Tim Finn

Tim Finn and Lizottes ... sounds like a boomer musical marriage conjugated in heaven.

For Australian baby boomers, Finn requires little publicity to rise to the top level of consciousness. Born in 1952, he's a boomer himself. And, as with Russell Crowe and quite a few other cultural icons, we'll happily claim him as one of ours, regardless of his origins on the other side of the Tasman.

Many of us spent our early adult years listening to him perform with Split Enz, and we subsequently followed his career with interest and affection, both solo and in collaboration with his younger brother Neil, the mainstay of Crowded House.

Most will be far less familiar with Lizottes, a musical venue at Kincumber on the NSW Central Coast, an hour or so north of Sydney.

It's absolutely boomer-friendly. None of this being jostled by several hundred others while waiting for the performance to begin, none of this having to fight your way to the bar to get a drink, and certainly none of this having to peer at the performers from 30 or 40 metres away.

The audience at Lizottes is limited to 120 or so, most of them seated at tables surrounding the stage. It's a very intimate muscial setting — intimate enough for performers to sit down after the show and have a drink with the people they've just played to.

The food is good, too, and for most shows can be included in the ticket price. For the Tim Finn show, on 18 February, $150 will buy you the show plus three-course dinner. I regard that as sensational value for seeing a genuinely world-class performer almost within touching distance and also enjoying a fine meal.

Lizottes seems to have an endless stream of top-class acts lined up on its schedule ... Tex Perkins, Jimmy Barnes, Richard Clapton, Mike McClelland and Doug Ashdown, Jenny Morris, Tim Freedman, the Black Sorrows, Mental as Anything, Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson, James Reyne, Dragon, Brian Cadd, Vince Jones, James Blundell, Renee Geyer, Dutch Tilders, Mark Seymour ... and Mark Lizotte ... aka Diesel.

Perhaps a lot is explained by the fact that the latter is the brother of Lizottes' owner, Brian Lizotte, himself an absolute veteran of the hospitality and entertainment industries.

For the record (sorry about the pun), Tim Finn has just released The Conversation, a new studio album that will presumably be a centre piece of his Lizottes show.

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