In the afternoon of his 73rd birthday in early September, Chris Knox did what he’s done most days for more than a decade: he went to the front room of his Hakanoa St home in Grey Lynn, Auckland, trawled some favourite internet sites and took out his paint brushes.
In this cluttered room, he once recorded, created cartoons, comics and illustrations, and scrupulously – if untidily – filed his innumerable writings, drawings, handmade posters and more.
Master tapes of his recordings were also once housed here before being gifted to the Alexander Turnbull Library in 2019.
There are piled-up paintings, some violent and disturbing abstracts of what a grand mal seizure feels like from the inside, all done left handed since his debilitating stroke in 2009 paralysed his right side, took away most of his voice and left him with cognitive issues.
Those who kept in touch after that awful day – especially his many caregivers, of which I was one a few days a week for about three years – would attest to his courage, resilience and wicked humour, which, although curtailed or difficult for him to express, was always evident.
On this day, he shows me new paintings, but is especially enthusiastic about the massive TV screen commanding the lounge with its scores of DVDs, mostly of classic films, arcane horror flicks and B-grade – at best – monster movies. He would, with almost maniacal glee, inflict some of these on caregivers.
But he’s tired, in part because the morning had been stimulating: Sam Elworthy of Auckland University Press arrived to give him a copy of Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly, his biography by Craig Robertson, who interviewed more than 80 people for the project, but admits some who gave their time will be disappointed.
“I made the decision not to quote directly from interviews,” says Robertson from his home in Boston, “because I wanted to foreground Chris’s voice. Aside from reviews, the only person directly quoted in the entire book is Chris.
“It was an attempt to compensate for the fact I wasn’t talking to Chris [because of the stroke]. But he’d left ample examples of his voice on paper, tape, canvas …”
Not Given Lightly – its title Knox’s best-known and most financially rewarding song – is a remarkable piece of well-illustrated research and lively writing covering Knox’s life as an only child in Invercargill, through shiftless days and short-term jobs in his late teens and early 20s in Dunedin with writing, LSD and a trip to Christchurch to see (and film on silent Super 8) Lou Reed in concert.
There’s the formation of punk band The Enemy, then Toy Love, touring, becoming a guiding conscience in the emerging Flying Nun label, creative work across many arts and as an often-confrontational character with a malevolent grin.
He hosted the New Artland television series, undertook an Intrepid Journeys trip to India, released numerous solo albums and many as Tall Dwarfs, with Alec Bathgate.
It has been a productive life of diverse creativity from comics (Jesus on a Stick) and bizarre cartoons of malformed bodies to beautifully executed caricatures and dramatic paintings alongside social commentary and his idiosyncratic music and handmade videos.
Kindred spirits
Adopted just weeks after his birth in September 1952, Knox grew up in a loving, conservative family. Like one of his heroes, John Lennon, he drew his own comic strips and made little magazines (Form One Flop) to amuse himself and school friends. Figures such as Lennon he would see as kindred spirits.
“He admired Lennon’s humour and anger,” says Robertson, “and Lou Reed in the 1970s when [Knox] becomes more of a Velvet Underground fan. Then [the Sex Pistols’] Johnny Rotten makes a brief appearance.
“They helped him orient himself and figure out how he could live and perform in this world.”
In Robertson, Knox has an exemplary biographer who grew up in Dunedin, studied journalism and is currently a professor of media studies and communication at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
He was also a Flying Nun fan: “I heard The Clean’s Anything Could Happen on the radio when I was 12 and I’d heard nothing like that before.”
He became a Nun obsessive, organising underage gigs so he could see The Chills and The Verlaines, wrote Rip It Up’s Rumours column about the Dunedin scene, published a short-lived fanzine (Side On, named after a Clean song) and, in 1991, “the Dunedin Sound” was the topic of his history honours thesis.
But he didn’t see Knox in The Enemy or Toy Love because Knox left the city in 1978. “I remember vividly the first time I saw him live was when Tall Dwarfs played the Oriental Tavern in 1987.
“I was in high school, snuck in and stood at the front, as you do if you’re under age, because the cops are never going to fight their way through 350 sweaty punters to arrest you.
“That was like, ‘Oh my god, this is Chris Knox.’ He’d become this mythical figure for those too young to have seen The Enemy or Toy Love.”
Robertson left the country in 1994 and although he planned to return, there were academic positions, marriage to an American, a child …
The dislocation from home led to a “cultural panic”, so he toyed with writing “a social and cultural history of New Zealand using Knox’s life to make it interesting”.
He talked about it frequently with his older brother Grant, the former finance minister and deputy prime minister whose recent memoir is also named Anything Could Happen – at Craig’s suggestion.
When he returned home in January 2009 for Grant’s civil union in Wellington, where Knox played, Grant engineered a conversation for Craig with Knox and his partner Barbara Ward in the SanFran bar about his idea.
“Chris liked the perversity of a biography where he wasn’t the main person. The person who has the reputation of having the biggest ego in New Zealand music loved that it could be a biography, but wasn’t one,” he laughs.
