Eddie Rayner, the keyboard player for Split Enz and currently working on the project Forenzics with Tim Finn, recalls the day the phone rang and it was Paul McCartney at the other end recruiting him for work.
McCartney was about to start work on his album ‘Press To Play’ and admired Eddie’s work in Split Enz.
Eddie tells Noise11.com, “I was living in Melbourne at the time and received a call at three in the morning. He said “hello its Paul. Would you like to come and play on my record?”. In the band there was Pete Townshend and Phil Collins, Carlos Alomar, Eric Stewart from 10CC and Paul, of course, on bass. I went over and completed the band. He had a windmill on the south coast of England, down by Hastings and a studio built in the bottom of it. We played there for like three weeks”.
The album was McCartney’s first in three years after ‘Pipes of Peace’. “We did an album called ‘Press To Play’ and such good fun,” Eddie says. “Its possibly not his finest moment musically. He was such a great guy and it was amazing to work with those players. Looking around and seeing those guys in the same room and thinking ‘what am I doing here?’.”
After his McCartney sessions, Eddie says watching ‘Get Back’ was an interesting experience. “I watched the whole documentary. It seemed to me he was very much in control. He knew what he wanted and the frustration was coming out. When you are in a band, there is always a main songwriter or couple of main songwriters who kind of know what the song should be in your head but you don’t get that instantaneously from the band. There is pressure going on all around. The songwriter isn’t getting what he wants, the band members don’t know what the writer is hearing because they can’t get in his head. I just figure you have to go through this process. It’s a very long-winded process and there is a lot of shit going on. They talk a lot and there is a lot of interplay. Unless you do go through that process you are not going to wind up with what a band winds up with. A band has a certain sound, a great band like that has a certain sound. Any great band only has a sound because it comes about through that process. You can’t shortcut it”.
Eddie’s latest project is Forenzics with former Split Enz member Tim Finn, Noel Crombie and Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, who produced the second Split Enz abum.
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