Life in One Chord, directed by Margaret Gordon, is in cinemas now.
This documentary about Shayne Carter has a couple of big advantages over every local rock history that has gone before it. It has Carter’s remarkable 2019 memoir Dead People I Have Known as its blueprint – but not its script.
While the book inspired sympathy for anyone the young Carter encountered or the older Carter’s therapist, the movie is generally a happier and very touching affair. Some of those dead people – Straitjacket Fits bandmates Andrew Brough and David Wood – come back to life, as does Wayne Elsey, of Carter’s pre-Fits group The Double Happys. There’s a touching tribute to the late Martin Phillipps after the credits. And the long, influential relationship between Carter and Chris Knox – articulate in archive interviews, scene-stealing in his post-stroke interactions with Carter – becomes the film’s own fraternal love story.
Carter was, and remains, a bit of an enigma, one – as this film reminds us so well – who stuck out even in his early days among the Dunedin bands that gave the Flying Nun catalogue its beginnings. He was working class, Māori on his father’s side, stroppy, articulate, funny, unapologetic, opinionated – and photogenic. He could sing, and even in his more avant garde moments – like the scorching, post-Fits instrumental of early Dimmer single Crystalator, which opens the film – he couldn’t escape being jaggedly tuneful.
Life in One Chord is a very good projection of Carter’s thorny personality. His undermining of director Margaret Gordon’s efforts to get him to read from his book possibly improves the film. He jokingly suggests getting in Carol Hirschfeld with her newsreader voice to do it. The joke becomes a reality and though it takes a little adjusting to, Hirschfeld’s readings bring their own weird harmony – a bit like Brough did in Carter’s most celebrated band.
It’s heartening to see Brough, who died in 2020 (after Gordon interviewed him), give his perspective on his time in the group and his departure – just, as he says, the band was on track to record The Great Straitjacket Fits Album. All three SJF albums had their flaws; both Carter and Brough released better albums in the band’s aftermath.
The film’s visual archive use is a triumph of video and recording research, though some of the photo material is a little scattergun in its chronology and the visual scrapbook of clippings isn’t great at telling us where it’s from or who wrote it, or when.
Its one dramatic re-creation – of a teenage Carter at the infamous Bored Games school hall gig where he ripped apart younger sister Natasha Griffiths’ teddy bear on stage – is like the greatest Repair Shop flashback ever.
Gordon’s own camera spends quite a bit of time with Carter walking a sort of suburban memory lane, with visits to his childhood house in Dunedin’s Brockville and old school, Kaikorai Valley College. Poignant details – his bedroom where the Bruce Lee poster was replaced by Johnny Rotten; the adjacent streets where early bandmates/schoolmates lived – give a sense of the existence that made Carter pick up a guitar and sneer at the world.
His book was a vivid, honest account of him being quite the jerk to those around him as his musical abilities gradually began to match his ambitions. The movie, while relying on the book and its abundance of great lines, has its own perspective, one that stands back a bit.
In it, Carter occasionally tries to make himself a hard man to pin down. But he comes out of it both very well explained and very good company.
Rating out of five: ★★★★★
Life in One Chord, the songs
A playlist based on the dozens of tracks featured in the documentary
