Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m in my thirties. I’m a member of that generation who used to stay up until all hours on the weekends watching Night Flight, nearly two decades before Rhonda Shear was staying Up All Night. I remember fondly the music of Gary Numan and A Flock of Seagulls and the Human League – and the videos that went with that music. Oh, how I remember the videos. Weird settings, weirder costumes, and quite probably the weirdest hairstyles human history had ever produced. And as works of amateur filmmaking, music videos wore the “amateur” part of that description as a badge of honor. Jump cuts, massive leaps in continuity and visual logic, that signature overlit-low-budget video look, and a total disconnect between the song’s lyrics and the video’s imagery…nothing was too weird, and it wasn’t entirely improbable that the whole thing was shot in a single day. It was the age before MTV took over from radio the task of deciding what got listened to. It was the age when music video was truly in its infancy, not yet bestowed with mammoth budgets that would dwarf some hour-long television shows. Or some feature films.
And at the dawn of the music video age, on the first night MTV went on the air, who came on after the Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star? None other than a young Neil Finn and his cohorts, still riding the crest of their greatest popularity ever as Split Enz, dressed in clown suits and bouncing beach balls around a studio in time with the chiming electric guitar chords of History Never Repeats. Already hitmakers as close as the Canadian border, Split Enz had recently been signed by A&M for North American distribution, and surely they’d soon be famous worldwide. Or at least that was the thinking at the time.
I just wanted to impress upon you for a moment that Split Enz was a seminal voice in the infancy of music video, and their stuff did get played outside of Australia and New Zealand. But now that their nearly-complete video catalog has been committed to DVD for our digital preservation and enjoyment, it seems somehow unfair that I should have to go to great lengths to get a copy of it sent to America. But it was worth the effort.
A huge number of these videos display the influence of Split Enz percussionist Noel Crombie – an accomplished artist and designer in his own right who directed videos, designed sets and costumes (as he did for the band’s renowned live appearances), and otherwise stamped his own uniquely humorous imprint. Crombie’s contribution to the band’s look may, in retrospect, have been more important than his contribution to their sound. Though the first Split Enz album cover was painted by founding member Phil Judd, the look of Split Enz on stage – and on future album covers – was a bizarrely ahead-of-its-time aesthetic invented by Crombie, anticipating the new wave look of the 80s as far back at the mid 1970s. The look of Split Enz was humorous, even though the sound was frequently dramatic.
I’ve praised the songs themselves at some length in my album reviews, so here I’ll concentrate on the videos themselves and this DVD’s extras. One of the band’s first promotional clips, Late Last Night, may give you a momentary pause if you’ve seen it before. On my aging copy of the A&M Records VHS video compilation History Never Repeats: The Best Of Split Enz, Late Last Night is in color from beginning to end, 
and it sounds different. This is the first example of some of the trade-offs that had to be made to get this Split Enz DVD released: all of the sound is sourced from an Eddie Rayner-remastered best-of compilation, Spellbound – whether that version of the song is what was used in the original videos or not. Now, to be sure, Late Last Night is crisp and clear on this DVD, but portions of it suddenly turn into sepia-tinted B&W with an annoying “film flicker” effect. Make no mistake, I’m glad to have the clip on here, but it’s sad to hear that the original version of the video had sections that were too deteriorated for remastering. The substitution of the slickly-remastered album version of the song for the early 7″ single version doesn’t bug me as much, but if you’re a hardcore Enz fan, it may rankle you a bit. And this isn’t the only place where the use of the Spellbound remasters dictated the DVD’s content.
It’s with clips like Sweet Dreams, Bold As Brass and My Mistake that Split Enz defined itself on video: they take the mock-performance genre of music video and send it up for all it’s worth. This ranges from the bizarre dancing of the Bold As Brass video (Neil Finn’s first appearance in one of the band’s clips) to the amusing disappearance of the toupeè from Phil Judd’s head in one of the most perfectly-executed jump cuts I’ve ever seen. With the videos from Frenzy, the group’s financial low point is evident from the quickly-thrown-together clips for I See Red and Give It A Whirl.
The Split Enz you have the best chance of remembering is 80s Enz, and the videos of that era are, while still colorful, a little more self-consciously slick. It’s this era that brings us the familiar I Got You and History Never Repeats, as well as the more low-key Six Months In A Leaky Boat, which is a nice example of matching song and video thematically, but not necessarily playing out the lyrics word-for-word. Curiously, almost identical videos were made for Strait Old Line and I Walk Away, though I like both. Hidden on the third page of the “clipz” menu is the video for Things, a mighty catchy between-album single released in 1979; go to Message To My Girl and then hit the right arrow on your remote, and the “Things” button between the two columns of menu selections should light up. Enjoy – it’s hard to imagine squirreling a whole video away as an Easter Egg.
Omitted due to the lack of a remastered sound source, sadly, was one of my favorite videos, Next Exit. While I understand the need to have high-quality sound to go along with the restored video, I’m disappointed by this particular omission – and according 
to reports, no one in the band really expressed any disappointment than it was being left out. Sad, really – the goofiness of this particular video, which involved the members crammed into cars “driving” against a moving background, was its appeal. I Don’t Wanna Dance was also left out, as was Never Ceases To Amaze Me, a video in which green-skinned “aliens” Neil, Noel, Nigel Griggs and Eddie Rayner beam down to a zoo, where zookeeper Tim promptly escorts them around, both for the same reason. (And yet the video of Things is from a very scratchy film source; were these other videos, or indeed the substituted scenes of Late Last Night, really worse off than that?) Looks like I need to hang on to that History Never Repeats compilation for a while yet.
There’s also a wealth of live material here, ranging from a 1977 visit to the BBC’s Sight & Sound (an already-bizarre performance made that much more surreal by the polite, appreciative applause of the well-dressed music hall audience in attendance) to chronicles of the 1985 Enz With A Bang tour and even the 20th anniversary reunion performances.
The real killer app of this DVD, however, is the outstanding career-spanning documentary Spellbound, narrated by Sam Neill, and featuring interviews with virtually every member of every incarnation of the band – really, the only two past members I didn’t spot were Miles Golding and Div Vercoe from the group’s original, all-acoustic lineup. Everyone else – Tim, Neil, Noel, Eddie, even Phil Judd – is interviewed at length in an hour-long show that would sit very nicely alongside the very best episodes of VH1’s Behind The Music series (and why VH1 doesn’t license this for inclusion in that series would be baffling were it not for the band’s relative obscurity north of the equator – it’s that good). The heartbreaking thing about Spellbound is that it shows us clips from further live performances and videos not included in their full-length form on the DVD (including Maybe, one of my all-time Enz favorites from any of the band’s incarnations).
There is also a photo/poster gallery, and a discography with brief song samples. The videos would be enough of a prize all in one place, but the documentary makes an enormously compelling bonus. Highly recommended for any frenz of the Enz out there – if you’re outside of the south Pacific, get a multi-region DVD player. This one’s worth the special hardware.