Artistic closure
Five months later, however, Knox had the stroke and the book idea was shelved. Robertson returned to it in 2016 as a biography with cultural change woven through.
The stroke offered a kind of artistic closure, so he began work, expecting it would take a year. But because he’d been away, he didn’t grasp the scope of Knox’s work outside music. “I knew he’d done the NZ Herald’s weekly Max Media cartoon strip and Listener cartoons, but didn’t realise how much else he’d done. I don’t think others are aware, either, so I wanted people to realise the breadth of what Chris did.
“He could be a pain in the arse and confrontational and all those things, but when you read the Listener columns and look at the cartoons, you see this really smart, perceptive guy … very upfront saying, ‘Music is a hobby.’
“He might record a Chris Knox or Tall Dwarfs album with Alec every year, but he’s spending only a couple of weeks on it. The rest of the year he’s doing Max Media or the Listener column, reviewing movies on TV, other cartoons and so much other writing.”
Considerable source material was there because, even as a child and young boy, Knox archived his drawings, thoughts, likes and dislikes, listing horror films he hadn’t seen, and so on.
“He’s an obsessive person, no doubt about it. He applies himself to whatever task is at hand, and at times Chris Knox himself is the task.
“In a 1974 journal, he refers to himself as an ‘egocentric hoarder’ jokingly. He got into that practice early and in the 1970s, he’s doing that to figure out who he is, and part of that comes out in creative expression.”
Knox’s distinctive approach to creativity across numerous fields in popular culture was influential at home and abroad.
“In an interview, he talked about ‘expressions, not professions’; his aesthetic is about immediacy, a first take, honesty and as little editing as possible. Chris’s impact is that particular attitude and approach to music and recording over and above the songs themselves. The approach to home recording on a four-track had a huge impact here [in the US]. It encouraged a whole group of musicians who very quickly left it behind, but who wouldn’t be in a position to leave it behind if Chris hadn’t been there.
“And his impact pops up in odd places, with people like Beck, or Pearl Jam wanting Tall Dwarfs to open for them at Mt Smart Stadium.”
Five months after Knox was felled, a double album tribute, Stroke, appeared, his songs covered by The Chills, David Kilgour, The Mint Chicks, Shayne Carter, Boh Runga, Bill Callahan, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Yo La Tengo and others, a roll call of important local and American artists.
Hakanoa St was often a drop-in centre for travelling bands such as America’s The Mountain Goats, whose John Darnielle endorses Not Given Lightly (“an exemplary rock bio and a crucial read”) and says Knox is “someone whose art and whose life are one and the same thing: a person living the art they make”.
Raw power
Robertson’s book is often revelatory (Knox didn’t start making music until he was 24, the time of life when many get out) and insightful.
Today, a similar multi-faceted creative could just be another voice in cyberspace but Knox, a disciplined and diligent worker, used his reputation as an outsider and provocateur to enter mainstream media.
“His aesthetic and the times combined to make him this incredibly prolific person across multiple media and I wanted to emphasise that – the different creative communities Chris was part of and a force of nature within.
“He puts out things most people would see as sketches or rough fragments and that’s linked to honest, direct communication and expression. He had different standards … if things are good enough, they can go out there.
“There are things that are difficult to listen to; that’s part of his intention. He doesn’t want people who listen to his music to have an easy, comfortable experience.”
Robertson notes the juxtaposition of a melodic love song and a distorted slab of guitar noise is intentional, and although a fan, “I’m very comfortable saying there’s good and bad”.
Although he hadn’t interviewed Alec Bathgate previously – “Chris’s best buddy” – Bathgate’s opinion after reading the book came like a benediction: “He said, ‘This is Chris on every page.’ That was gratifying.”
So, does Robertson know Chris Knox after a decade of interviewing, research and writing?
He laughs, then there’s a long pause: “I feel like I do, but I didn’t know Chris pre-stroke. We had interactions, like when he crashed at my house when touring America, but I didn’t know him personally.
“I wouldn’t claim to know Chris Knox behind closed doors, and that wasn’t the point of this book. It wasn’t a deep dive into his personal life, nor is it some psychoanalytical take. But I do know him as a creative person and find him incredibly fascinating.”
He says if someone doesn’t know Knox’s cartoons, art or music – “if such a person exists” – they should still find the book interesting, as it shows the development of a creative person, “particularly a person with a dogmatic understanding of creativity”.
“I have a better understanding and respect for the contradictions and provocations that characterise Chris as a creative person.”
The irony is, I say, because of the stroke, his subject can’t read his own biography, but you know he wouldn’t like it anyway!
“Yes, but it’s the way he wouldn’t like it,” he says, laughing. “I wanted to write a Chris Knox biography that would sit next to a Sargeson biography, a McCahon biography, a Janet Frame biography. Literally and metaphorically, Chris is on the same shelf. And therefore not only Chris but the creative communities he’s part of, which are not part of the ‘high culture’ of literature and art and poetry.
“But that doesn’t mean they aren’t important … and Chris certainly isn’t insignificant as a New Zealand voice.”
Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly by Craig Robertson. (Auckland University Press, RRP $59.99)