MINORITY OF 1

Rip It Up, Issue 167, 1 June 1991, Page 12

MINORITY OF 1

4 SOLO ARTISTS

PROFILED BY

DONNA YUZWALK

CHRIS KNOX

Chris Knox, one half of the legendary Tall Dwarfs, is also prone to taking to the stage alone and going solo. Accompanied only by his guitar (which he plays “like a trombone, up and down all over the place”), and / or omni-chord organ, mike and mikestand for the lyrics he can never remember, he cuts — if not a dash — at least an idiosyncratic figure in bright yellow board shorts and jandals, the famous Knox wit given full vent on the audience between songs.

These performances are backed up with regular vinyl output — three solo albums to date, the latest, Croaker, released last month on

Flying Nun. Speaking to him at home in his kitchen in Grey Lynn (where else?) Mr Knox revealed that his solo guitar work is indeed a matter of lifeiin one chord. o One chord with the fuzz box turned up on two thirds of the songs, over which he launches that voice, added agitation provided by those signature tape loops — low tech home recording at its finest. “All you do is this (bangs table) as many fimes as you need to get it

sounding nice and rhythmic, chop from the first beat to the last which may be 20 minutes of tape, join the ends together and that’s it. If we splice it nicely there'll be no lurch.” Chris got hip fo tape after reading about the Beatles experiments in the 60s, listening to music concrete from the 50s, and seeing an early Scratch Orchestra performance at an

“incredibly arty show in Dunedin about 1972. Atthe end they had a tape loop which, when it started, was just the alphabet but half an hour later | was hearing the Lord's Prayer, presumably because | was in a church, and nursery rhymes and other stuff because your brain apparently gets bored hearing the same thing over and starts inventing stuff.”

Although he likes working from home, Chris thinks his next album will involve other people. He points out that it's hard to get an element of swing going when you're doing everything yourself, although his fascination with the solo album

concept remains undimmed, avowing that he can listen to any album done by one person at least once.. '

“When | go to Wellington I'll be playing a couple of songs with the Pacific Stream Band who are a bunch of drummers who use a lot of Pacific rhythms. I've got this idea at the back of my mind of me and

whole lot of percussion. | think

there’s no finer music than Pacific Island slip drum percussion played at rugby matches, I'd love to get -

together with some of those people | don’t think anyone’s done it — Pacific rhythms plus fuzzed out

guitar, white New Zealand middle - class melodies over the top — | think it would be really interesting.” Chris Knox in song can come across as the self-appointed scourge of middle New Zealand

complacency. When | ask him to list his loves and hates his negatives

include “all the isms — sexism, racism, ageism” as well as

trendiness, boiled cauliflower and the club scene. | wondered if for him, writing songs was a matter of expressing the person he'd really like to be but often fell short of. “Yes, quite a lot. | often get off the stage and think ‘Fuck, what a hyprocrite!’ There | am coming out with all these politically wonderfully correct bits and pieces whereas in normal life | fall far short of that. | think everybody's the same. When I'm writing a song, for instance, ‘The Woman Inside Of Me' or ‘Rapist, the feminist, caring—sharing songs, | do feel these things but I'm very politically inactive and Barbara does percent of the cooking. “Songs are often a distillation of the pure side of you and other times an expression of the totally animal, nasty, disgusting side of you — if's really hard to write a song that is as equivocal as most people really are. I've got a few, like the first song on Croaker,'Don’t Know Much About Life’, and the fact that you change your mind and your whole ideas

from second to second, you can’t ever be one thing but you like to

think that you're something — that you're nice and you're good and

you're caring. | think creativity is a way of legitimising any side of yourself without having to explain it. So you can have your Lydia Lunches and Jim Thurwells pouring forth all this disgusting stuff whereas they're probably extremely nice people and you you can have other people like John Lennon who did all these beautiful songs about how

wonderful the world should be and was apparently being violent and nasty all the time. It doesn't matter what the human is like because so few people are actually affected by the human but an awful lot of people are affected by the art that comes out of the human.”

From the political to the personal .. alot of Knox's songs focus on the body — if's disease, ageing,

disintegration and decay. An expression of physical self-loathing? “I've pretty much gotover loathing of my body, actually. | had it for along time because since the age of fourteen | always had a real struggle to stay sylph like, very important when you wanted to pick up girls. As a quite grossly fat 15 year old it seemed to be quite obvious that 99 percent of young women didn’t want to know.”

But didn't you realise that women find men's brains an aphrodisiac?

