Nick Atkinson: Monster created for mad scientist of music

Diamond Dozen album cover by print maker Scott Jackson.

I played punk songs with him at school assembly. He always had an interest in being outrageous

As well as unveiling a record almost every year, and being producer for this year's Silver Scroll winner Tami Neilson, Delaney Davidson has been in the vanguard of a beguiling Lyttelton scene that continues to produce highly talented young musicians who include Aldous Harding and Marlon Williams.

These artists thrive in part because Davidson has set such a high standard of performance in the studio, on stage and visually. You may have seen artful bills handprinted in three colours on wonderfully heavy stock promoting the Grand Ole Hay Ride tour. Then there's the cover of his third album, Self Decapitation, a seductive sampling and reworking of a late-Victorian era poster advertising magician Harry Kellar.

For his latest trick, a couple of Davidson's contemporaries in the Cantabrian art world have contributed work for his latest release, Diamond Dozen. Printmaker Scott Jackson remembers Davidson as a schoolboy already cultivating an aloof and observant presence.

"He was 6 or 7. He looked like a strange sort of fellow. Even at high school we weren't really friends, but I played punk songs with him at school assembly. He always had an interest in being outrageous."

Later on, the pair met at a Screamin' Jay Hawkins show. "It was quite a formative gig for both of us at the Christchurch Blues Club in Madras St. There were about 200 people there. It was probably the nadir of Screamin' Jay's career," remembers Jackson, whose Dr Frankenstein-inspired piece The Monster features on the cover of Diamond Dozen.

"The reason it has that patchwork effect is I've cobbled together old bits of lino offcuts from other work and glued them to a block of wood. If the music is the monster then Delaney is the mad scientist. It's almost sewn together out of chunks."

It's a brutally apt way to describe an album assembled from unreleased and rare recordings from a decade of ceaseless touring and studio work.

The inner sleeve of Diamond Dozen is decorated by another local artist, Samuel Harrison, best known in Christchurch for his sculptures. Harrison is also an award-winning draftsman and printmaker - and a fan of Davidson.

Asked to describe the singer-songwriter, Harrison says: "He's probably wearing a hat and looks kind of angry. I was always keen for people to sit for me. I did something like 10 prints of Delaney last year." One of those woodcuts decorates the inner sleeve.

"It directly complements the music. It has that static thing ... like distortion. It feels like him more than it looks like him," says Harrison, although the likeness is unmistakable.

Five hundred individually numbered and hand-printed copies of the Diamond Dozen LP have headed to boutique record stores throughout the world with only another 150 earmarked for local outlets.

Of those very few remain. The distributor, Southbound, has sold out, but you might be able to hunt down a copy if you're lucky enough to live near a classy little record store.