Split Enz returned to Rod Laver Arena on May 13 and made the old oddity feel newly alive. The band opened under a golden cloth, then moved into Shark Attack, History Never Repeats and Poor Boy as Neil Finn and Tim Finn traded lead vocals with the ease of brothers who have spent a lifetime hearing the same songs from different angles.
The show mattered because it was Split Enz’s first reunion tour in almost 20 years, a rare comeback for a band that disbanded in 1984 and last night sounded less like a nostalgia act than a living archive. The stage was crowded with two percussionists, two pianists and two guitarists, a doubled-up setup that matched the music’s layered, theatrical streak and gave the performance a sense of motion even when the band was standing still.
Tim Finn, who spent part of the night reminiscing about the band’s earlier years in Victoria, pulled one of the evening’s sharpest laughs by recalling a crowd of “zero people” in Shepparton. That joke landed because it carried the kind of memory only a long-lived band can claim: the gulf between playing to nothing and filling a major arena decades later.
Split Enz have always traded in the strange, and they did not soften that instinct for the return. One reflection on the band’s early reputation was bluntly summed up as “We were weird,” a line that fit a group whose hooks have often arrived wrapped in detours, costumes and art-school mischief. Noel Crombie, the percussionist and art director, was still part of that visual and musical language, and in the encore he delivered a spoon solo that turned a comic flourish into a reminder that the band never treated performance as something separate from the song.
The emotional hinge came with Six Months in a Leaky Boat. When the song reached its peak, the entire seated section on the floor rose to its feet, a burst of recognition that said as much about the audience as it did about the band. The Finn brothers, now in their 60s and 70s, have spent enough time away from Split Enz to make the reunion feel earned rather than manufactured, and that distance gave the night its weight.
For listeners who grew up with the music in Aotearoa, New Zealand, the songs carried an extra charge because they were never just album tracks or old hits. They were part of the background noise of a country, and at Rod Laver Arena they arrived with their history intact. The band’s stage arrangement, with duplicated instruments and rotating roles, made that history visible: this was not a tidy museum piece but a group trying to show how its old parts still fit together.
The tension in the night was not whether Split Enz could still play the songs. It was whether the songs could still surprise after all these years. On May 13, they did. The reunion answered its own question by sounding both familiar and restless, and that is why the return worked.
