‘She was squeam-ish if people were kissing on screen,’ Tim recalled. ‘There was that Irish, sort of extreme thing about sex as [being] extremely evil.’ 38 With a psychic suitcase full of Catholic guilt and sexual naiveté, and a blithe ignorance of the drug-fuelled revolution that was happening in much of the Western world, Tim took a deep breath and entered the grounds of Sacred Heart on 30 January 1966, joining 400 other fellow boarders. His life would never be the same.

Around the same time that a nervous Finn surveyed his new home, a fellow boarder, Jonathan Michael Chunn, also began his stretch at Sacred Heart. A native of Auckland suburb Otahuhu, Chunn and his younger brother Geoff had an upbringing not dis-similar to the Finns, having attended St Joseph’s Convent, where, as a cynical Chunn wrote, ‘They told us about heaven and where




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we all stood with this invisible figment.’ 39 Chunn’s own per-sonal revelation came at a screening of the wonderfully anarchic Beatles vehicle A Hard Day’s Night, which he caught at a cinema in Wellington. Writing in Stranger Than Fiction, Chunn recalled this event as ‘one and a half hours of the most exciting, uplifting and fresh music I had ever heard in my life’. 40 It was virtually impossible for him to equate the Beatles – their sound, their look, the works – with anything he’d experienced beforehand.

Having done the usual rounds of talent quests and music les-sons – like Tim, he was trained on the piano – Chunn was now a devoted Fab Four fanatic, Beatles boots and all. His life-changing 90 minutes in that Wellington movie house was every bit as rev-elatory as Tim’s night in the Founders Theatre watching the Dave Clark Five. Tim, too, would fall hard for the Beatles, with more than a little help from the more musically enlightened Chunn brothers.

Like most of life’s happy accidents, Tim’s first meeting with Chunn was purely by chance. Tim was emerging from his inter-view with Sacred Heart’s principal, Father Urban, and Chunn was outside the office, awaiting his own introductory ‘sitdown’. Like most newbies, Chunn and Finn gave each other the once-over. Finn, for one, was taken by what he saw in Chunn, who appeared to follow Groucho Marx’s edict about not wanting to belong to a club that would have him as a member. The standard uniform at Sacred Heart was a blazer with a butcher’s stripe – ‘which made us all look like dorks’, said Tim – but Chunn had elected to wear the alternate uniform, a dark blue suit. He was the first student Tim had seen who’d taken that option. A friendship soon developed.

Not long after settling into Sacred Heart, Tim would undergo another accidental musical revelation as he strolled through his




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dormitory one night. From somewhere nearby he could hear the crackling of a radio, and the song that was ringing out left him spellbound. This was no ‘Terry’, that was for sure. It was the heartbreaker ‘Massachusetts’, as sung by the Bee Gees, a trio of brotherly harmonisers who’d been born in England but made their mark in Australia. ‘I remember standing there, glued to the spot,’ recalled Tim. ‘I was really overcome by it.’ With Chunn act-ing as his musical guide, Tim said the Bee Gees and the Beatles ‘became the twin axis of our musical life’. 41 And it wouldn’t take a degree in musicology to find a bloodline linking ‘Massachusetts’ to Tim’s own ‘I Hope I Never’, despite a gap of some 13 years. The connection, clearly, was almost as deep as that between Tim and ‘Chang’, his new pal from Otahuhu.



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