About Me
For the time being this page is run by Andy @ Little Teddy. All messages will be forwarded to Chris so please include your email contacts off myspace. *********************Chris Knox, 53 year-old spiritual godfather of the Flying Nun scene, a man whose astounding creative output marks him down as a true renaissance bloke from downunder New Zealand, does not just confine himself to making music. Chris turns his extremely able (if slightly unhinged) mind to film, video, comix, writing and criticism in a variety of regular outlets, including his country's leading magazines and national television networks.Raised by adoptive parents in Invercargill - the southernmost city in these shaky isles, aptly named "the asshole of the world" by Keith Richards - Chris found the family piano and his brand new Super-8 camera to be the vehicles for an insatiable young mind fuelled by the music of the Beatles, Kinks, Jefferson Airplane,Incredible String Band etc. and that unholy grail for horror film freaks, Famous Monsters of Filmland. But all that is more easily read about than experienced firsthand in Invercargill and, as soon as he could, Chris set off for Dunedin, 120 miles north and a famous university town where his interests might not be so far from the norm.Seven years later, he had passed through a misspent year of college life and a plethora of no-hope jobs - when such things were still plentiful - in various chocolate and whiteware factories, postal delivery services, woolsheds, construction sites etc. when suddenly...Punk rock changed his life! A legitimate - if deliciously rebellious - way to express his confusion and a great way to impress his mates.So, by mid-1977, Chris Knox was the misfit lead singer of one of New Zealand's very first punk bands, The Enemy. Their live shows were chaotic, loud and legendary culminating in Iggy Told Me where, on a good night and they were all good nights, the audience were treated to the sight of the manic frontman hacking into his forearms with the first bit of broken glass he could find or create.Within a year The Enemy headed for Auckland, the northernmost and largest Kiwi city, where the band swiftly mutated into a new outfit, Toy Love. A few Enemy classics like Pull Down the Shades stayed in the set but Toy Love soon became a vehicle for the more melodically ambitious ideas fermenting in their heads, especially those of Knox and his main songwriting partner, guitarist Alec Bathgate,Toy Love set about conquering New Zealand by 1979 before being washed up 18 months later in a sea of indifference in Sydney, Australia. They returned to NZ disgusted with the experience (which had included the classic big label/big studio recording trip) and Chris bought himself an open-reel Teac 4-track with which he and flatmate Doug Hood proceeded to record young Dunedin bands for a fledgling label called Flying Nun. Thus were born records by the Clean, Chills, Verlaines et al. Chris also continued his partnership with Alec Bathgate as Tall Dwarfs. These two have delivered a string of wonderfully demented records ever since - the latest, The Sky Above, The Mud Below released in 2002. Dwarfs projects have given both Chris and Alec the opportunity to take the DIY ethic of punk to a delightful extreme. The two accomplished graphic designers take turns at creating all visual aspects of Tall Dwarfs releases, resulting in unique packaging concepts and swags of stickers, postcards, day-glo covers and more. Not to neglect the actual recordings, built by trial and error on various 4 and 8 track analogue dinosaurs - state of the art in, say, 1968 and latterly within the dodgy digital realms of Protools.Chris, aided in recent years by his partner Barbara Ward, has been making videoclips to accompany Dwarfs' records since day one as well as for his solo stuff and the odd other band-including a decidedly low-tech vid for Flying Nun's first single, Tally Ho by The Clean. His frenetic clips, featuring anything from stop-frame animated slabs of meat to painstakingly drawn narratives, have had plenty of attention-the claymation Half Man/Half Mole (from Songs of You and Me, Flying Nun/Caroline, 1995) even had Beavis and Butthead debating the relative merits of cel versus clay animation!Musically, Tall Dwarfs have extended themselves, over the years, into the 22-piece Wall of Dwarfs ( for a couple of songs on 1984's That's the Short and Long of It) and International Tall Dwarfs for '97's Stumpy (most songs recorded over loops sent from fans around the world in response to a solicitation in the previous album, 3EPs). Solo Knox output has, however,been almost exclusively the work of one man, his voice, guitars and various other decrepit hunks of out-moded musical technology. With the very occasional guest musician to do the bits he can't figure out for himself, to date; strings, horns and bagpipes. And, to answer an oft-asked question; "How does he decide which songs are for solo and which for Tall Dwarfs?", he doesn't! Dwarfs songs are created in the recording process with equal input from both partners while solo songs (generally) have had a decent live performance workout prior to recording and are the offspring of Knox alone.The 1981 Knox solo album Songs for Cleaning Guppies is the sole exception to this, having been made up of experimental recordings doodled with no release in mind. Seizure, the first "official" album, didn't appear until 1988. It was followed by Croaker (1991) and Polyfoto, Duck-Shaped Pain & Gum (1993). Meat (Communion USA, 1993) compiled tracks from Seizure and Croaker. The same label also licensed P.Duck for the US. Caroline Records picked Chris' 1995 album Songs of You and Me which almost immediately hit the top of the college radio charts. 