Blood Harmony - The Finn Brothers Live in Concert

I think it was the same night that we had a couple of drag queens join us in the dressing room, and one of them did the most deft chunder I have ever seen. She had a little purse with a zip. She unzipped the purse, deposited, zipped it up and carried on talking.

– Tim Finn recalls a memorable backstage "Wellington" moment, from the 1981 New Zealand Music Awards

Talking with my brother when the lights went out / Down the hallway 40 years ago /And what became much harder was so easy then /Opening up and letting go

 

– Lyrics from Finn Brothers song 'Disembodied Voices'

As you get older, you appreciate what sounds simple or like a sell-out is actually highly skilled and quite emotional, and really directly for the people. That’s my feeling about music now. To take nothing away from people who are avant-garde, state of the art, or clever — [pop has to] connect with the people. If people can pick up a guitar and play my songs at parties then to me that is the ultimate compliment. It doesn’t always happen, but that’s what I’m always aiming for.

– Neil Finn, in a Listener article on Finn Brothers album Everyone Is Here, August 2004

Performing for their family during Christmas parties at the beach was where it all started for the brothers Finn. They would rehearse in the hallway, then knock out the relatives with a version of ‘Jamaican Farewell’. “Our Uncle George would insist,” says Neil. “So we’d get dragged out. And though we’d squirm with embarrassment, we’d really enjoy it.” Says Tim, “We used to be forced into it. Good naturedly, but definitely forced. And I guess Neil was sheltered by me. It’s easier to be a lieutenant or a younger brother. You give the natural authority to the older brother, and just tag along.” Later, when Tim started putting bands together at school, Neil would hang about to watch. Despite the six-year age gap, he would occasionally be allowed to sing. “He was just good to have around,” says Tim. “Neil was always pretty cool. He knew how to be around older guys. To most people, it’d be, ‘Oh God, here comes my younger brother — I’ve got to look after him for the afternoon.’ It wasn’t like that.

– Chris Bourke interviews Neil and Tim Finn, The Listener, 2 March 1996

...he recalls the "purple patch like no other" they had — a two-week period in the early 1990s that produced some of the biggest hits the pair ever wrote. "All those years in Split Enz, we never really wrote together. It was quite bizarre. I think it was two or three songs, and they weren't true collaborations, in a funny way. It was almost like we'd saved it up."

– Tim Finn on composing songs with his brother Neil, Stuff, 28 November 2011

Their slightly rough harmonies and skewed melodic sense are as familiar as a pair of old gloves, of course, but their lapsed-Catholic soul-mining is less obscured by the veils of metaphor in which Neil, in particular, has long revelled. He's in a boldly existential mood from the off, vowing he Won't Give In, "even if time is just a flicker of light and we all have to die alone".

– Excerpt from a review of The Finn Brothers' album Everyone Is Here, The Age, 20 August 2004