The Voices, the Voices, the Noises, the Noises

David Herkt
Chris Knox: Not given lightly by Craig Robertson (Auckland University Press, 2025), 455pp, $60

If there is one encapsulation of the perspective of Craig Robertson’s Chris Knox: Not given lightly, it can be found in the Prologue:

After more than twenty hours of interviews with Alec Bathgate, his musical collaborator of more than three decades and closest male friend, I asked him if there was anything about Knox that I definitely had to include. After a pause, he said, ‘I don’t think you should be too kind to him. I don’t think he would like that. He would want you to be honest. If people had said anything that isn’t flattering, he’d want it to be in there.’

Honest biographies of living figures are scarce. There are often human and legal obstacles. Robertson’s Chris Knox is an exception, and this fact contributes to the book’s importance. It is a complete portrait of a man.

Given Knox’s wide influence and the many consequences of his creative work, this biography, and its account of the impact of one of the most important recent figures in New Zealand cultural life, was a necessary project. Knox also continues to have global significance, and this, too, receives its due.

The central text runs to 454 pages, but the book also includes a crucial inside front and back cover featuring Knox’s own graphic summary of his life from birth (1952) to age 47 (1999). With many illustrative inserts, both in colour and black and white, along with discographies and chronologies, Chris Knox stands as the most complete and informative document ever written about a New Zealand musical figure, and it will surely remain so for some time to come. It is compendious.

Knox’s musical works (‘sixteen albums, nine EPs and half a dozen singles as a solo musician and band member … at least 367 original songs, writing lyrics for 335 of them, creating music for 171 solo songs, and contributing melodies and other ideas for the remaining 196’) are not his only creative achievements. He exhibited paintings and published numerous cartoons in magazines. He has also created video clips for his own work and for others. His regular opinion columns and media interviews have provoked wide-ranging responses. Knox’s television work included gathering content and hosting his own programmes. He became a practised cultural provocateur.

Then there was Chris Knox in presence … For anyone who had the privilege of witnessing Knox on stage in his bands of the 1970s and early 1980s—The Enemy and Toy Love—it was to confront a force of nature.

By the time of their initial public gig, Knox’s first band, The Enemy (Knox on vocals, with bassist Mick Dawson, drummer Mike Dooley and guitarist Alec Bathgate), had around a dozen self-written songs. This alone was unusual. New Zealand punk bands of the time generally played ‘xerox-of-a-xerox’ covers based on the few records that had managed to evade New Zealand’s restrictive import laws. Original material was rare.

Before the first Enemy gigs, he [Knox] hadn’t given too much thought to what would happen when he was on stage. Once he saw people looking at him it didn’t take long to figure out: ‘I can do all the things I normally do that piss people off.’ That meant using his non-singing voice to entertain the audience between songs—he’d been bored shitless at gigs for too long and wanted to make sure an audience had as much as possible. As well as hitting himself, this involved shaving parts of his hair off …

One night at Dunedin’s The Captain Cook Hotel, Knox picked up a piece of broken glass and cut his forearm. ‘When he started cutting himself more regularly on stage, the only pain Knox ever felt came the following morning when he had to pull the sheets that were glued to his body with blood …’ His performances were real amid the posing of bands and musicians, grounded in something that had happened half a world away. For New Zealanders, Knox was ‘ours’, vital, and his presence was large. He was electric. His art was ‘raw’, physical, and it howled with human emotion.

When The Enemy began to tour, audience sizes grew, but by the time of the band’s first visit to Auckland in 1978, cracks were appearing. Gigs were cancelled because other bands were no-shows. There were managerial problems. Finally, Dawson announced he was leaving the group.

They had already played at Zwines, the well-known bluestone backstreet punk club, with its aggressive boot boys in skintight dirty jeans and steel-capped boots, its heroin-stoned or drunken audience, and its notorious pools of vomit.

Half a dozen staring boot boys stood directly in front of The Enemy as they started playing. Knox saw them as a test of his manhood. As the set went along, he got more and more intense and the songs seemed to get more powerful. But he had a trick up his sleeve that had won over Dunedin’s surfies—and as far as he was concerned, if you could win over Dunedin surfies you could win over anyone. Knox got a bottle, broke it, and cut his forearm. The boot boys were seriously impressed.

