At the height of Split Enz's glory days in the early 1980s, keyboardist Eddie Rayner felt strangely disconnected during their mammoth stadium tours.

"Back in those days, there was no memory to speak of on the synthesiser," he recalls. "So you were constantly twiddling with knobs and very often – god! I would be playing one song but thinking about the next, setting it up because you couldn't just press a button. I felt like a technician more than somebody who was getting into the feel of the music and actually responding."

Eddie Rayner sees himself as the ''keeper'' of Split Enz's legacy. Credit:Simon Schluter

Rayner is wearing the obligatory rock star shades indoors and a dark green flannel shirt when we meet in Melbourne's Hamer Hall ahead of him performing in ENZO: The Songs of Split Enz. An orchestral-rock hybrid show inspired by his 1996 collaboration with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Rayner rearranged the Split Enz back catalogue, including Message to my Girl and Six Months in a Leaky Boat, despite being unable to read or write music.

"I can't pretend there was ever any grand plan," he acknowledges of that first iteration. "I went back to live in New Zealand [after a stint in Melbourne] and I'd just heard about the Rolling Stones orchestral record. Then I heard that the conductor lived just round the corner from me in Auckland – go figure – so I went to see him and he encouraged me to have a go."