If that voice belting out hits by Crowded House like “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and “Something So Strong” sounded somewhat familiar to you in the late 80s, it could be because you’d heard it before from another minor hit. Neil Finn had already scored with the band Split Enz several years earlier on the song “I Got You”.
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Split Enz only managed that one single that made much of an impact outside their native New Zealand. Still, the song fit very well with the power pop/New Wave vibes dominating the airwaves at the start of the 80s.
Brothers Unite
In their native New Zealand, Split Enz made a pretty consistent impact throughout the 70s. The band’s first two albums were dominated by the songwriting duo of Tim Finn and Phil Judd. But Judd left before the making of their third album, Dizrhythmia, in 1977.
To replace him in the lineup, Tim Finn enlisted his brother Neil, then an upcoming singer and guitarist. Neil Finn, not even 20 when he joined the band, hadn’t yet developed as a songwriter. But that would come soon enough, as he contributed a few co-writes to the 1979 album Frenzy, which still failed to do much outside of the Down Under countries.
“Got” Success
While Neil and Tim Finn prepared the songs for the band’s 1980 Split Enz album True Colours, they decided to try a songwriting exercise. One brother would give the other a potential title as a prompt, and the other would then take that title and try to write a song about it. As part of this exercise, Tim gave Neil the title “I Got You”.
At that point, Neil was still learning to play electric guitar. The riff that made up the start of “I Got You” was one of the few bits he’d learned to play. Eddie Rayner provided a wild keyboard part that accentuated the tight rhythmic approach.
“I Got You”, boosted by a memorable video, finally got the ball rolling for Split Enz outside of New Zealand. It hit the Top 15 in the UK. And it even received a little bit of a push in the US, where it squeaked into the Top 60. The band would never again reach those heights in those areas with their subsequent work, although Neil Finn would later gain worldwide acclaim as leader of Crowded House.
Behind the Lyrics of “I Got You”
The title might promise “I Got You”, but the narrator’s hold on his girl is actually a bit tenuous. He certainly shows he can bring the romance with his words. “Look at you,” Neil Finn sings. “You’re a pageant.” But the cracks in the façade start to show pretty quickly. “Sometimes we fight,” he admits in the first verse.
His confidence wanes later in the song. “But something’s wrong,” he says. “I feel uneasy.” By the last verse, things seem to crumble. “Where do you go?” he asks. “I get no answer/You’re always out/It gets on my nerves.”
In the refrain, he seems to chastise himself for his neuroses. “I don’t know why sometimes I get frightened,” he moans. The title notwithstanding, the lyrics of Split Enz’s “I Got You” detail an utter lack of confidence. But the song itself brimmed with the sure-handed pop smarts of a songwriter (Neil Finn) who would show off those skills to great effect later in his career.
Photo by Paul Natkin/Getty Images
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