Forever 14
Split Enz legend Mike Chunn tells Alex Behan how agoraphobia caused him to quit the band, how he helped raise the profile of Kiwi music and why he’s still a ‘happy cry-baby’.
Amazing things seem to happen to Mike Chunn. Opportunities fall from the sky. In person it’s easy to see why. He’s immensely likeable. The cheeky charm sneaks through in his new memoir, but across the table at a Parnell cafe´ sipping the house chardonnay, it’s palpable.
‘‘It must be the small boy in me that’s never grown up,’’ he says. ‘‘I was asked by a schoolgirl, for a project she was doing, if to have a long and fruitful time in the music industry you have to be 14 years old forever. I said two things. One, that’s one of the best questions I’ve ever been asked, and the answer is yes.’’
Chunn’s new memoir A Sharp Left Turn details the formation and glorious early years of Split Enz. It goes deep into their brilliance and dysfunction and he reveals he left the band due to debilitating agoraphobia.
Beyond Split Enz the book is a story of how enthusiasm, passion and self-belief can achieve remarkable results. This is a man who thought writing songs was so special it should be part of the education curriculum. Today, thanks to his Play It Strange foundation, it is.
It all began in his school years at Auckland’s Sacred Heart, where future bandmate Tim Finn was halfback for the First XV while Chunn was on the wing. They yearned to be free and music was their escape.
‘‘In 1968 we’re out on the lawn passing rugby balls around and someone rushed in and said, ‘I’ve got the new Beatles’ song, it’s called Lady
Madonna.’ We bashed it on one of those battery
gramophones. The Beatles completely took over my being.’’
Recording Finn singing for the first time was a moment that changed both Tim and his little brother Neil’s life. Later, forming Split Enz, they also had a secret weapon called Phil Judd ‘‘who brought foundations of truly mind-numbing songs’’.
Split Enz was everything Mike Chunn had always dreamed of but while on stage he thrived, off stage he was suffering severe attacks that he didn’t understand. ‘‘I didn’t have a name for it. I could have said, ‘every now and then I am filled with terror, I usually vomit, my bowels turn to water and I think it all goes back to when we were tripping and that dope we smoked.’ Everyone would have thought I was mad.’’
Musically they were brilliant – ‘‘no-one told anyone what notes to play. It made me really happy. I felt like I was part of a creative machine’’ – it was only when Split Enz had to talk to each they became dysfunctional. ‘‘The evolution of my character found me a pathetic communicator, like everyone else in the band,’’ Chunn admits.
Agoraphobia is commonly thought of as the fear of open spaces but it’s actually the fear of not being able to return to a safe place. For him that place was Auckland. Not a great mental condition for a touring musician. Prescribed tranquilisers bought him five years of being able to function in a band, but eventually it became too much.
‘‘I didn’t want them to know anything. I didn’t want to cause any sort of rift. I didn’t want to have to leave. The irony was in the end I had to leave because of the endless parade of tranquilisers that were going through my head.’’
He left the band but stayed in music, taking the series of sharp left turns that gives the book its title. Post Enz, Chunn managed bands (The Crocodiles, Pop Mechanix) but was terrible at standing up to people and delivering difficult truths to bands.
The same fear of confrontation had plagued Split Enz. ‘‘We’d been drilled down in our academic life from 5 to 18, where silence was demanded all the time. ‘Be quiet. Don’t talk. You’re talking, bend over. Don’t talk. Shut up.’ So we made dumb decisions all the time.’’
He happily stumbled from management into major record labels signing bands and spotting talent (DD Smash, The Exponents). Effusive and passionate, he could convince anyone a band or a song was great but he didn’t quite get the impetus on profit (‘‘I don’t give a shit if one person sells more icecreams than another person’’).
He was an outlier in the corporate world. For a start, he’s a weeper. He broke down twice last week during a radio interview. While Chunn doesn’t think he has any depressive elements to his psyche, he cries a lot – ‘‘but I’m a happy cry-baby, like my Dad was’’.
‘‘Kim Hill can ask a question and I find myself crying first and answering later. That’s cool. But I never ever felt sorry for myself.’’
Eventually Chunn found himself as director of operations at APRA (Australasian Performing Rights Association). Every country in the world except the United States has a version of APRA, a body dedicated to collecting and distributing royalties to songwriters. And that’s where Chunn found his voice. He entered a community he truly envied, and loved it.
As much as Chunn says he envies great songwriters, many of those same great songwriters in this country all love Mike Chunn because his hard work made them all more money.
When he took over in 1991, radio station reports of what was being played were infrequent and low on detail. When they streamlined the process they discovered that very little New Zealand music was being played at all.
During his tenure at APRA not only did the amount of New Zealand music being broadcast increase, but also the amount of money collected also increased significantly. This meant not only getting media on board, but convincing nightclubs, bars, gymnasiums and hairdressers they all had to chip in.
While at APRA the seed for Play It Strange started germinating. He set about convincing everyone else that songwriting should be part of the curriculum.
His enthusiasm was the foundation’s greatest asset. Schools got on board, so too did big names like Neil Finn and Sean Fitzpatrick. He asked the head of TVNZ to host a telethon to launch a school songwriting competition. And it worked.
Play It Strange kicked off with National Anthems, a 24-hour music telethon in 2004, and in November 2016 the Ministry of Education announced the implementation of Achievement Standard 91849 – Songwriting at Level 3, Words and Music.
‘‘Kim Hill can ask a question and I find myself crying first and answering later. That’s cool. But I never ever felt sorry for myself.’’ Mike Chunn
The boy that never grew up still gets attacks of agoraphobia from time to time. As he takes his memoir on tour – on Friday he was in Wellington – there will be a tranquiliser in his pocket at all times, just in case. He hopes A Sharp Left Turn will help the many others who suffer the same affliction.
It will certainly appeal to Split Enz fans who will pour over its backstage details. It seems he’s no longer close with his high school buddy (‘‘I don’t see Tim. I don’t know what he does’’), but he had lunch the other day with sax player Bob Gillies, who told him he had no idea about the agoraphobia. No-one in the band did.
Most important to Chunn these days are children. Either the ones coming through the Play It Strange competitions or his own. He says he wrote the book for them. ‘‘My children and my grandchildren. They think I’m a bit odd. But they deserve to know why.’’
A Sharp Left Turn: Notes on a life in music, from Split Enz to Play It Strange, by Mike Chunn, is published by Allen & Unwin and is available now. RRP: $45.