“Hiding in the wings forever / We couldn’t keep our band together / You and I were always going to blow it / But somehow we lost everything / I don’t want it back again / I found that a friendship can stop growing.”

The lyrics of More Fool Me close Tim Finn’s latest LP The Conversation in a bit of a funk – recalling the regretful fallout between him and founding Split Enz member Phil Judd. Ironically the song that concludes the album is also the first track recorded for it. It’s a pared-back tune – no bass, no drums and plenty of space for violinist Miles Golding, guitarist Brett Adams, keyboardist Eddie Rayner (and Tim’s vocals and acoustic strums) to swirl around each other without risking entanglement.

Each tune on The Conversation (produced by Eddie Allen and Rayner ) is fingerprinted by that same simplicity. The album begins with Straw Gold, a mid-tempo number that paces back and forth between delicate pop and a theatrical sense of foreboding (emphasised by the low murmur of a marching band bass drum, sustained keys and the climactic propellant of Golding and Adams’ cinematic duelling towards the end).

Then comes Out of This World a tune that after 15 years in the works is not only the first single off the album but also one of the tunes being used for Poor Boy, a musical starring Guy Pearce and featuring music from the catalogues of both Finn and The Split Enz. It’s not a hard tune to like – centred mainly on vocal lines and flanked by the occasional keyboard and guitar suggestion. Still, it doesn’t share the intensity of numbers like Fall From Grace, Invisible or The Saw and the Tree. The latter is riddled with a sense of melancholy that lends itself to Golding’s string lines, blending nicely with an eerie bowed-saw contribution by guest musician, Alan Pitts.

Still, the main feature of any Tim Finn album is that Tim Finn is on it. Yeah, he’s got some fairly slick songwriting skills, but the guy also deserves a firm handshake for the distinctiveness of his vocals alone. He not only has a clear knack for vocal harmonization, but also the odd ability to sound both short of breath and effortless at the same time (the former trait a stylistic thing rather than a vocal flaw).

If there was one oath Finn and co. upheld when recording this album, it was to allow enough room for each instrument to assert itself without being dominated by another. “In a good conversation everyone contributes equally,” says Tim on the album sleeve. If you don’t believe him, press – œplay’.