Do we like Neil Finn?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of decent conduct, a refused knighthood and a song sung for Gaza's civilians, with just a gap where LGBTQ+ comments would be.
Neil Finn is the Te Awamutu kid who joined his brother Tim's band Split Enz as a teenager and wrote their 1980 hit “I Got You”. He then built Crowded House, whose “Don't Dream It's Over” is now one of the great singalongs. The brothers were appointed OBEs for services to music in 1993.
In 2018 he stepped into one of rock's hardest jobs: replacing Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac after Buckingham left. Finn says some fans gave him hostile looks in Buckingham shirts, and he answered by waving and smiling. He says he doesn't think Buckingham holds a grudge against him.
The nearest thing to a scandal is a long-running feud with fellow Kiwi musician Shayne Carter. Carter's memoir tells of a gig where he got drunk, challenged the players to a fight and was ejected backstage. Carter also says Finn was always “magnanimous and never confrontational”. Finn's version is that Carter was very drunk and then fell over, and that he had no memory of another incident.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty from him: no slide into conspiracies, no culture-war grifting, and no campaigning against any group. His recent work is his brother's band, his own band and Fleetwood Mac, with no sign of the harmful company the test looks for. The gap is that we found no statement from him on LGBTQ+ or trans rights either way, so this is a pass on what he has done, not a rave.
He does take stands. In August 2025 he sang “Don't Dream It's Over” a cappella at an Auckland pro-Palestine rally, dedicating it to the innocent people of Gaza. Where you land depends on how you read the rally, and we found no response from him to any criticism of it.
He also turned down a knighthood, telling the NZ Listener he saw the monarchy as “something quite rotten in the core of our society”. In late 2024 the Arts Foundation gave him its Icon Award, its highest honour, for his lasting influence on the arts in Aotearoa.