Music Industry News

NZ Post Collectables are celebrating NZ Music Month with a focus on the kiwi music legends, Split Enz.

Split Enz was New Zealand’s first internationally recognised band. Revered and influential to this day, they were true originals who created their own sound and style of performance from the time they formed as Split Ends in 1972.

In 1975, Split Enz recorded their debut album Mental Notes, now seen by many as an early masterpiece. But it was with 1980’s True Colours that the band truly arrived on the world stage. Tim Finn’s songs ‘Shark Attack‘, ‘I Hope I Never‘ and ‘Poor Boy‘ became staples of the live set, while Neil Finn contributed the band’s biggest hit, ‘I Got You‘. True Colours also ushered in the era of Eddie Rayner’s instrumentals, which featured on all subsequent Enz albums.

True Colours was in heavy rotation on college radio in America, and BBC1 in the United Kingdom, and would influence a whole range of international artists including the B-52s and a young Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), as well as many of our New Zealand musicians back home.

Split Enz, the band and its songs, are an enduring cultural treasure for all New Zealanders.

Here are some details on the collection below:

$2.00 Purple & yellow – Split Enz released True Colours in January, 1980. The album remained high in the charts in NZ, Australia, Canada and Holland for several months. Neil Finn’s song I Got You is the band’s most successful tune.

$3.30 Yellow & blue – True Colours is the fifth album released by Split Enz. The band’s percussionist Noel Crombie designed the cover, choosing four different colour combinations.

$4.00 Blue & orange – British engineer and producer David Tickle has contributed to albums by Blondie, Prince and U2, among others. But it was as a near-unknown 20-year-old that he produced his first album: True Colours by Split Enz.

$6.90 Red & green – Before True Colours, Split Enz was a popular cult band, playing concerts around the world. After True Colours, many of its songs including Shark Attack, I Got You, I Hope I Never and Poor Boy would be mainstays of the band’s live performances and favourites on Kiwi and Australian radio

Medallion – Designed to look like a vinyl record, this metal medallion features iconic shapes from the album cover and comes in a pack featuring Noel Crombie’s vibrant True Colours artwork. Issued during New Zealand Music Month, the medallion commemorates the band’s influence on New Zealand’s music industry.

4 enamel pins have also been designed, each featuring one of the four different original release True Colours album covers.

Check out the whole collection here.