“No, it didn't seem to come across that way. And if women do in fact consider men’s brains an aphrodisiac how come there are so many women with men2”

As for the future, aside from the imminent purchase of a set of kiddies

“Hit Sticks” from Dave's Discount Disasters and a possible cover story appearance in America’s Forced Exposure magazine, another Tall Dwarfs album is already waiting in the wings ready for mixing. “Some pretty odd noises” are promised, and one track that's “bigger, crunchier and nastier than anything we've done before.” One last question. How come

you're so prolific2 “Two factors,” replies Chris, ‘I have a very low standard of acceptance — as long as it's got a couple of chords and a vague semblance of melody I'l use it — and | think | subconsciously rip off an awful lot. Now with the age of sampling ripping off is totally fine so | don'tfeel even slightly guilty about it anymore.” :

GODSTAR

He might not have been born with that intergalactic appellation but he sure wears it well. Godstar first exploded on our :

consciousness some months back in the middle of an underground film and music event at the .

Gluepot where he took to the

stage with a bank of computers, strapped on his guitar and proceeded to wah-wah out in front of a psychedleic 35 mm backdrop, alone, prone figure with a

corkscrew halo, he looked like Mark Bolan, sang like Prince and played like Hendrix. Next time we saw him was before an NRA gig, also at the Gluepot, swathed in scarves and flowered flares, he looked and sounded absolutely groovy but the crowd was too small to appreciate him.

So who is this enigma? Godstar (as he inists on being known) started playing around Auckland 10 years ago when he was 16. He went to England when he was 17 with a friend called Tony. They formed a band in London where they stayed and played for a few years. Then they came back to New Zealand for a break, during which time Tony died. So since then Godstar has

been pottering productively by himself. He had a brief stint doing samples for his neighbours Sperm Bank 5, but he's always been intent on working on his own stuff. “| really love the idea of a band and working intensively with

someone else who knows what

they're doing,” he says, sprawled in an armchair in the home he shares with his partner and their new baby daughter, “but I've always been a megalomaniac, lets face it. I've only really met a handful of people in my entire career I've wanted to play with. | think it's because I'm really fussy — I'm good on lofs of instruments. It's not just musically, i's hitting it off —that's 70 percent of it.”

The Godstar musical mix consists of the voice (passionate, intense, higher register), the guitar (a Fender Stratocaster played wild) and multi-layered computerised backing. The voice and the guitar are delivered live on stage, everything else is concocted at home in his well stocked computer laboratory: a keyboard module/drum : machine/sequencer enables himto sample “absolutely anything and everything”, borrowing friends’ CD collections and working his way through from reggae to classical. Godstar is an infriguing combination of ethereality and hard nosed determination. Just like the

paradox of making music via computers. But as he says, the prospect of having that much power and control over your sounds is just too tempting. (much like a writer stumbling across a dictionary full of hitherto undiscoverd words). His equipment enables him to pre-produce fo the extent that the - only thing stopping him making his own CD quality recordings at home is the absence of a $400,000 mixer. Although he has only made two tantallisingly brief appearances in public so far, Godstar is determined to get a record out this year. Like a dozen others, he's waiting on an Arts Council grant application. If he’s one of the lucky few, he'll release a five song EP. “It | don't get it I'll find another. way cos there’s no way I'm going to be 28 in Auckland and no record out. | just couldn't stand it, I'd rather be dead. I'd like to get an EP and an album out this year. I'm ready to do something good, I'm not going fo fuck around any more.” - Bold words, but something ofa

public awaits him already. “I'm fucking cynical,” he says of the rapturous reception accorded his debut appearance, “Personally | believe everyone must be starved out of their brains to react like that to two songs. | was surprised because | lock myself away for months and every day I'm going ‘that’s shit and that’s shit, what a shit song, shit lyrics’ without any feedback whatsoever. | sort of got into this rut where | wasn't going to play it o anyone so I'm really glad that | went out.” He's got a store of some 50 songs, “all just raw, grooves or beats or a concept or three quarters of a song” which he subjects to a continuous mulching process with the touch of a button or key or whatever it is activates all that machinery. Lately he's been getting sick of the funky groove he used as a live foundation. “If’s really hard notto do it, its so easy to just lay down a groove and do anything you want inside it.” With Godstar, funk gets wired with psychedelia. As he says, “I'm interested in the other side of life, the mind, the psyche”.

But next time he does his solo turn it'll be in @ more atmospheric venue than a pub. s it hard to play all the music and muster the necessary

emotional intensity on stage all by yourself2 “Playing music is fucking hard work anyway,” he replies, “the whole thing’s draining if you ask me, from start to finish — writing it, sampling it, whatevering it. But as to the actual doing it live, I'm usually just concentrating on what I'm playing but if the audience is reacting that feeds me.” g S