00:00:00
Speaker 1: Well, there are a few bands that are as original, as unique, and fair to say, as loved as Split Ends. And now there is a brand new, collectible, full-colour, beautifully illustrated coffee table book that shows all of that and more. All the band are involved. It's called Split Ends, An Adventure in Music and Design. I am delighted to welcome Noel Crombie, Split Ends percussionist and visual genius, alongside Michael Dwyer, long-time music journalist, who's written for Rolling Stone and a number of other publications. Boys, lovely to have you on. Congratulations on the book.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Thanks, Lee. Thanks very much.
00:00:36
Speaker 1: Hey, Noel, no surprise. This book is a beautiful piece of art, like everything you do, everything you touch.
00:00:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there's no answer to that. But, yeah, thank you. All right.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: I'll leave those kind of questions then for Michael if you don't want to talk about and pump up yourself.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: You can do that, Michael.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: What's it like to work with the geniuses that are split ends and put something of this artwork together?
00:01:00
Speaker 3: Fantastic. Imagine my lot, Leith. I got to spend several months talking to, I think, maybe 20, 25 people, former members, current members, various other associates, all in praise of this, you know, kind of aesthetic, really, this kind of vision that Noel and other members of the band contributed to. But it was a really joyful thing because, you know, there's all kinds of machinations that go on inside bands, of course, which can get a little bit fraught. But everyone agrees on what a fantastic kind of just celebration of, you know, being alive. The visual aspect of Split Ends was it was always joyful, always colorful, always surprising. So it's been just a hell of a lot of fun for me.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Hey, Noel, I spoke to Tim recently on the show and we were talking about how you all went from art school there in New Zealand to become these global household names. Very few bands rival what you did in terms of, you know, the costumes and the music and the visuals. That was something organic, obviously, that just grew as you got together and became better friends and became better musicians together.
00:02:11
Speaker 3: I guess.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, yeah. I mean, the band when it started was pretty much like any band and everyone just kind of wore what they thought appropriate. And in the early days, Spudens didn't do a lot of gigging, but the ones that we did do were sort of usually in theatres and were quite elaborate productions in two halves. And I got involved there in a kind of stage management role and had the occasional sort of cameo and then realised that, you know, it was time that I just got something. I was making clothes for myself at that stage. And I thought I can do a set of costumes for the band and basically just did that off my own bat and handed them out at a gig and everyone put them on and I was like, oh, okay. But it suddenly unified the band, I think.
00:03:02
Speaker 1: When it comes to the clothing and the painting of the face and the theatrics that you had as a band, where does that idea of style come from? Like who or what was the inspiration for you? Is that a household you grew up in?
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Not at all, no. I mean, art school opened my eyes to a lot of things. And looking back at the history of performance, I suppose, things like vaudeville and circus were an influence. But, yeah, I think at the core of it, it was just you're going on stage, you're performing, you dress up. It's just a natural part of doing that. So.
00:03:41
Speaker 1: We can't talk about Noel because he's in the room here, Michael, so let's do that for him. What makes him such a genius when you look at the visual architect as he's been described about this? What is it that you, from all your writing and work, have noticed?
00:03:56
Speaker 3: I think it's that, you know, it's hard for us to imagine now, I think, how I can only imagine how isolated you would have felt growing up as an artist in Auckland in the 1960s. And I think that what that gave Noel and other founders of the band, Rob Gillies and Phil Judd, I think it sort of gave them carte blanche to be whatever they wanted to be. And what surprised me when I first started talking to Noel was I was asking those sort of questions, you know, so where did this come, where did that come from? And the answer was always pretty much, I don't know. We just wanted to do something different. There's an early chapter in the book where Noel talks about just the clear Pacific light, as they call it, of New Zealand. And it sort of struck me that it was all just grounded in. the surroundings that that he found himself in and this sort of wide open slate of possibility so there was no kind of you know we can identify things you know i thought he was going to talk about you know various art movements and stuff which obviously did filter into his sensibility but it was really just an act of imagination and and the permission that that that gave to them to be whatever they wanted to be. So I think that's how they ended up being so unique.
