Chris Knox - Hard Knox

Chris Knox, boasting a new album called Beat, was never one to pull his punches. GREG DIXON finds out what the man is made of.

The Kangaroo court is in session. The accused, Christopher Alexander Knox of Grey Lynn - occupation local Godfather of Punk, artist, cartoonist, film and music critic - grins wildly from the dock as the charge is read.

Did he knowingly, and without regard for the consequences, hurt the feelings of a band of fellow musicians on a dark day way back when?

"Yeah," Knox says as he slouches on the couch in his darkened living-room. "I was drunk ... or stoned or something. Yeah, I did feel that their album was [insert rude synonym for inferior]. I still feel it's pretty [that word again], though it's grown a little better with the mellowness of age."

Mellowing with age hardly seems a Knoxian concept. For all intents and purpose, the multimedia artist has appeared to change not a jot in the 22 years since he began his public rantings as a punk rock singer.

Although his face and work may be familiar to a broader range of New Zealanders in the year 2000 - particularly from his film reviewing for TV One's arts programme Backch@t - his music, newspaper and magazine cartoons and views still have the harsh edge of punk, albeit an old punk.

He looks his age. His 47 years are etched around his eyes, giving his trademark manic smile the look of a clown nearing retirement - not that he has plans for that.

He's happy with not changing his views, however, and believes his 25-year-old self would not be displeased with Knox at 47, apart from the mortgage and the extra kilos of weight.

"I haven't become part of the mainstream," he says proudly. "I have continued to carp against the things that I was carping against way back then." Such as fellow musicians not doing what he thinks is their best work.

But for Matthew Bannister - an erstwhile member of the band in question, the 80s Dunedin group Sneaky Feelings - no mellowing is apparent for Knox's ancient slight.

And it's produced some rare and very public criticism of Knox from his own peer group. In his recently published book , Positively George Street, which charts the rise and demise of his band, the so-called Dunedin Sound and its still-flying record label Flying Nun, Bannister vividly recalls the occasion in early 1987. He reports Knox's exact words ("I've heard your album, it stinks") with what could only read as considerable anguish.

"There was a long argument, too tedious and painful to recount," Bannister says. "[Fellow Sneakys] David and Martin defended our work valiantly ... I was being told my music was `easy-listening,' `soft rock,' `bland' and `wimpy.'"

Poor boy.

Of course the book is positively payback time too, proving the non-mainstream can snipe just like the mainstream. In a chapter called Sour Grapes, Bannister fires a few poison-tipped volleys of his own, painting Knox as a Calvinist punk puritan, the dark heart of Flying Nun and Dunedin's once thriving non-mainstream music scene, a kind of alternative rock snob with a big mouth.

Undoubtedly, Knox has always enjoyed, will always enjoy, calling a spade something rather unpleasant. He holds strong opinions which he delights in expressing to anyone willing, or for that matter unwilling, to listen.

But for those who have followed Knox's career and occasional bursts of invective (including parts of his new record Beat and his two weekly cartoons, the Weekend Herald's Max Media and the Listener's Pop Vulture), an outburst such as Bannister's might seem to have been a long time coming.

Certainly, Knox says, some reviewers of Positively George Street have used it as an opportunity to take their own poke at him.

"There's been at least three or four reviews that I've read that have used it as a stepping-stone to say, `At last that arrogant bastard Knox is getting his come-uppance,' which is interesting."

But hardly surprising, it must be said. The name of Knox's first musical activities still reads like his statement of intent: he and his band mates called themselves The Enemy.

That was back in 1977, the Year of Punk both here and in England. It was the year that the Invercargill-born Knox, adolescent loner, comicbook and Beatles freak, Otago University dropout, finally let out what he'd mostly kept inside.

Punk was a perfect angry setting for his distaste for the mainstream music - for mainstream everything, for that matter - and The Enemy was the perfect angry tool.

The band debuted at an anti-disco rally in November, playing original songs like Pig Sty Blues and I Just Can't Get It Up. Knox soon earned himself a reputation as a manic, bonkers performer keen on antagonising his audience and mutilating himself.

