Claire Mabey reads Not Given Lightly, Craig Robertson\u2019s long-awaited biography of iconic, contradictory artist Chris Knox.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Where do artists come from? What makes them? Why do they do it? These are questions central to Craig Robertson\u2019s exhaustive, and at times exhausting, biography of musician, filmmaker, cartoonist, reviewer and TV presenter, Chris Knox.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like most New Zealanders under 40 I was too young to follow the \u201cDunedin Sound\u201d in real time. I came to it later, in compilation CDs and anthologies featuring musicians like Martin Phillipps, Hamish Kilgour and Chris Knox. \u2018Not Given Lightly\u2019 is a song I played over and over again in my last year of high school, before I went to study at Otago and got to experience the kind of heavy drinking and dingy living described in detail in Robertson\u2019s study of Knox\u2019s coming-of-punk-age.<\/p>\n
Avid students of the Flying Nun subculture will be cringing at this amateur association. \u2018Not Given Lightly\u2019 was his mainstream hit and Knox was actively, aggressively about counterculture. Nevertheless, it\u2019s that song \u2013 re-recorded to be used in an ad for Vogel\u2019s bread in the 2000s \u2013 that many will associate with Knox and that lends this biography its name.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not Given Lightly, the biography, is a fulsome, painstaking account of an art punk: an artist who \u201crejected mainstream New Zealand attitudes towards work\u201d and made creativity central to life. Robertson (yes, brother of Grant) took 16 years to finish the book \u2013 greenlit by Knox just before he had a massive \u201cleft hemisphere cerebellar stroke\u201d in 2009. Reading it, I had a dual and contradictory response: at times the book is so laden with minute chronology you feel the full weight of the research; and at other times it\u2019s so breathless I willed it to slow and take a moment to linger on what is an emphatically fascinating, and influential life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Robertson begins at the beginning: home town, parents, school. Knox grew up in Invercargill of the 1950s: a conservative New Zealand about a decade behind the rest of the world where art and culture was concerned. Knox was good at school \u2013 was good with words and with his friends started the Dim View newspaper, a satirical anti-authoritarian rag showing early signs of Knox\u2019s signature aesthetic and anti-authoritarian sensibility. He loved The Beatles (Lennon over McCartney) and hated Bruce Springsteen so much he started writing his own, \u201cbetter\u201d, lyrics in response. But towards the end of his secondary school education he flailed badly, yet only one line in the book is given to the fact that his academic decline coincided with medication Knox started taking for epilepsy \u2013 drugs that gave him brain fog and that he later gave up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Seizures punctuate Knox\u2019s life. And an enduring interest in bodies: in their flaws and potential to express the grotesque remains part of Knox\u2019s aesthetic to this day. Early in the book, Robertson describes Knox\u2019s awe when Phil Judd temporarily becomes the bassist in Knox\u2019s band The Enemy (which frankly sounded terrible but paved the way for the intermittently ingenious duo, Tall Dwarfs, with Alec Bathgate). Judd\u2019s term was short-lived, however, in part because Knox didn\u2019t like Judd\u2019s process of rehearsing songs over and over again \u2013 Knox worried the repetition might bring on a seizure.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At this point I wanted Robertson to pause the freight train of recording detail and take a moment to consider how epilepsy may have shaped Knox\u2019s frenetic art-making \u2013 an ethos of expressing, not perfecting. Knox\u2019s approach to art is fast: he wrote fast, he recorded fast, he rarely laboured over a piece (excepting his cartoons, but even these were usually were filed weekly). For Knox, art is determinedly raw, handmade, flawed, monstrous (Matthew Bannister less generously described Knox\u2019s style as \u201cshambling amateurism\u201d). I went back and watched the videos Knox made for Tall Dwarfs songs. They\u2019re brilliant: small domestic films playing with animating inanimate objects, obscuring faces, upending normalities. There is something fascinating, here, about how fear of seizures (a fear that permeated lyrics over the years) and refusal of medicine-induced brain fog might have influenced a particular approach to getting art out of a mind and a body.<\/p>\n
One of the revelations in the biography for me was just how much Knox influenced the early days of Flying Nun. That signature sound \u2013 like the band is in the room \u2013 came from Knox schlepping his four-track around houses to record bands like The Clean, The Chills and The Stones. During recording sessions he would offer direction, unafraid to say when songs might be going on too long, or were actually shit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Knox was renowned for offering his opinion. His early, drug-and-drink-fuelled years in Dunedin saw him regularly kicked out of pubs like The Cook for belligerent behaviour, and his reputation for being a bully established. Knox strikes me as the kind of New Zealand man walking the line between superiority and inferiority complex: someone who thought he had better taste and superior interests to anyone caught up in mainstream, institutional dross; and someone desperate to make their mark, draw attention, be recognised; someone who greeted people by pinching their arses (a detail that riled me having had my arse pinched one too many times in The Cook in the early 2000s).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Robertson does alight, briefly, on what Knox\u2019s life and relationships tell us about masculinity in P\u0101keh\u0101 subcultures of the 70s, 80s and 90s. How excessive drinking (there\u2019s a scene involving Colin Hogg and Knox spewing on, kissing and biting each other) and music were central to Knox\u2019s male relationships. A kind of alternative intensity to, say, the sports enthusiasts \u2013 where instead of the rugby pitch, gig stages provided the ground upon which to throw egos about.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over time, Knox mellows. He has a family and sees children as a way to channel attention away from his own ego. I enjoyed the descriptions of Knox and his partner and fellow artist Barbara Ward\u2019s home in Hakanoa St, Grey Lynn, as a creative site: where their kids could paint on the walls and videos were filmed and new music made and recorded. There was no stopping art from being central to life. By the 90s Knox was earning decent enough money from reviews, columns and cartoons commissioned by mainstream media such as the Listener and NZ Herald that he was no longer eligible for the sickness benefit. Bigger money arrived in 2008 when Heineken used his song \u2018It\u2019s Love\u2019 in an ad: $105,000.\u00a0<\/p>\n