00:05:19
Speaker 1: Hey, so Noel, without aging you, I wasn't really around when you started. I was only very, very young. I was a year or two old. So I missed when you first started as Split Ends. Was it received well? Was there ever a push for you to conform to what everyone else was doing or people loved the individuality of the band?
00:05:42
Speaker 2: I think it was confronting for a lot of people. Um, but just further to what Michael was just talking about, really, we were, I think we were making art. It wasn't rock and roll in any sense. Uh, it was just, the music was complicated and interesting. It was art in a general sense. Um, so that was kind of the, the starting point of it all, I think. And, Then really when we went overseas, I think we were pretty determined to be different. We were also very uncompromising in that sense. So we just did what we did, and people either liked it or didn't, depending on what part of the world we were in. The Americans had a lot of trouble with it, I think, initially. But in truth, for a lot of people, the band starts with True Colors, but there's that whole era. the bulk of the band's history in fact before that and so hopefully this book will enlighten some people on that era as well I.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: Was just going to say there's some great stories in the book from people who were you know I mean Steve Kilby from the church for instance saw what he thinks was the first split ends gig in Sydney in 75 and he's got a funny story about you know just what you're talking about this sort of people didn't know what to make of it and it was quite divisive and it could have gone either way and you know certainly when split ends moved to london in 76 77 and the punk thing was happening Music fans kind of had to pick a side. Are we going to go with this crazy, arty, kind of, what the hell is this from New Zealand? Or are we going to go with this uniformed, NME-approved new movement? So, yeah, it was strange and challenging to a lot of people. I was just old enough to feel challenged by those early albums, which are now, you know, some of my favourites.
00:07:49
Speaker 1: And Michael, when you speak to everyone and you look and you live through that era, you would say too that It was never a gimmick, was it? Where the music's outstanding, the nature of the band might be eccentric, but it's natural. It's not forced like so many other musicians who think, let's do something visually to get noticed.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's the point is that it began, as Noel said, as just an explosion of creative possibilities, really.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: Music was a part of it.
00:08:16
Speaker 3: And in a sense, the the costumes and the artwork were responding to the music. And you can see that change through the book, actually, as the band became more, less kind of eccentric and more, you know, MTV kind of pop oriented, I suppose. You can see how the style changes. So, yeah, those things were fueling each other. It never felt contrived or, you know, kind of, Like they were drawing a long bow anywhere. It was just a natural progression because there was so much creativity going on in the ranks.
00:08:53
Speaker 1: Hey, Noel, thank goodness for your or the band's archiving abilities. I mean, this book is so beautiful. The photographs, the costumes, the design elements, the memorabilia. I mean, it's a joy for fans and lovers of art. Are you someone that sort of hoards those things and collects all your memories of things that you've done over the years and decades?
00:09:12
Speaker 2: Some of it, but no, not really. We were scratching around in some cases and certain sets of costumes that only had a short run because I ideally always, I insisted that we change. I didn't want to get stuck. And I use Kiss as this example, not that I'm against anything that they do, but they just had their thing and they just kept it. And that was never the thing. Every album was a new look or a couple of new looks for the touring that came after it. And so, yeah, some of the sets of costumes were worn very seldom. Others that became favourites might have overlapped a couple of albums. And we always had a few in reserve on the road because i used to get pretty manky a lot of sweat and stench but yeah so it was just a matter of moving forward and as michael was saying as the music sort of became more streamlined and we became more conscious i suppose of of trying to make a single really um the idea of commercial success hadn't really been a driving factor. But Chrysalis at some point in England sort of put it on us, you know, we want a single. And that was kind of confronting. But, yeah, so that was, I think, yeah, you see that transition through the book because it's sort of laid out chronologically from album to album. And that was definitely a part of the way the look changed just in response to the music. And the times. Yeah.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a spectacular piece of work that you put. Imagine how much the fans, Michael, would want those sweaty, skanky bits of costuming if they could get their hands on it as a piece of memorabilia. Before I let you go, Michael, you interviewed everyone in the group. I mean, in today's day and age, in today's music, that's a rarity too. A, that bands like each other after all this time, but B, just even the concept of bands like Split Ends just doesn't exist today.
