True Colours, the most commercially successful album of New Zealand group Split Enz’s career, will be reissued in numerous formats to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2020.
Working with freshly digitised audio taken from the original album tapes, Split Enz’s Eddie Rayner has produced a stunning new mix of True Colours for the acclaimed album’s 40th birthday. Rather than just another remaster from the existing final tracks Rayner took all the original recordings from each song of the record to mix them together from the ground up in these state of art remixes.
But why does the album need to be remixed? Eddie Rayner is taking back the original sound of the album which has been muddled over time as he explains, “I have both the original stereo masters from the 1979 mixing sessions, and the versions currently held in repositories such as Spotify….and they are radically different, sonically. The original masters are mixed, but unmastered, and the Spotify versions have been brutally, and probably repeatedly remastered… by whom, when, where and why, nobody will ever know. So for me, remixing to both restore and improve the currently-available mix AND the overall sound, for this 40th anniversary release, was a good idea.”
True Colours was recorded in Melbourne's Armstrong Studio in late 1979 and featured the band line-up of Tim Finn (vocals), Neil Finn (guitar and vocals), Eddie Rayner (keyboards), Noel Crombie (percussion), Nigel Griggs (bass) and Malcolm Green (drums). Produced by 20-year-old British producer David Tickle (Blondie, The Knack, Divinyls), True Colours features timeless Split Enz songs including “Poor Boy”, “I Hope I Never” and “I Got You”.