#philjudd

[be-themessenger]

•••🌟second end post of the whole blog - can't believe it's been so long since I last talked about them... this is part 1 of the pre-atom age [that's to say, before xtc's multipairing world won my writing life] icons me and dear @heartbeatkittie used on Tumblr - as you see they bear the old logo. here's a very young phil judd taken from one of his earliest enz photos, when the band was still called split /ends/. this non-studio picture sent back to the awakening times of 1973, when the band was coming to life and about to pop on the musical scene [almost contemporarily to the young lads of xtc, who were rockin' round under the name of helium kidz]. looks very natural, touched by the sunlight and is harmonised by the roundness of his shirt collar. behind phil, the angry skies of whitianga show the glorious beauty of this as one of the northwards landmarks of new zealand's northern island. the sand of its shores is very dark, so dark when I placed the b/w it looked already gun-grey. in placing phil on the towering blue cumulus clouds, I took care in making his presence in the pic look very collage-like, that's why his hair are roughly cut. I then added the brush swirl to recall of maori moko. to match the collage/zine aesthetic i picked courier font and scribbled down the title of a later tim-penned 8os song melancholically (whata wordsmith) rests among my favourites. written around 1978, performed in the luton sessions [bringing an equally intense feeling], this song evokes the tribal, primal feeling of native life in new zealand's wilderness. it was the song that made me start the fic I will tell you about on part two, but in this occasion, it came as a natural choice - it felt like tim shouting in the wind to a far, distant phil, 'you remember when we were me and you, free, doing everything together? I can, can you as well?' 🌟••• #splitenz #newzealand #whitianga #shores #darksand #stormy #clouds #northwards #northernisland #awakening #music #70smusic #philjudd #bside #rememberwhen #collage #maori #moko #icon #fanzine #courier #font #lettering #bluehues #blue #timfinn #song #tumblr #calling

[vinylanswer]

Oh, Split Enz were a complicated group, and a prime example is this trio of album (yes, that’s “album” singular). Their first LP, back when they were a cross between Gabriel-era Genesis and a demented vaudeville troupe, was called Mental Notes, and it came out in 1975 in Australia; that’s the one on the bottom left. It is a WEIRD freakin’ album and the impressive cover painting was done by a band member, Phil Judd (brown suit jacket in center Then they moved to London, re-recorded half the Mental Notes album and released those tracks with some newl tracks as their second album, calling it Second Thoughts. That’s the album on top, and arguably it’s really a 1.5 album instead of a second album proper. Its cover is a photo and if you look close, you can spot Judd in front—by this point, he had shaved his head (a rare sight in 1976) and PAINTED HAIR on to his head. Somewhere around this time, Split Enz finally got signed in the U.S., so they released Second Thoughts as their U.S. debut (bottom right)…but they called it Mental Notes. And used the Judd painting, except that he now had altered it, painting out his hair. No question, Judd was an odd guy, but his best work was still ahead of him, when he led Schnell-Fenster through its forgotten, brilliant alt-pop debut, The Sound of Trees, in 1990.