00:11:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a family. It feels like that.
00:11:18
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, speaking to people like Tim and Mike in Auckland, you know, they.
00:11:23
Speaker 2: Still see each other.
00:11:24
Speaker 3: There's a lot of history there.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: They're old friends.
00:11:28
Speaker 3: And the reason that I think that they're all so keen to get involved is because, I mean, you know, Noel has kind of got a very esteemed position in the band. He's been there from the beginning and everyone wants to talk about that aspect of And a lot of them were really, you know, we talked about where the costumes come from. They're all in storage here at the Australian Performing Arts Collection at Hamer Hall in Melbourne here. And Noel brought them in. They told me, like, how many years ago, Noel? When did you take them in?
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Oh, must have been about 82 or something, 83, early on.
00:12:09
Speaker 3: I was told that Noel just sort of dragged them in, you know, half a dozen old garbage bags kind of things, just these bags of rag, which they've restored lovingly and they're all, you know, hanging there. And sometimes they come out for an exhibit. We're really hoping someday we'll be able to get them all out on the road because it's an amazing collection. And everyone I spoke to from the band said, they were just delighted to see these things you know they hadn't seen them in years and the memories just came flooding back so to have that resource that was really the seed of this project we got to get these yeah these beautiful costumes seen and now here they all are.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: I love that i love the idea of not walking in all these old things here you go meantime all of our heads are exploding and how exciting it is congratulations to you both i mean it's an incredible piece of work i I was saying to you off-air, Michael, like the book is just so beautiful. It's such a great piece of artwork. Split Ends and Adventure in Music and Design is an Allen and Unwin publication. It is available now where you get all good books. Michael Dwyer, lovely to have you on, Michael. Thank you for your time. And the legend, Noel Crombie. Great to meet you, Noel. Thank you for joining us and congratulations too. Thanks, Lee.
Speaker 1: Well, there are a few bands that are as original, as unique, and fair to say, as loved as Split Ends. And now there is a brand new, collectible, full-colour, beautifully illustrated coffee table book that shows all of that and more. All the band are involved. It's called Split Ends, An Adventure in Music and Design. I am delighted to welcome Noel Crombie, Split Ends percussionist and visual genius, alongside Michael Dwyer, long-time music journalist, who's written for Rolling Stone and a number of other publications. Boys, lovely to have you on. Congratulations on the book.
00:00:35
Speaker 2: Thanks, Lee. Thanks very much.
00:00:36
Speaker 1: Hey, Noel, no surprise. This book is a beautiful piece of art, like everything you do, everything you touch.
00:00:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there's no answer to that. But, yeah, thank you. All right.
00:00:50
Speaker 1: I'll leave those kind of questions then for Michael if you don't want to talk about and pump up yourself.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: You can do that, Michael.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: What's it like to work with the geniuses that are split ends and put something of this artwork together?
00:01:00
Speaker 3: Fantastic. Imagine my lot, Leith. I got to spend several months talking to, I think, maybe 20, 25 people, former members, current members, various other associates, all in praise of this, you know, kind of aesthetic, really, this kind of vision that Noel and other members of the band contributed to. But it was a really joyful thing because, you know, there's all kinds of machinations that go on inside bands, of course, which can get a little bit fraught. But everyone agrees on what a fantastic kind of just celebration of, you know, being alive. The visual aspect of Split Ends was it was always joyful, always colorful, always surprising. So it's been just a hell of a lot of fun for me.
00:01:49
Speaker 1: Hey, Noel, I spoke to Tim recently on the show and we were talking about how you all went from art school there in New Zealand to become these global household names. Very few bands rival what you did in terms of, you know, the costumes and the music and the visuals. That was something organic, obviously, that just grew as you got together and became better friends and became better musicians together.
00:02:11
Speaker 3: I guess.