‘Pull Down the Shades’ was a particular audience favourite:

Back home we lie in our beds
Is the day really day
Is the night really night
Won’t it please go away
There is nothing to see
So we pull down the shades

The Windsor Castle would be a different deal. With a larger capacity, the Saturday afternoon gigs were held in a room poorly insulated from daylight, and it was there that The Enemy played their last Auckland gig before the band’s dissolution. It was a moment witnessed by many major figures in the punk scene. Jim and Zero of The Suburban Reptiles and the members of The Scavengers mingled in the audience.

The gig included both The Enemy and the Idle Idols, New Zealand’s first women-dominated punk band, featuring Jamie Jetson and Sandra Jones. More fashionably dressed than fashion, the Idle Idols made their way through their first song, a version of Roxy Music’s ‘Editions of You’, with Jones performing the synth part in her pure singing voice, before they completely fell out of rhythm, imploded and suddenly walked off the stage.

But then there was The Enemy. Knox patrolled the risers of the Windsor Castle stage like someone possessed. His presence was palpable, fearsome even. He walked on tables. He hit the floor. He cut himself with the end of a broken beer bottle. He hurt. He sang. Knox was in your face. At the end of the set, he suddenly snarled at full volume: ‘We are the Enemy and we don’t exist.’ And abruptly, they didn’t.

Knox had arrived in the world like a figure from myth. Born in 1952, he was the proverbial foundling, the son of a woman, Doreen, who had given him up for adoption. His adoptive parents were a settled middle-class couple in Invercargill. Knox was a bright and lively only child with many obsessive fascinations, including comics and horror movies—even though he had never seen one. He subscribed to Hollywood Monsters and kept scrapbooks of its images, as well as lengthy indexes of these unseen films.

If we can be judged by the friends and companions of our youth, then Knox stood out from the beginning.

In late January 1964, a couple of hundred soon-to-be twelve-year-olds arrived at Rosedale Intermediate School in Invercargill to start Form 1. Three of them quickly became friends. One of them would grow up to be a Professor of Classical Studies. A second became the world’s leading legal philosopher. The other one grew up to become Chris Knox.

Robertson details Knox’s fascination with music, which led to an obsession with recording sound on tape recorders. He was gradually gifted a succession of ever-better movie cameras. Knox had strong graphic interests, as well as an impulse to document his life in voluminous diaries. Besides roping his friends into scripted movies, there were his self-animated films, made one shot at a time. Knox was lo-fi from the beginning.

Knox was also epileptic, having his first grand mal seizure at the age of 16. It would become a regular event. His bandmates became accustomed to it. Later, the lyrics of some of the first Tall Dwarfs songs, including ‘Song of the Silents’, were centred on his fits: his uncontrolled bodily movements, his electrical whiteouts and the strange perceptual distortions they produced.

We’re alone, alone with the things in our bodies,
The voices, the voices, the noises, the noises,
the smells, the stench of the people around us …

On moving to Dunedin, Knox discovered the world of punk music, adopting its signifying disregard for convention and social advancement. He gradually met like-minded friends, for whom, as Robertson puts it, music was ‘a key cultural currency’. There was record-shop proprietor Roy Colbert; Chris Moody—who would become a flatmate, a friend, a sidekick, eventual roadie; and finally Alec Bathgate, who would become Knox’s lifelong musical collaborator. The pair complemented each other in ways similar to other great songwriting partnerships, such as Jagger/Richards and Lennon/McCartney.

The Enemy would be the consequence, but the group’s dissolution at the Windsor Castle gig was not the end of the Bathgate–Knox collaboration. They would reform, regroup and become Toy Love. Knox continued as frontman, with Bathgate, Paul Kean on bass, Mike Dooley on drums and the talented Jane Walker on her Ekosonic keyboard. Her skills and her instrument provided a poppy counterpoint that layered Toy Love’s songs, which intensified Knox’s Shakespearean sturm und drang. Though from Christchurch, she was an essential part of what would come to be typified as the ‘Dunedin Sound’, later developed by bands such as The Clean, The Chills, The Verlaines et al.

Toy Love was Knox’s first real taste of success. He had written the songs with Bathgate, and they included many of the group’s early hits: ‘Swimming Pool’, ‘Rebel’, ‘Squeeze’, ‘Don’t Ask Me’ and ‘Bride of Frankenstein’. They toured New Zealand on a gruelling schedule before ever-growing audiences.

