Carol Hirschfeld is back on screen, narrating musician Shayne Carter's new docoumentary, Life In One Chord.
When you picture Carol Hirschfeld, is she sitting or standing?
For many of us, the journalist and presenter doesn’t exist from the waist down. She is forever a buttoned-up blazer, still hands and a calm, authoritative voice, welcoming us to the evening’s news.
Perhaps then, you should be sitting down when I tell you it’s 20 years since Hirschfeld left TV3’s news desk, which she shared with John Campbell. It’s been 20 years since she was a nightly fixture on screen, a trusted voice explaining the world around us.
Even Hirschfeld herself hadn’t clocked the milestone but admits it “feels remarkable to still be working in the media” when forced to do the maths.
Of course, she’s never been far from our TVs. And now she returns to the big screen – well, her voice does – as a narrator of sorts for musician Shayne Carter’s biography-slash-documentary Life In One Chord. Based largely on his book, Dead People I Know, the film charts Carter’s life from his childhood in Dunedin, his teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys, to the heady days of trying to make it in the US – and the many dark days of band break-ups and losing friends, family and others close to him.
Hirschfeld (happily) got roped in when, during a voiceover session, which was on camera, Carter got awkward and giggly reading his own words and casually suggested they bring in a professional… like Hirschfeld. The next thing the audience knows, she’s there in the vocal booth reading the kind of rock ’n’ roll stories we don’t really associate with the prim and proper presenter.
“I love Shayne. And I was very chuffed – and shy – about him saying, ‘hey, can Carol do the voiceover?’ Of all the people. We are a very unusual mix,” she says.
“This was so different to anything I’d done before – exhausting and tricky. Somebody else’s voice is somebody else’s voice.”
She was familiar with Carter’s, though. They first crossed paths in the late 1980s when Hirschfeld was a young producer for Paul Holmes’ show and got sent to do a story on Carter’s band, Straightjacket Fits, who were on the verge of becoming the next big thing overseas. You don’t imagine someone like Hirschfeld getting nervous too often, but this time she was.
“Because they were kinda steely, punky, ‘we’re not into this bulls***’ would-be rock stars,” she says.
It turns out, she didn’t have much to worry about. Carter won her over quickly – and the pair have remained loosely in each other’s orbits since.
“He was, I’ll say it – I can objectify him – he was tremendously good looking. He was deep in his head, which I kinda like,” she remembers of that first encounter.
“I loved that at times their music was a complete scream and racket of the painful young person order, and at other times, deeply tender… and I love what Shayne has mellowed into as well, and it’s because he has a wonderful intellect – and all great rock stars need that.”
For Hirschfeld, rock ’n’ roll began with her older brother, Charl, who discovered the soundtrack to American Graffiti when he was 15 and she was 10.
“One of the things about my own personal musical history is that the men in my life – be it my brother, partners, live-ins, husbands, sons and now my daughter too – are the great music obsessives. I know what I like – I tend towards R&B soul, because it speaks to me – but I have the joy of being a part of their journeys.”
It wasn’t just the boys who influenced her. Hirschfeld remembers her mother, Ngawiki, as a “natural musician”, one who taught herself how to read sheet music and play the piano and who ensured her children did the same – even if they didn’t keep tinkling the ivories for long.
“She was really, deeply musical. It does run in me,” says Hirschfeld.
“When I was producing or directing something, I nearly always had to start with a piece of music … It helps me shape the pictures, more than anything else. I think some people have a sort of cinematic memory, and I am one of them, therefore, a music track is always running with it. Whereas Finlay [Macdonald, her husband and fellow journalist] remembers in words.”
Remembering is at the heart of Life in One Chord and loss is a shared story for Hirschfeld and Carter. You don’t name a book Dead People I Have Known without experiencing it once or twice. The film visits the musician in moments of great sadness, including the early loss of his bandmate/best mate Wayne Elsey in a train accident, and those are often the passages Hirschfeld narrates on screen.
In her own life, the sting of grief came early, when she lost her mother at age 10.
“I think it is why we are drawn to Shayne. Because no matter how staunch he looks on the outside, you know that there is this incredible sensitivity inside and it comes out in all sorts of ways. I reflected when I learnt more about his story, how he took those life experiences into his psyche and it made him a richer, more giving person. That is a sign of huge emotional IQ and I respect him immensely for it – and then to be creative with it, how wonderful,” Hirschfeld says.
Life in One Chord also touches on Carter’s relationship with his whakapapa. His father was adopted by a Pākehā family and Carter has previously said that family situation “made me feel like someone who’s straddled between two worlds”.
Hirschfeld “absolutely relates” to Carter in that way. She has spoken before about the ways her father, a white Australian, helped foster his children’s Māori identity after the death of Ngawiki. It’s something Hirschfeld is still navigating alongside her own children.
“Though [Shayne and I] haven’t talked about it, I think he’s probably very similar to me, where we learn to be comfortable with that. Nobody can ever take away your whakapapa. People can judge you for whatever, but ultimately, it’s about how you judge yourself, how you understand where you sit in the historical continuum of the peoples that you come from. It’s also a journey that doesn’t end. We resonate with each other in that way.
“Both my kids are on their own journeys and we are understanding that we will just travel this together and see where we land. I have got an extraordinary whānau … so I feel like my whānau connections are incredibly strong, and that’s the most important thing.”
Hirschfeld’s professional life is largely off-screen these days. She is TVNZ’s GM of production operations after stints at Whakaata Māori, Stuff and RNZ, and calls the return to the company – where she first met Carter – “beautiful” after 25 years away. The challenges remain the same, although this time she’s less intimidated by surly, beautiful rock stars and more interested in the power of local stories.
“Any of us who have been involved in storytelling, journalism in New Zealand, you come to understand that it is the unique aspect of what it is to come from this part of the world that makes us stand in the world.
“When I think about Shayne’s story, it’s so quintessentially ‘Nu Zillund’. Where he came from, the staunchness that is a combination of a whole lot of things – being from Dunedin, Māori – and then what he did with that. How people bend it into something expressive and all of their own. And what’s not to like about that?”
Life in One Chord is in cinemas on September 4.
Bridget Jones joined the New Zealand Herald in 2025. She has been a lifestyle and entertainment journalist and editor for more than 15 years.