00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, yeah. I mean, the band when it started was pretty much like any band and everyone just kind of wore what they thought appropriate. And in the early days, Spudens didn't do a lot of gigging, but the ones that we did do were sort of usually in theatres and were quite elaborate productions in two halves. And I got involved there in a kind of stage management role and had the occasional sort of cameo and then realised that, you know, it was time that I just got something. I was making clothes for myself at that stage. And I thought I can do a set of costumes for the band and basically just did that off my own bat and handed them out at a gig and everyone put them on and I was like, oh, okay. But it suddenly unified the band, I think.
00:03:02
Speaker 1: When it comes to the clothing and the painting of the face and the theatrics that you had as a band, where does that idea of style come from? Like who or what was the inspiration for you? Is that a household you grew up in?
00:03:15
Speaker 2: Not at all, no. I mean, art school opened my eyes to a lot of things. And looking back at the history of performance, I suppose, things like vaudeville and circus were an influence. But, yeah, I think at the core of it, it was just you're going on stage, you're performing, you dress up. It's just a natural part of doing that. So.
00:03:41
Speaker 1: We can't talk about Noel because he's in the room here, Michael, so let's do that for him. What makes him such a genius when you look at the visual architect as he's been described about this? What is it that you, from all your writing and work, have noticed?
00:03:56
Speaker 3: I think it's that, you know, it's hard for us to imagine now, I think, how I can only imagine how isolated you would have felt growing up as an artist in Auckland in the 1960s. And I think that what that gave Noel and other founders of the band, Rob Gillies and Phil Judd, I think it sort of gave them carte blanche to be whatever they wanted to be. And what surprised me when I first started talking to Noel was I was asking those sort of questions, you know, so where did this come, where did that come from? And the answer was always pretty much, I don't know. We just wanted to do something different. There's an early chapter in the book where Noel talks about just the clear Pacific light, as they call it, of New Zealand. And it sort of struck me that it was all just grounded in. the surroundings that that he found himself in and this sort of wide open slate of possibility so there was no kind of you know we can identify things you know i thought he was going to talk about you know various art movements and stuff which obviously did filter into his sensibility but it was really just an act of imagination and and the permission that that that gave to them to be whatever they wanted to be. So I think that's how they ended up being so unique.
00:05:19
Speaker 1: Hey, so Noel, without aging you, I wasn't really around when you started. I was only very, very young. I was a year or two old. So I missed when you first started as Split Ends. Was it received well? Was there ever a push for you to conform to what everyone else was doing or people loved the individuality of the band?
00:05:42
Speaker 2: I think it was confronting for a lot of people. Um, but just further to what Michael was just talking about, really, we were, I think we were making art. It wasn't rock and roll in any sense. Uh, it was just, the music was complicated and interesting. It was art in a general sense. Um, so that was kind of the, the starting point of it all, I think. And, Then really when we went overseas, I think we were pretty determined to be different. We were also very uncompromising in that sense. So we just did what we did, and people either liked it or didn't, depending on what part of the world we were in. The Americans had a lot of trouble with it, I think, initially. But in truth, for a lot of people, the band starts with True Colors, but there's that whole era. the bulk of the band's history in fact before that and so hopefully this book will enlighten some people on that era as well I.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: Was just going to say there's some great stories in the book from people who were you know I mean Steve Kilby from the church for instance saw what he thinks was the first split ends gig in Sydney in 75 and he's got a funny story about you know just what you're talking about this sort of people didn't know what to make of it and it was quite divisive and it could have gone either way and you know certainly when split ends moved to london in 76 77 and the punk thing was happening Music fans kind of had to pick a side. Are we going to go with this crazy, arty, kind of, what the hell is this from New Zealand? Or are we going to go with this uniformed, NME-approved new movement? So, yeah, it was strange and challenging to a lot of people. I was just old enough to feel challenged by those early albums, which are now, you know, some of my favourites.
00:07:49
Speaker 1: And Michael, when you speak to everyone and you look and you live through that era, you would say too that It was never a gimmick, was it? Where the music's outstanding, the nature of the band might be eccentric, but it's natural. It's not forced like so many other musicians who think, let's do something visually to get noticed.
00:08:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's the point is that it began, as Noel said, as just an explosion of creative possibilities, really.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: Music was a part of it.
