Fifty years. As T.S. Eliot wrote, our beginnings never know our ends. And who would have thought that such a whimsically ambitious project as Split Enz would be embarking on another victory lap celebrating five decades of strangeness, arthouse sight and sound, and particoloured pop.

When, in the early 70s, I first saw a clip of Split Enz on GTK featured on ABC-TV just before the news hour, it seemed to me that this weird Kiwi band had somehow not received the style memo. Mistaking their off-kilter costumes and contorted choreography for failed glam, I wondered how on earth they got to be the opening act for Roxy Music – themselves just beginning their meteoric rise to Ferrydom.

It was only sometime in 1975 when I actually saw the Enz live. In the Matthew Flinders Theatre at Flinders Uni, for a lunchtime concert when touring their debut album, Mental Notes. To a crowd of maybe a hundred they delivered a full-dress performance. The band of seven, led by song writers Tim Finn and (the long-departed, now beleaguered) Phil Judd, with Eddy Rayner on keyboards, and Noel Crombie on costume design, living tableau, and spoons.

Everything about them was extraordinary and outlandish. The baggy pastel suits, the garish makeup, and the surreal topiary hairstyles- extruded into the twin peaks of Crombie, or, in Finn’s case, a pompadour with shaven sides that looked like a danger to low flying aircraft. Who, I wondered, in the pre-punk, early glam period – when hair was the epicentre of culture – would commit such travesty?

The music was equally and brilliantly perverse with its fractured melodies, contorted tempos and convulsive rhythms, executed with antic precision and sung in a mix of recitative and suppressed panic. The songs – ‘Under the Wheel’, ‘Stranger than Fictio’  and ‘Time for a Change’ rang out as the players shifted and shuffled like the chorus in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade.

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Dialling forward five long decades, and Split Enz are again taking the stage at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre. It is the last show of their Forever Enz tour of Australia and New Zealand, playing to arena crowds – including two nights in Sydney and three in their adopted home base, Melbourne.

After a captivating opening set from Vika and Linda Bull (capably backed by surefire trio, The Bullettess) showcasing new songs from their forthcoming album, Where do You Come From?, it is time to begin, and the band to make their Enztrance.

The faded theatrical curtain (itself a digital simulacrum) parts like the Red Sea, an unwieldy polythene-wrapped heffalump blunders on to the stage, and from it (a reprise of the One Out of the Bag show for their 30^th birthday in 2006) comes spilling the six members of the current iteration of Split Enz.

Of course they are wearing classic Crombie creations. Tim Finn (looking rather like Oscar Wilde) is dressed in brown with orange and blue checks, Eddy Raynor is in red and grey, Neil Finn sports blue and light blue checks, and Noel Crombie has chosen a copper-coloured herringbone. They all spread across the stage in Vistavision against the massive digital screen which features an ever-morphing, brilliantly eccentric mess-en scene which envelopes and illuminates the show for the next two hours.

Instead of the stark rectangular video closeups usual in music events the backdrop is festooned with all manner of unfathomable imagery. The soloists are surrounded by curtains of metal chain, there are projections of mesas and canyons like something David Lynch would conjure for National Geographic. There are coloured sprays of stage lighting and wisps of fog. Suddenly the images become Gormenghastly or like slime green Broomhilda cartoons. It is phantasmagoric eye candy.

The set begins on the front foot as Tim Finn leads in, head bobbing, snapping the lyrics of ‘Shark Attack’. The whole band is on red alert. Rayner jabbing the keyboard, Neil Finn hitching his guitar with purpose,  and the much younger ring-in rhythm section – James Milne on bass and drummer Matt Eccles – laying down a formidable foundation for the entire show.

‘History Never Repeats’ follows – patently incorrect, given that Neil’s vocal is proving these songs, augmented by the crowd singalong, have never sounded fuller and better. ‘Poor Boy’ from True Colours shines richly, Tim then continuing at the piano with ‘Give it a Whirl’ and after an ominous Rayner keyboard intro, bursting into his mantra against depression – ‘Dirty Creature’.

‘Time for a Change’ is a return to the debut album, Mental Notes and a sole credit for Phil Judd. Tim’s solo piano and keening vocal is followed by a tsunami of Pink Floyd-esque chord changes and one of many searing guitar solos from Neil. Time for a change indeed. Melancholy doubt is then displaced by the upbeat ‘One Step Ahead’, roaring through the crowd, eager for the pop hits in large and stunningly clear 21^st century arena sound.

They are also revelling in the plaintive Finn ballads: ‘Message to My Girl’, later, the tender ‘Stuff and Nonsense’ and in the encore, ‘I Hope I Never’. Neil leads on several, although Tim’s singing in the final stages of the show (and in what they tell us is the band’s 1,113^th performance over half a century) is starting to strain. Like McCartney, a once almost uniquely pure tone is quietly shredding in latter days. But it is even the more acclaimed by the Enz faithful, many dressed in replica costumes and draped in brand new merch. No Enz Days for them.

This splendid concert has many highlights. Eddy Rayner’s mid-set instrumental from True Colours, ‘Double Happy’ is a definite. While he works his stack of keyboards with thrilling gusto, surrounded by a seismic rhythm section, the huge screen displays a myriad of Noel Crombie’s stage costume designs, arrayed like a regiment of psychedelic troops with the cameras then swooping in close enough to show the buttons, the stitching, the wit and whimsy of fifty years of theatrics. As Tim Finn declares, “We never had to worry about what to wear on stage.”

As they appear, the singles stir old memories – the Countdown clips and the radio rotations when Gudinski and the band began to gain the attention and payoff they deserved. ‘My Mistake’, ‘I Got You’, ‘I See Red’ – turbocharged with the rich sound and still nimble vocals.

Fittingly the final song is ‘Strait Old Line’ and His Crombieness makes a memorable cameo. Always key to the band semiotic, his droll other-worldly demeanour remains a delight. Standing all night at his percussion desk, he has added string whistles, pattering snare drums, and – amidst the thunder of electricity – he has resolutely tapped his triangle. His is the last word – follow the straight old line. And, after this concert’s joyful cacophony – his is the final note. The sound of two spoons clapping. This was no ordinary night.

Split Enz performed at Adelaide Entertainment Centre on Monday May 25