Eddie Rayner is having one of those; a day from a Split Enz song, perhaps "Under The Wheel" where Phil Judd screams "it's not fair". Locked in an Auckland recording studio where he's desperately trying to mix the new Exponents album, Rayner's already missed two interviews in a four-hour schedule, has the "boss" - Crowded House and Split Enz long-time manager Grant Thomas on his back, and he's anything in but ENZSO mode.

"Oh, what a morning," he laughs. "It's just not working. I've got my head into this album and talking about ENZSO doesn't gel with it. I had Grant on the phone and I said 'I can't do it' (the interviews) and he said 'who's paying you more money - ENZSO or the Exponents?'. I said 'point taken'.

"But he's great. Bullshitting as much as normal. You don't talk with him, you get talked to by him. He tends to talk a lot. But we go so far back. He calls me Tall and I call him Tall. That's our pet names for each other and we just call each others' bluff constantly."

Eddie's not short of a word either. And he sounds remarkably like Neil Finn. Dammit, he sounds exactly like the younger Finn, who just a few weeks before has done the ritual shedding, leaving Crowded House as a memory and a lot of questions unanswered.

This act obviously intrigues Rayner who's quite happy to spend the first half of the interview speculating on things Finn and travelling down memory lane to the halcyon days of the Enz. First though that split. Rayner's known Neil since he was a little jockstrap - they all come out of the same neighbourhood - and spent those years of the second phase of the Enz when Neil joined as a baby-faced teen and brought both pop and appeal to the greatest progressive band of their time.

The Enz were mighty but struggling then. An eccentric outfit of strange twisted ruminations and psyche songs, costumes that flared and assaulted, geometrically matched hairdos. Concerts of wonderful airs and graces, marvellous twists and turns, massive sounds and irresistible harmonies and melodies that veered loony and bizarre across the musical spectrum.

So they go back a way.

"Who knows what's going to happen," Rayner muses. "Neil's over here mooching around. I saw him yesterday, mooching around, didn't know what the hell to do. He's recording in his own studio at home but I can tell his heart's not really in it, right now. Even though he's effectively stripped all his support system away from him, he's going to miss it. And he knows he's going to miss it because you need a support system."

Nick Seymour reckons he's made the worst decision in his life and thinks he'll live to regret the day. "Yeah, I think he may as well," Rayner continues. "It's really hard know. It depends on what he decides to do but one of the basic philosophies I had is that you work with people. That's what working is all about - for people, with people. Other peoples' ideas are very very valuable even if you don't think so at the time. You can't just drop it away and forget about it and expect to everything by yourself.

"I mean what a decision. Look at the legacy. Look at the songs they left behind. The albums - every one of them is fantastic in some way. But I don't agree with what Nick says, that they never attained their full potential.

"I don't think they were ever going to do a better album than 'Together Alone'. In fact, I don't think anybody could really do an album that's better than that. The quality of the songs - although there are a few that aren't all that great ... but that's one of my qualms about some of the Finns stuff: they tend to make some strange decisions about which songs to put on and which to leave off."

Like on the "Finn" album, maybe. Half generous, half nonsense. "Yeah, that's what I think," Eddie says. "Although I think they were probably pushed for songs with that record. I don't think they had that many but now Neil's at home working by himself in his own home studio with just an engineer there - just him and nobody else. It's kind of a bit sad to go round. I feel like saying, 'Well, do you want me to play; can I help by playing with you?' but I wouldn't because I prefer to wait for an invitation.

"With the split, we knew about the chance of it months ago and I thought the band must have known about it as well so I was surprised to find out they virtually only heard about it just before Neil made the announcement. I guess I just see Neil everyday when he's around so I know what he's doing, what he's thinking as well. I think it was pretty much a very, very difficult decision. He could have gone either way. He could have decided at the last moment not to split the band up, you know.

"Oh my God ..." What? "I've just got another guy on the phone. He'll call back in 10 minutes. This just isn't working. I'm never going to talk to all of them. Oh well, yeah, I think it could have been a spur of the moment thing of Neil's in the end. Kind of he almost dared himself to do it."

So there you have it; one more look at THAT split. So what's it got do with ENZSO, which is why we're all here? Probably as much as the next bit of memory lane historics. ENZSO isn't an isolated event. Sure, it's Eddie's symphonic scoring of old Split Enz songs but why it works and what it represents is something else.

