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From the time they burst on to the music scene, the Kiwi band also generated plenty of noise from their outrageous outfits – imagined by a band member who previously had no interest in clothes.
From clown-influenced early costumes to asymmetrical distortions and curtain fabrics, New Zealand band Split Enz was known as much for their striking look as their music. The band’s visual architect and percussionist Noel Crombie, in this extract from new book, Split Enz: An Adventure in Music and Design, describes his inspirations and process to journalist Michael Dwyer.
“I had no idea about fashion,” Crombie says. “I was a surfer before I went to art school. One outfit: corduroy jeans and a flannie shirt or something. I was not in the slightest bit interested in clothes.
“But I was interested in making things. That’s how I ended up at Elam School of Fine Arts [in Auckland, with Split Enz founders Tim Finn, Phil Judd and Rob Gillies]; basically because of my drawing ability. Tech drawing had given me an understanding of how to assemble things. So I got a couple of Butterick patterns from the haberdashery place …
“I was quite impressed and influenced by early New Zealand art more than European art, because you got to look at it in real life, as opposed to everything being in books.
“I didn’t realise this until we finally got to America and I went to a couple of big art museums, looking at paintings by Edward Hopper and people like that who were into that folkie realist realm, and realising that it was painterly.
“Seeing [Pablo Picasso’s] Guernica in New York, you got the sense of the physical action that was involved in doing that stuff.
“I also saw an exhibition of Russian opera costumes at the V&A Museum in London and they were rough as guts. I thought that was great, because I’d seen some pictures of them and they looked quite tailored. I suppose it’s a metaphor for that Antipodean thing of thinking everything ‘over there’ is really amazing. When you see it in real life, it looks like somebody made it …
“We had the same cultural cringe thing as Australians driving us, in a way. You were at the end of the world, feeling slightly isolated. You had all these bands and other things happening up there in the northern hemisphere that were inspiring and you felt like you had to be able to compete in that market, so you had to be really shit-hot, but we were striving always to be perversely individual and never thought at all, for years, about what would be commercial. It was art. We just did exactly what we pleased …
“The clown theme was a recurring thing in the early days. At art school, I became vaguely aware of commedia dell’arte. It must have come up in art history and I saw a picture of Joseph Grimaldi in the Harlequin costume. So that was the classic clown image I was drawing on …
“Dizrythmia [Split Enz’s third studio album, 1977] was when I started whacking off different asymmetrical looks. Punk had happened. We were in that strange no-man’s-land there for a while … Tim’s shredded suit was designed for the show opening, which was an explosion. You’d get these things like fire extinguishers, a big thing that will fire shreds of this green material and bits of crap. He’d emerge from this like he’d somehow managed to escape.
“[Split Enz keyboardist] Eddie [Rayner]’s red sideways jacket was an interesting one. The other sleeve’s on the back. He just had his arm hanging out in a white shirt. Until he turned around, you wouldn’t even really notice the other sleeve was there. It was like taking your jacket and twisting it 90 degrees … I revisited that idea for a coupe of reunion costumes in the early ’90s.”
“There was a shop in Melbourne specifically selling curtains. I think it was down in Prahran, and I remember walking in and immediately thinking, ‘Oh, shit, that’s got potential.’ Those suits came together fairly quickly. There’s a lot less distortion involved in the design, so the patterns were fairly straightforward …
“I was pushing a few shape things for the New Black-and-Whites [in 1983]. There’s some looser stuff going on, playing with collars, getting away from the more formal suit look. There’s a bit of a Japanese influence here, most obviously in Nigel [Griggs]‘s outfit: the big kaftan-y thing. Neil [Finn]’s had a rolled collar instead of an opening in the front …
“We were very determined not to be like everyone else. That wasn’t the starting point for any of it, really; it was just that we were totally uncompromising.
“The band as a whole was pretty good at just letting each person do what they did best, so I got to do what I did: from going to art school thinking I’d be a painter, to being in a band, and then actually getting to do all of that stuff and more, make film clips and sets and costumes. It was a great outlet for those impulses that I would never have got to express otherwise.”
Split Enz: An Adventure in Music and Design by Noel Crombie and Michael Dwyer is out September 29 (Allen & Unwin).
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