Buoyed by Toy Love’s public success, Australia was the next step in Knox’s ‘first we take New Zealand, then we take the world’ strategy. Like many New Zealanders, they crossed the Tasman. In Sydney, they intended to record an album. Uncomprehending record producers and recording engineers, sometimes joined by bewildered record company execs, along with the band’s own inexperience, resulted in an album the group loathed.

This experience would change Knox forever. Robertson’s book contains a nightmarish catalogue of Toy Love’s Australian gigs and financial losses. The band literally starved for its art. ‘In line with their contract, Toy Love got whatever was left over after MMA paid their expenses—that could be as little as $50 a fortnight, split between five band members and the three-man crew.’ The gigs added up, but the money did not. They could afford only the cheapest takeaway food (potato fritters) and relished pub gigs that included a meal. It was under these circumstances that the band returned to New Zealand, where it dissolved, not so much with a bang as with a whimper.

What followed, however, would become perhaps the most singular episode in the history of New Zealand popular music. Knox and Bathgate formed Tall Dwarfs. From 1981 until 1997, there would be a steady stream of EPs and albums, interwoven with Knox-only releases. The Flying Nun record label was founded in 1981 by music store manager Roger Shepherd, and Knox would be intimately involved in its growth. It would act as the distributor of Knox’s musical productions, while also becoming the centre of the ‘Dunedin Sound’, releasing works whose influence continues 45 years later.

Knox had purchased a four-track tape recorder, the TEAC 3340S. ‘When Knox and Bathgate took turns listening to those first efforts, they were shocked: Bathgate’s guitars sounded the way they should—the sound that had proved impossible to get in Sydney.’ In the future, The Clean and numerous other bands would bounce off this sound, and it would inform the lo-fi techniques of their own songs. The interfaces between maker and audience were minimal. It was a revolution that had global implications, from the US to the UK.

Robertson’s Chris Knox relates these changes, situates them and gauges their consequences. He also deals with Knox’s personal life—his marriage to Barbara Ward and their two children—while keeping pace with his stream of side projects: the long-running Listener ‘Max Meteor’ weekly cartoon strip (social commentary, philosophical questioning and news annotation, including 9/11 and ‘the War on Terror’), along with other graphic projects, from album covers to compilations of New Zealand comic-book artists. Knox hosted television arts programmes and had been a record reviewer until the records he reviewed had simply become ‘boring’.

His music was used in commercials, including two for Vogel’s Bread (‘Not Given Lightly’) and a Todd Haynes-directed international TVC for Heineken (‘It’s Love’). In a consumption-based world, no higher achievement can be reached. Knox received the New Zealand Arts Foundation Arts Laureate Award in 2009, shortly after a disabling cerebral haemorrhage. He lives in Grey Lynn.

Chris Knox is an encyclopaedic recounting of a fully lived human life, and of the effects that the need to create can impose on an individual, along with the struggles and rewards of its execution and reception. It is a necessary book for a nation whose horizons are too often narrow. Robertson demonstrates how Knox came in from the periphery and helped move New Zealand culture towards the global centre.

If it has a flaw, it is that it is perhaps too detailed, but this is also its great advantage. It will remain the basis for any writing on Knox to come. There is one major irritation: the image reproductions are frequently too small. They are well chosen, but—just to give two examples, though there are more—the words in Knox’s carefully handwritten cartoons and his album back notes sometimes cannot easily be read. This is unfortunate.

Robertson devoted ten years to the research and writing of Chris Knox: Not given lightly. He interviewed more than 80 people. The book is a telling depiction of a culture at a crucial moment, as it changed from a bucolic socialist paradise to a less humanly supportive free-market economy, and it asserts the role of musicians as its audible diarists. Chris Knox is also a careful close-up of a notable individual, with all his genius and quirkiness. It is an outstanding achievement.

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DAVID HERKT is a poet, widely published journalist, book reviewer and writer of short fiction. He resided in Australia for 20 years and was educated at the University of Melbourne. Formerly working in television, his documentaries received awards for ‘Best Factual Series’ and ‘Best Children’s Television’ at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards. He now lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.