In 2023, Tim Finn went into the garage of his Melbourne home for what he has described as a deep rummage. Stacked in a cupboard among the two-inch reels he had accumulated over a long career was one with handwriting on the box that read, according to the ABC, Chrissy Amphlett and Tim Finn, 30/11/1998. Three songs were on it. Nobody outside that room had ever heard them. The woman singing on them had died ten years earlier.
That tape has now been released as an EP called Some Times, with three tracks: He’s In Love, Crash, and Sometimes. It came out digitally late last week, with a limited CD and a twelve-inch pressing following, roughly 28 years after the session and 13 years after Amphlett died. The record is the part of this story that is easiest to describe and the least interesting. What is interesting is the gap. A box sat on a shelf for a quarter of a century while the person whose voice was inside it ran out of time, and the only reason any of it exists in public now is that nobody ever decided the box was rubbish.
To understand why Finn picked up the phone in the first place, you have to understand how strange the pairing was. Chrissy Amphlett was the singer of the Divinyls, a Sydney band she formed in 1980 with the guitarist Mark McEntee and the bassist Jeremy Paul, and by the late nineties she was one of the most recognisable rock performers Australia had produced. The band’s reach was not local. I Touch Myself, released in 1990, went to number one at home, reached the top five in the United States and the top ten in Britain, and is still the song most people in most countries would name if you asked them about her. Her reputation was built on volume and confrontation. She was a hard, wiry, unsentimental presence on a stage, and for most of her working life that was the only version of her that got written about.
Then, in 1998, she took a role in the original Australian production of The Boy From Oz, the musical built around the life of the songwriter Peter Allen. Amphlett played Judy Garland. It is worth sitting with how odd a casting decision that was at the time, and how much it required of her: a rock singer whose entire register was aggression, standing in a theatre every night doing somebody else’s standards, in a role that demands fragility rather than force.
The role also tells you something about where she was in her life. She was approaching 40, nearly two decades into a band she had co-founded, and she had spent that time writing as well as fronting, mostly with McEntee. Taking a theatre job in somebody else’s story, singing material written long before she was born, is not what a rock singer does when she is coasting. It is what someone does when she wants to find out what else the voice can do.
Finn was in the audience. He had his own long history, having fronted Split Enz through the seventies and eighties before a solo career, and he knew Amphlett’s records the way everyone did. What he saw on stage was not what he expected. By his account to one Australian music publication, the performance was a complete departure from the Divinyls, and it made him want to work with her in a register nobody had used her in.
So he asked, and she said yes, and what followed was not a studio booking in the ordinary sense. Finn had recently bought an old Bechstein upright piano. In a room in Surry Hills, in inner Sydney, over a few days, the two of them wrote and recorded three songs around that piano, with Charley Drayton on drums. Drayton was an American drummer with a substantial session history who had played on Divinyls records; he and Amphlett were a couple by then and would marry the following year. The ABC describes the recording as happening in Finn’s studio and the interview places it in the Surry Hills room with the piano, which are probably the same thing described two ways, though neither account spells that out.
Finn’s description of the music is the detail that makes the whole thing worth chasing. He has said that it felt as though Amphlett was looking for a new creative direction, and that she loved singing with a piano. What came out was quiet, intimate and piano-led, nothing like the Divinyls and nothing much like his own records either. Her voice on the tape, as the ABC heard it played back in Finn’s office, is gentle and husky with a hint of jazz phrasing. That is not the instrument the public knew. It was there the whole time and almost nobody got to hear it use itself that way.
Then ordinary life did what ordinary life does. Finn’s son had just been born. The sessions had been a few days squeezed into two very busy careers, and there was no label waiting for the results, no deadline, no plan beyond seeing what happened. The tape went into a box. The box went into a cupboard. Both of them went on working. Amphlett reprised the Garland role when the production came back to Australia as an arena show after its Broadway run, then kept touring and recording. Finn kept making albums. The three songs stayed exactly where they had been put.
Amphlett was ill for the last years of her life. She disclosed a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis publicly in 2007 and a breast cancer diagnosis in 2010, and she died in Manhattan in 2013 at the age of 53. Her memoir, Pleasure and Pain, was published shortly afterwards. There is no version of this story in which the delay was anybody’s fault, and there is no version in which the delay was worth it. The songs simply stopped being something that could be finished with her in the room, and that is the plain fact at the centre of this.
What happened next is the part almost no coverage explains properly, and it is the reason the recordings could easily have been lost even after they were found. Drayton, by several accounts, kept asking Finn whether the multitracks still existed. Finn looked once without success and found the reel on a second, more thorough search. But finding a two-inch master from 1998 is not the same as being able to hear it. Analogue tape of that era is a sandwich: a plastic backing, a layer of magnetic oxide particles, and a polyurethane binder whose only job is to glue the oxide to the plastic. In a great many tape stocks manufactured from the mid-seventies through the nineties, including widely used professional reels from Ampex and Scotch, that binder is hygroscopic. It absorbs water out of the air, slowly, for decades, and the chemical reaction that follows breaks it down.