ENZSO is the latest chapter in a story that began nearly 25 years ago; another page in the book of the Finns; and, most importantly, the thread that ties a glorious past to an unknown future. ENZSO takes the greatest of all New Zealand bands - yes, greater than Crowded House - to a place in history of which they might never have dreamed. In the real, conservative world, ENZSO legitimises the eccentricity and sheer innovative bravura of the Enz, takes their marvellous songbook and puts it on another level. Ultimately, ENZSO is the immortalisation of Split Enz.

In rock, few bands gain both popular and classical acceptance. Such is the quality of Rayner's achievement in association with conductor Peter Scholes - an open-minded fusionist if ever there was one - and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra that those crusty classical types - many of whom railed against the project when it was first announced - are now the first to buy front row tickets. What that's says is that the Finns and Phil Judd wrote songs that have a life beyond pop - that is their quality. That Rayner and the remaining Enz scored music that already had its feet in contemporary classicality: the distance between art/prog rock and classical is often only in the instruments used and the leap of faith required.

Everything then is a tapestry. The Crowded House split falls within it, for as Seymour hinted at when we spoke recently, Crowded House always lived with the shadow of the Enz, Finn and the Finns just a step behind.

Sitting on the floor of the Sandgroper Hotel in suburban Leederville, Western Australia, in 1975, watching the "Mental Notes" era Split Enz on their first Australian tour was as revelatory as it was a slice of heaven. We knew nothing about them then, apart from the fact they looked weird, dressed weird, acted weird and had come from New Zealand - and I'm damned if I can remember anybody else who had then.

This then was one of the two great Enz line-ups. At its core Tim Finn, compere, showman, catalyst, craftsman and spiritual romantic; Phil Judd, dark, uncertain, almost manic, lost in a world where art and muse collided in fear and uncertainty and sparked imagination and soul-searching emotion; Rayner, the maestro who coaxed great and voluminous sheets of sound from his keys or rippled piano lines with Finn; Noel Crombie, visionary, stylist, designer, percussionist and manic spirit. The bottom end was still in flux. Wally Wilkinson, Jonathon Chunn and Paul Crowther would soon be replaced by Nigel Griggs and Malcolm Green.

For three nights this vision of post-art school musical polemics were as frantic and inspired as any band I've seen; a dangerous, unpredictable meld of the best music can offer. And always they came to the indescribable brilliance of "Stranmger Than Fiction" and its beautiful anthemic companion "Time For A Change".

Rayner laughs. "Oh man, we loved that time. That's one of the best times we had in Perth. That was the first tour of Australia we did. I remember the Sandgroper vividly. That's the time to catch a new band, hey. Fresh and unrestrained.

"If I had to define what it was about the band between 1975 and 1978 that made it so unique it was a sense of commitment that these days is sadly lacking. We used to look pretty strange and be pretty strange musically. We used to love the music, we used to love the whole lifestyle and we used to ... the hairstyles, the outfits, everything that was our daily wear - we used to walk around like that and it was the way we were. We lived it. We didn't come off stage, take off the gear, the make-up, flatten our hair down and look normal for the rest of the time. We had a commitment to it - without realising it at the time. It was just basically kids being in a band but we were totally committed to the music as well.

"It was pretty much a unique team. In those days we were young and impressionable and kind of had a boarding school ethos about us. We were very elitist. It was band of very creative people all pulling in one direction and injecting ideas into the songs which wouldn't have been there if there'd just been a songwriter and lots of music which I was able to pick up on and use in the arrangements for ENZSO. The Split Enz around 'Mental Notes' was very orchestral already. It was all there I didn't have to write anything new."

So, finally, we reach ENZSO, this extraordinary meld of contemporary and classical - that works. For the next 10 minutes Rayner walks through its history, rarely stopping for a break or question.

Its birth came of need: arriving back in New Zealand after several years away, Rayner found that his services as both a musician or producer weren't going to be tested. There was very little going on. It was a matter of own project or nothing.