1997 saw the release of YES!! which got delivered around the USA by the Chapel Hill-based Flying Nun US operation (which met an unfortunate demise not too much later-a pure coincidence!) and got into Europe via Matador UK. As a value-added extra, Chris recorded 10 more songs on a bonus disc that found release a little later in the States as Almost on the Dark Beloved Cloud label. 2000 found the artiste getting all sensitive with the critically applauded Beat, haunted by his father's recent death. In 2002 Chris also found time to indulge a passion he had long wanted to translate onto disc. This was a musique concrete, Protools-manipulated, found-sound album with no tunes, lyrics or any of the other things for which he was most known. Inaccuracies & Omissions was the result and was released under the nom-de-disc, Friend, to widespread puzzlement.Possessed of a superb voice, an ear for glorious melodies, a quick - if oblique and sometimes cruel - wit and a taste for the unusual, untaught and eclectic in all artforms and ways of life, Chris has carved himself a sizeable niche in the alternate reality of "the underground".Since the late '80s this has also translated into a tiny niche in "the real world" (Copyright McDonalds and Microsoft).Thus, as well as a monthly full-page, full-colour comic strip in the sub-mainstream Real Groove mag, he has infiltrated NZ's biggest newspaper, the NZ Herald, with a weekly strip, Max Media, Not content with this level of acceptance he has snuck regular rock and DVD columns and opinion pieces into the New Zealand Listener (a TV guide for vaguely leftwing readers....) and a handful of others.Nor has television escaped his attentions with five seasons of the country's only Arts show of the time being the venue for his personal take on Movie criticism. Then a year-long stint as the presenter of ancient flicks on the late night cult item, The Vault. Most recently saw the bewildered old chap on a trip to Southern India as part of the hugely popular Intrepid Journeys where a mountain-top, primitive tribal version of Not Given Lightly was filmed but not broadcast! All the above are vehicles for his trademark acerbic wit and the little knowledge that is, indeed, a dangerous thing in the right hands. Politicians, celebrities and assorted other fakers are the usual targets.Add in Chris' reputation as a wonderful live performer, fond of terrifying forays into the myriad sacrosanct personal spaces that make up the average audience, capable of surreal lyrical and ear-shattering instrumental extemporisation (though he's never claimed to be anything other than barely competent on any instrument). and you have your veritable home-made Renaissance man, a cheerful misfit who has perfected the art of doing whatever the hell he wants.2000 was a good year for the boy with the delivery of a bNet "Lifetime Achievement Award" and an APRA Silver Scroll for "best song of the year", being My Only Friend from the BEAT CD. Could it be that by awarding such accolades the hope is that the artiste might quietly disappear......No such luck for, despite things musical having slowed up a tad in the last couple of years as real life - and the need to fund it has required more time to be devoted to actual employment, a decent backlog of songs has built up and in a stunning reversal of all his fondest and longest held beliefs he has chosen to record them in a studio! With a band!!The result is Chris Knox and The Nothing, a 17 song album encased in Beatle ripoff artwork and with yer actual musical competence in abundant evidence, thanks to drummer Stefan Neville (AKA Pumice) and bassist Jol Mulholland (main guy of Gasoline Cowboy) and the engineering and production skills of Roy Martyn who got it all down to hard drive at Auckland's MAINZ studios. Strings and/or horns feature on about half of the songs and Those Great Big Puppy Eyes the first feature track off the disc - show both off to fabulous advantage as Knox rails schizophrenically at his audience!This album also breaks from tradition by not being on Flying Nun. Instead, Knox has chosen to self-release it on his newly minted A Major label with distribution by Rhythmethod. The DIY approach continues. And deepens.The band toured during Orientation 2006 to coincide with the March release and continue to show up at irregular intervals in unlikely places in order to stun the odd mullet!French mag, Rocksound, once described him as "that gentle psychopath, Chris Knox" and -on a good night, with a shorts-and-jandal clad Knox bearing down on you from onstage (or even more to the point, up at you from a drooling heap at your offstage feet) - maniacal grin fixed in place - we can definitely understand what they mean. But, then, there's also the guy who created Not Given Lightly, the love song to end all love songs...the Carl Barks' Disney comix freak...the Abba fan (especially when they were uncool)...the man with the amazing John Lennon conspiracy theory...the multi-talented, unique amateur that is Chris Knox. Love the guy.