00:08:16
Speaker 3: And in a sense, the the costumes and the artwork were responding to the music. And you can see that change through the book, actually, as the band became more, less kind of eccentric and more, you know, MTV kind of pop oriented, I suppose. You can see how the style changes. So, yeah, those things were fueling each other. It never felt contrived or, you know, kind of, Like they were drawing a long bow anywhere. It was just a natural progression because there was so much creativity going on in the ranks.
00:08:53
Speaker 1: Hey, Noel, thank goodness for your or the band's archiving abilities. I mean, this book is so beautiful. The photographs, the costumes, the design elements, the memorabilia. I mean, it's a joy for fans and lovers of art. Are you someone that sort of hoards those things and collects all your memories of things that you've done over the years and decades?
00:09:12
Speaker 2: Some of it, but no, not really. We were scratching around in some cases and certain sets of costumes that only had a short run because I ideally always, I insisted that we change. I didn't want to get stuck. And I use Kiss as this example, not that I'm against anything that they do, but they just had their thing and they just kept it. And that was never the thing. Every album was a new look or a couple of new looks for the touring that came after it. And so, yeah, some of the sets of costumes were worn very seldom. Others that became favourites might have overlapped a couple of albums. And we always had a few in reserve on the road because i used to get pretty manky a lot of sweat and stench but yeah so it was just a matter of moving forward and as michael was saying as the music sort of became more streamlined and we became more conscious i suppose of of trying to make a single really um the idea of commercial success hadn't really been a driving factor. But Chrysalis at some point in England sort of put it on us, you know, we want a single. And that was kind of confronting. But, yeah, so that was, I think, yeah, you see that transition through the book because it's sort of laid out chronologically from album to album. And that was definitely a part of the way the look changed just in response to the music. And the times. Yeah.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a spectacular piece of work that you put. Imagine how much the fans, Michael, would want those sweaty, skanky bits of costuming if they could get their hands on it as a piece of memorabilia. Before I let you go, Michael, you interviewed everyone in the group. I mean, in today's day and age, in today's music, that's a rarity too. A, that bands like each other after all this time, but B, just even the concept of bands like Split Ends just doesn't exist today.
00:11:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a family. It feels like that.
00:11:18
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, speaking to people like Tim and Mike in Auckland, you know, they.
00:11:23
Speaker 2: Still see each other.
00:11:24
Speaker 3: There's a lot of history there.
00:11:26
Speaker 2: They're old friends.
00:11:28
Speaker 3: And the reason that I think that they're all so keen to get involved is because, I mean, you know, Noel has kind of got a very esteemed position in the band. He's been there from the beginning and everyone wants to talk about that aspect of And a lot of them were really, you know, we talked about where the costumes come from. They're all in storage here at the Australian Performing Arts Collection at Hamer Hall in Melbourne here. And Noel brought them in. They told me, like, how many years ago, Noel? When did you take them in?
00:12:04
Speaker 2: Oh, must have been about 82 or something, 83, early on.
00:12:09
Speaker 3: I was told that Noel just sort of dragged them in, you know, half a dozen old garbage bags kind of things, just these bags of rag, which they've restored lovingly and they're all, you know, hanging there. And sometimes they come out for an exhibit. We're really hoping someday we'll be able to get them all out on the road because it's an amazing collection. And everyone I spoke to from the band said, they were just delighted to see these things you know they hadn't seen them in years and the memories just came flooding back so to have that resource that was really the seed of this project we got to get these yeah these beautiful costumes seen and now here they all are.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: I love that i love the idea of not walking in all these old things here you go meantime all of our heads are exploding and how exciting it is congratulations to you both i mean it's an incredible piece of work i I was saying to you off-air, Michael, like the book is just so beautiful. It's such a great piece of artwork. Split Ends and Adventure in Music and Design is an Allen and Unwin publication. It is available now where you get all good books. Michael Dwyer, lovely to have you on, Michael. Thank you for your time. And the legend, Noel Crombie. Great to meet you, Noel. Thank you for joining us and congratulations too. Thanks, Lee.
