More than a decade after Chrissy Amphlett’s death, three songs she recorded with Tim Finn in 1998 are being released on an EP titled Some Times. The two-inch master sat in Finn’s garage until 2023.
It has been more than a decade since Australian rock icon Chrissy Amphlett died, but three songs long thought lost have finally been heard.
The Divinyls frontwoman was one of Australia’s most dynamic performers. Across an ever-changing lineup, Amphlett and guitarist Mark McEntee built a catalogue that ran from Boys in Town and Pleasure and Pain to the 1990 international hit I Touch Myself. Amphlett died in April 2013 at age 53.
In late 1998 she went into a Surry Hills studio with Split Enz and Crowded House songwriter Tim Finn. Drummer Charley Drayton, who later married Amphlett, played on the session. The tape was labelled “Chrissy Amphlett and Tim Finn, 30/11/1998”. The three songs He’s In Love, Crash and Some Times were never finished, and for years both men believed the master was gone.
Finn has said he reached out after long admiring her work. In a social media post on 28 September, he wrote that they “hadn’t met previously but instantly felt a bond, a camaraderie of shared history as ex-lead singers of two brilliant bands”.
Speaking to ABC’s Australian Story, he put the timing down to where Amphlett was in her career. “It was a good time for us to meet because she was looking for something new, something different in her life musically.” He described her in the room as locked in: “She was so focused. She just wanted to get it right… I was in the presence of great talent, great charisma.”
When the session ended, Finn took the recordings home intending to work on them. In his post, he said they “were never fully realised”. Life moved on. He shifted house more than once, and the reels from his old Melbourne studio stayed stacked in a garage.
In 2023 Drayton contacted him about the 1998 tapes. Finn went looking. “I thought they were lost to the universe but remarkably found the two-inch tape in my garage,” he wrote, calling the songs “incredibly important to me, Charley and those close to Chrissy”. “It was still in perfect condition, and we are now able to share these songs with you.”
The reel was baked, digitised, and sent to Drayton, who mixed it in New York. Finn has since described the tape as something that “contains magic” and “a treasure”, and said hearing Amphlett’s voice “clear and just on its own… in its raw essence” was “really something, knowing that she’s passed and not with us anymore”.
The tracks landed on Friday 2 October as the EP Some Times, digitally and in a limited CD and 12-inch vinyl run. They sit well away from the school-uniform snarl of Divinyls: piano-led, close and reflective, with that husky tone still unmistakable.
In a press note attached to the release, Finn said: “We were meant to create something special together. I only wish it could have gone on. But we have these three songs.”
The story also features in Australian Story’s two-part special Wild: Chrissy Amphlett, streaming on ABC iView.