A year later the band moved digs to Auckland and a few months after that reshuffled and renamed itself Toy Love, a band which truly forged the Knox legend.

Hardy old souls who witnessed their performances still go a bit teary at the mention of the band.

Knox seems to have long regarded Toy Love, which produced only one Australian-recorded album (never re-released on CD), as something of a lucky escape from the corporate music factory.

He says the band's entry into the mainstream was the reason it broke up. In the 20 or so years since, with his solo work and his part-time musical two-some the Tall Dwarfs (with Enemy and Toy Love guitarist Alec Bathgate), he has successfully avoided repeating the Toy Love experience.

Indeed, he's not even interested in listening to it. He prefers looking the future in the face.

"I sometimes come across people who love replaying their life over and over again. A particularly sad example was being down in Christchurch recording some Tall Dwarfs stuff in a little eight-track studio, and a guy from [the defunct punk band] the Androidss was there.

"They'd just had a reunion gig and he was sitting in another room just watching over and over this two-hour video of their performance. I couldn't relate to that even slightly.

"I've gone on doing things. But saleswise my peak was way back then too. Toy Love sold more than anything else I've ever done and early Tall Dwarfs sold three times as much as late Tall Dwarfs, and my solo sales have gone down. So I'd have an excuse to look back ... but I have no desire to."

Besides, this father of two teenagers (to partner and sculptor Barbara Ward) is now the sole owner and operator of what appears to be Chris Knox Inc.

Music is just one division of his empire, which includes cartooning, illustrating, occasionally making short films and music videos, music punditry and being the film critic for Backch@t.

The last two are perhaps the most interesting.

Of course he's perfect for the job. He's never been short of an opinion - as Bannister and Co discovered - and his is, he concedes, something of a contrarian.

But being a music and film critic means he's in the position where he must occasionally give a very public report of the creative work of friends and acquaintances.

A sticky middle ground for an artist, surely?

"The only time it's ever becomes a problem is when I'm reviewing a record by someone I know and like and I don't like the record - the same with a New Zealand film.

"It's just something that you have to shrug off. If you're going to be honest about your reactions, you have to say what you need to say. But in those cases I will try to find the good in something, which I won't do for an overseas production."

But hold on, that's sounds like saying he pulls his punches for local material.

He explains: "With me, if it's local, I do, I think, have a kneejerk reaction to judge it more harshly because it's local and I want it to succeed more than I want any overseas film to succeed, and so I wince more rapidly at things that I can see on the screen that are not wrong, but could be done better.

"Also because you know the environment in which the film has been made. You're closer to the subject matter and you can see the mistakes and failures more clearly, so I have to try to reign that back and look at it like its come from another country ... to try to level the playing field.

"And also, everyone who is doing creative work in this little country, which is a really difficult country to do it in, needs as much support as humanly possible.

"So that altruistic side comes through as well."

Tell that to the judge. Knox admits the Sneaky Feelings case is proof he hasn't always been quite so supportive, but in mitigation he says he wouldn't have said what he said unless he'd actually cared about the band's music. He says he has since told Bannister so.

"I wouldn't not have been there for a start and I wouldn't have said boo [if I didn't care].

"But I was amazed at how what I perceived as being constructive criticism was seen as destructive and that it had lasted such a long time and had such a lengthy and deep impact.

"If some drunken person, for whom I had some respect - as he obviously must to have been so hurt by me - came in and said something like that I would take it with a large grain of salt."

The case is far from closed, however. Knox says that another Flying Nun stalwart, Shayne Carter, is also planning to burst into print on the Dunedin sound and scene.

"[Positively George Street] is a great book. I'm just really looking forward to Shayne's reply. I'd love Shayne to write a book about the Dunedin thing because he was a part of it much more so than Matthew was, and he [Carter] is as good a writer if not better than Matthew, and he definitely has a finer mind.

"I hope it starts a dialogue."