Apter pumps out biographies on musicians at the rate of at least one a year. Since 2004 he has written on the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Cure, silverchair, No Doubt, Dave Grohl, Jeff Buckley and Keith Urban. Cynical observers will have noticed a theme among Apter’s subjects: all have huge fan bases likely to convert into huge readerships. This renders dubious the author’s claim to be an unstinting admirer of the artists in question. Out of all this high-speed publishing must emerge a well-honed style, and Apter’s is comparable to that of a rather unconscientious drift net fisherman. That is, he casts his net far and wide for all the secondary sources and quotes available, barely discerning between plump whoppers and absolute tiddlers. Such a style calls out for strong, if not ruthless, editing, but there is not much evidence of that here either. If there were, events ripe for closer scrutiny – the interesting case of the British authorities banning the Split Enz song ‘Six Months in a Leaky Boat’ during the 1982 Falklands War being a prime example – would rate more than a passing paragraph. Moreover, whole portions based around shenanigans at school and LSD trips would be left in the ocean where they belong, along with such tiddlers as Neil, on his wedding day, ‘[celebrating] a little too much, which necessitated him having a nap’.

All of the Finns’ various musical incarnations seem, for better or worse, somewhat removed from contemporary norms. For instance, looking at the video for the 1977 single ‘My Mistake’, which is about as good as quirky pop songs get, it is obvious that Split Enz could hardly have been more antithetical to the punk era. For the most part, however, Apter’s fandom leaves weightier historical-contextual issues underdeveloped. By virtue of scare quotes applied in two separate contexts (one affirmative, the other pejorative) in reference to ‘real’ or ‘serious’ music, the author is mainly focused on balancing along the thin line that allegedly separates Split Enz and Crowded House from snooty classical and jazz on the one side and inauthentic pop and rock on the other.

Frustratingly, the standard pop and rock clichés are also to the fore. Records are not released, they’re ‘dropped’; drummers are ‘tub-thumpers’; audience members are ‘punters’ (until, in an insufferably sentimental description of a Crowded House farewell concert in Sydney in 1996, they are transformed into ‘teary-eyed acolytes’). Woodstock and Altamont are in turn cited as the zenith and nadir of the countercultural love-in. Drug taking and binge drinking are thoroughly documented as supposed evidence of rock star non-conformity, yet Split Enz’s reforming in order to support the corporate agenda of the New Zealand Tourist Commission is glossed over as an ‘act of patriotism’.

While following this story, it is easy to forget that the half century it spans featured innumerable wars, genocides, famines, terrorist outrages, political and social upheavals, globalisation, postmodernism and the Internet. The reader is coaxed into a hermetic world in which the lives of the Brothers Finn play out against a steady backdrop of Beatlemania, music industry lackeys, interfamilial intrigues and games of rugger. Which means that unless you dote obsessively upon every move that Neil and Tim make, Together Alone may prove very tough going indeed.