No Tim Finn like the present

New Zealand pop elder statesman Tim Finn is celebrating two significant anniversaries. He talks to RUSSELL BAILLIE.

No, Tim Finn doesn't look 50. He's actually a few weeks short of the big five-O. As Haul Away, the autobiographical shanty he wrote 20 years ago will always remind: "I was born in Te Awamutu, 25th of June, 1952 ... "

But on this morning, as the record company's reception stereo outside plays Crowded House's Weather With You - the most successful song the brothers Finn wrote together - he presents like a man you can't quite place into any particular generation.

As well as entering his sixth decade, Finn is passing another milestone - 30 years as a singer-songwriter.

Finn dates his career from 1972. The year that he, having made some musical mates at Sacred Heart College, headed to Auckland University and founded a musical partnership with art student Philip Judd. Split Ends made their live debut in December 1972, their first single For You/ Split Ends four months later.

Finn hasn't spoken to Judd - who couldn't handle the being-in-a-band side of the Enz and eventually left to be replaced by a teenage Neil Finn - for nine years. Judd went on to brief success in the Swingers, but now lives in Melbourne in apparent wilful obscurity.

"We're pretty estranged and that's not great," says Finn with a note of regret about his first musical partner. "It is what it is."

The subject of his first great musical partnership hasn't come up just because of that anniversary. His new solo album, Feeding The Gods, includes a Judd song, Incognito in California, which his old cohort wrote in 1978 having left Split Enz and decamped to the English countryside.

Finn had a battered old cassette of the tune. He contacted Judd's ex-wife, who pulled a crumpled lyric sheet out of a box of his old stuff. Finn had some of the lyrics wrong, but he left them that way. Yes, he did write a letter to Judd telling him he'd be doing the song, but never heard back.

"He's quite an elusive character ... "

Finn, on the other hand, is the least elusive he's been in ages. He's done three extensive tours since late last year and he has a two-night Finn Brothers Hooley at the St James on Queen's Birthday Weekend.

As those tours have shown, neither does Finn sound and perform how 30-year music veterans are meant to.

That restoked fire in Finn's belly can be heard all over Feeding the Gods.

It's an album that suggests the best New Zealand album released this New Zealand music month isn't by some bright young thing, but from someone who helped to start the very idea in the first place.

Though whether Finn will get noticed as much for his present as he is regarded for his past is another thing. The local branch of EMI, who have picked up Feeding the Gods after a label-less Finn shopped the completed album around, have an uphill battle - using the New Zealand music month logo, the company has put out an email to radio station programmers asking, "Tim Finn - the Australians are playing him, why aren't we?"

Not that it particularly worries Finn. Now married and a father of one, he's beyond career angst.

Ask him directly what sort of shape his career is in and he replies: "I feel like I've had some of the best years ever writing-wise and playing gigs, so I feel very good about it.

"I suppose in a sense it's not a career - a career has kind of a trajectory, you reach a certain level and you plateau out inevitably, I suppose. But it's not like that. It's all these peaks and valleys and troughs, but there's an enduring thing, which is always playing live. So as long as the gigs are going well I'm happy."

And his voice, which was once able to trill in a stratospheric falsetto in songs like I Hope I Never? What shape is that in after 30 years?

"Good. I look after it better than I used to do," he says, explaining that he does a full regime of vocal warm-ups and warm-downs after each show, taught to him by a vocal coach he went to in New York.

"But I think 90 per cent of the voice is in the heart and in the head and in the spirit. If you are feeling right about it and singing out there to the audience and connecting, you don't usually have a problem.

"You hit certain crisis points and you think, 'Shit, I've lost it, I can't sing any more'.

"A lot of the old stuff is so high. For a while I was hitting a bit of a wall there on some of those early songs. They were all so goddam high ... So because of that I started to sing a bit low again and find that low sound. But I can sing Matinee Idyll and a lot of the early stuff night after night, six gigs in a row, without any problem . The training I do for it it pays off."

Finn's last big payday was the runaway success that was his 2000 national jaunt with Bic Runga and Dave Dobbyn, which taught him he didn't have to just be playing to sell albums.

"You can tour just because you want to tour and make it an event, and it can be special and it can be about the songs and it can be about connections, and you can play old songs that do a certain work for you. A gig is an experience it ... it's not about, 'Hey, here are my new songs'."

That tour also was also important to Finn for another reason. His ill mother Mary came to see him play at the Civic shortly before she died.

"We were going through an extreme family time, and at the same time there was this amazing tour going on that just ran and ran and it went all over New Zealand, as you know. Hastings on Friday night, whatever, it was brilliant."

His sellout tours are proof of the regard New Zealanders still hold for Finn. When he whirlwinds into I See Red it's more than just a rock'n'roll song - it's revisiting our loudest cultural landmark.

But although Feeding the Gods is his most rock'n'roll album yet, it may be that we will always peg Finn to his past glories. He doesn't begrudge us doing that.

"I would love to have the whole thing work for me in a sense where it all comes together, you get a lot of radio and everyone loves your record.

"That's a great feeling, but what I've learned is that it can take 10 or 15 years to learn what an album was worth, and it might be just a person at a party playing [previous solo effort] Say It Is So to one other person.

"That to me is a little spark that can happen and it just carries it on."