The result is known in studios as sticky shed. The binder softens and migrates to the surface, and when you try to play the tape it drags against the heads and guides, squealing, shedding a brown residue, losing the high frequencies and sometimes stalling the machine outright. Push it and you scrape the recording off the backing. A great deal of twentieth-century music is sitting in archives in exactly this condition.
The fix is not elegant and has never pretended to be. You put the reel in a low oven, typically at somewhere between 54 and 60 degrees Celsius, roughly 130 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and leave it there for anything from an hour to eight hours. Wider tape needs longer, and a two-inch reel is about as wide as music tape gets. The heat drives the absorbed water back out of the binder. The binder temporarily firms up. And for a window of a few weeks to a few months the tape plays more or less as it did when it was new, after which it begins taking moisture back in and the problem returns. Baking is repeatable, but it is not a repair, and every pass through a machine takes a little more oxide off for good. In practice you get one honest shot at transferring the music to something permanent.
There is a second reason the format matters, and it is the reason this release is a record rather than a curiosity. What Drayton kept asking about was not a finished mix. It was the multitracks. A two-inch reel of that era typically carries 16 or 24 separate tracks running side by side, which means the piano, the drums and the vocal all exist as independent recordings rather than as one blended stereo file. Had the only surviving object been a mixdown, there would have been almost nothing to do with it except clean it up and put it out. Because the multitracks survived, somebody in 2026 could sit at a desk and make genuine choices about balance, space and which take of the vocal to favour, 25 years after the performance. The width of the tape is the whole reason there was any work left to do.
It is also worth knowing how routine this near-miss is. The music industry spent roughly four decades committing its masters to a plastic ribbon coated in a glue that was quietly failing from the moment it left the factory, and nobody knew that at the time. Archives, labels and private studios are full of reels in the same condition as this one, and the people who look after them talk about transfer the way doctors talk about triage: there are more tapes than there are hours, the clock is running on all of them, and the ones nobody is asking about tend to lose. A reel in a domestic garage, with no catalogue number, no label chasing it and no paperwork saying it existed, is about as low as a recording can sit on that list. The only thing that saved these three songs was one person who would not stop asking.
That is what was done. Finn’s description of it is almost comically mundane: they put them in these little ovens and bake them to get the moisture and residue off the tape. Then the reel was played once, carefully, and digitised, which is the only moment in this entire story where the songs actually crossed from one era into another. From that point they existed as files rather than as a chemical coating on plastic, and they could not be lost to humidity again.
Drayton took it from there. The digitised multitracks went to New York, where he mixed them, which means that the last creative decisions made on his wife’s vocal performance were made by him, 25 years after he had sat behind the drums while she sang it. He is credited on the session as the drummer and on the release as the person who finished it. There is no way to make that neutral and there is no need to dress it up. A man who spent years asking whether the tapes still existed ended up being the one who had to decide how loud her voice sat in the mix.
Some of the fine print around the release is still thin. No record label has been named in any of the reporting, and the three songs are listed slightly differently in different places, with the third track given as Sometimes while the EP itself is Some Times, two words. One music trade outlet credits the mix and master to the engineer Pat Thrall with Peter Contini engineering, while Finn’s own interview and other coverage credit the New York mix to Drayton, which may simply mean more than one pair of hands was involved at different stages. These are the kinds of details that get settled on a credits sheet rather than in a news story.
What is not in doubt is the shape of the thing. The ABC has built a two-part Australian Story special around Amphlett, and the release has arrived alongside it, which means the songs have landed in the middle of a broader reconsideration of who she actually was. That reconsideration has been going on for a while and it tends to run in one direction: away from the snarling stage persona that dominated three decades of writing about her, and towards the person who wrote the lyrics. The tape is useful evidence for that, not because quiet music is more serious than loud music, but because it shows she had somewhere else she could go and was curious about going there.
It is also worth being honest about what the recordings are not. Three songs cut over a few days around a piano, with no label and no release plan, are a sketch. Finn has not claimed otherwise. The appeal, by his account and by the account of people who have heard them, is precisely the lack of polish: two experienced writers in a room with an instrument and a drummer, working fast, with nobody in the building who needed the result to sound like anything in particular. Records made under commercial pressure almost never sound like that, which is why unfinished tapes are so often more interesting than finished ones.
There is a version of this story that gets told as a triumph, and it is not quite right. Nothing was rescued in time. The one person who could have said whether these were worth releasing, or whether she wanted a fourth verse on the second song, or whether the whole thing should stay in a cupboard, was not there to ask. What actually happened is smaller and more ordinary than a triumph: a man kept asking a question, another man went and looked twice, somebody with a low oven and a steady hand got a fragile object to play one more time, and a husband sat down in a studio in New York and finished something his wife had started.
The three songs are public now, under a title she never knew would be a title, and the only reason any of that was possible is that for 25 years nobody cleaned out the garage.