"I'd heard about this Rolling Stones thing (Scholes' Symphonic Rolling Stones) and it had been in the back of my mind for years to try and do an orchestral Enz thing. Hearing about the Stones album rekindled the idea. Then I sat on it for a year hoping it would go away and it never did. Everybody I spoke to about it, loved it. The record company, Sony, was right there from start, saying 'well, how much money do you want' and all that sort of stuff. So at that point it was 'how else can I convince myself not to do it' because not knowing about orchestra and things classical or understanding the orchestra at all or how it works, it looked very difficult.

"I've never had to read or write music in my whole career and this meant all of a sudden getting into that realm of theory and the ranges of instruments and what they sound like and look like. Then I thought 'well, I can get somebody to do it for me' but talking to the band and arrangers around town it soon became apparent that the band was never going to be happy with somebody else putting their stamp all over it and I wouldn't be happy either so thought I'd better have a go at it myself.

"I had a go at a couple of tracks and played them to the Finns and they went 'sounding great, carry on' so I did all the tracks and sent them a tape. Actually I arranged 17 songs which took me four or five months. They were in England promoting the 'Finn' thing and they rang me from the M4 (highway) and said 'Hey this is great. We're really out of it and we're having a great trip up to Liverpool and it's all sounding great so you go ahead and do it. That was enough for me to get started with the orchestra and make a few concrete plans."

In December '95 during an interview about "Finn", Tim mentioned he'd just come back from NZ where he'd recorded some vocals for this symphonic version of Enz songs that Rayner was doing. He seemed overwhelmed by it, talked about how Eddie had got into the dark corners that exists in most early Enz songs and brought them out, about its intensity, how the orchestration brought a new dimension to the Enz. It is no surprise then that as ENZSO approaches its Australian performances - which feature vocally, of course, both Finns - that it is Tim who is championing its cause. Neil has already expressed reservation publicly about whether pop and classical lie easily together but he doesn't have Tim's background.

The elder Finn has been through his own dark nightmares over the years and he understands what Rayner has built - a new sonic temple to the extremes of emotion that live in the music of the Enz. Tim is the man, after all, who in the same interview expressed admiration for Scott Walker's dark, frightening, masterpiece "Tilt" - an album that looks death in the face. Not to say "ENZSO" does but the mortality of man was always at the heart of both Finn and Judd's early songs. The grim reaper and his scythe were a constant companion to their life-loaded emotional portraits. Pain was as constant as joy. Just as life begat death and vice versa.

"I think Tim was confused about ENZSO at that time," Rayner says. "I think everyone was confused about it. Now it's been nine months since we recorded it and we've seen how it's gone, how successful it's been and how people seem to really like it. For instance, it's the first time the orchestra here has been on the charts and all that sort of stuff. It's given me time to get a bit of distance from it and see it for what it is. I can see there's a lot of flaws in the recording but I'm really happy with the arrangements.

"If I was going to do another one which I probably will - no, I will, I've got plenty of songs left - I'd make a better job of it next time. I think I'll get an even better performance out of the orchestra."

He talks for a while about the initial problems he and Scholes had with the orchestra, the "attitude problem" many of its older members had towards the project that reached a nadir in open hostility to something that as far as they were concerned "wasn't kosher".

All that, of course, has changed. "ENZSO" smashed into the charts, debuting in the top 10 and soared to the top outselling even its creators' greatest expectations. And new generations - both young and old - discovered the songs and music of the Enz. If Neil Finn has a problem in life, it is just that: it is something he can never escape and it will most likely always be bigger than anything - no matter how brilliant - that he does. The Enz are legend. That is as irresistible as it is romanticised. The past will now always stare back at him in the future.

Eddie Rayner chuckles quietly, "It's such a different concept isn't it - ENZSO. I mean it's not like Deep Purple with the orchestra or Elton John with the orchestra in which the orchestra is like a backing, a very small part of what is going on. With this the orchestra is the band. There are no drums, there are no guitars, there's nothing, nothing - just the orchestra and the singers. From that point of view, it is certainly new, where as it was never intended to be.

"I don't hold any claims to wanting to do anything new, it's just the way it turned out and I was very surprised. It was the sort of album that could have sunk like a stone. And there's the fanatical Enz fans and now their new fans. Hey, isn't that great. I reckon we're going to get a gathering from like 8 years old to 88 years old. That's fabulous."

And we're all spellbound, once again.