The stuntman artist guarding K Rd’s wild side
A stuntman artist rails against gentrification in inner-city Auckland. Vicki Anderson meets Chris Stapp.
By moonlight one man climbs the rooftops of Auckland’s K Road, creating hidden art as a panacea to the gentrification of a ‘‘wild, beautiful street’’.
Chris Stapp – stuntman, actor, musician and artist – is an unstoppable creative force who believes a wall is separating the final ‘‘character’’ of Auckland’s Karangahape Rd from gentrification.
‘‘On the other side of the wall there’s a massive construction site right beside us,’’ Stapp said. ‘‘A train station, a fancy shopping precinct and a major apartment building at the end of the driveway.’’
So he has turned his flat’s rooftop backyard above K Rd into ‘‘my own graffiti fun park’’.
It began during last year’s lockdown when he painted a face on a building.
‘‘It made my neighbours super happy and cracks me up every time I look at it. I could self-isolate, but I had a block of rooftops to run around on and do art all day long as the buildings were abandoned.’’
The artwork can only be seen from Stapp’s deck and his landlord’s OK with it. ‘‘For the most part it’s invisible from the street.’’
Stapp says ‘‘there’s no other place in the world like K Road’’ and, when ‘‘their side’’ of the wall was recently painted grey, the K Rd neighbourhood had rallied to ‘‘reclaim’’ it.
‘‘It annoyed me. I’m taking the attitude that vandals came and ruined our colourful wall,’’ he said.
‘‘I know they think they were doing the right thing, painting it grey, so it’s all nice and tidy, but no, we don’t want a boring grey wall on K Rd. I reached out to the neighbourhood. They turned up and spent the day spray-painting it.’’
K Rd’s bars and clubs are also vital to the survival of the city’s music scene. So over Easter Weekend, seven bands performed on Stapp’s deck as part of ‘‘mini music festival’’ Bad Friday, and an ‘‘intimate’’ audience of 100.
‘‘There are a lot of cool bands who need somewhere to play and people need places to hear them.’’
Stapp hoped the K Rd development would enable more people to access the area. However, he’s also worried it spells trouble.
‘‘Auckland needs housing but if you put apartment blocks next to noisy band venues, the apartment blocks tend to win and the band venues lose and disappear. There goes K Road’s nightlife.’’
Stapp has been hanging off buildings and ‘‘climbing s...’’ for most of his life.
As stuntman ‘‘Randy Campbell’’ on Back of the Y Masterpiece TV, which crashed, bogan-style, onto late night TVNZ in 2001, he and cocreator Matt Heath regularly pushed the boundaries of safety and, often, decency.
No-one was more surprised than Stapp when the cult show’s satire house band Deja Voodoo made the leap to mainstream stages with songs Today, Tomorrow, Timaru, the controversial P, and Beers off their 2004 debut ‘‘beer drinking concept album’’, Brown Sabbath.
They played the Big Day Out festival and toured nationally, with each performance culminating in his bandmates smashing 10 ‘‘flaming guitars’’ on Stapp’s head.
‘‘We did a tour with Tim Finn and each night he’d play Ten Guitars and Matt would smash 10 guitars on me. He broke my rib one night in Napier [laughs]. The last guitar each night was doused in meths and lit... Every day we’d duct tape the guitars back together, so they got softer over the tour.’’
Stapp directed 2007 film, The Devil Dared Me To, starring his stuntman persona Randy Campbell. He also directed C4 series Bogan Family Films, and was Mr Metal on popular children’s TV series Let’s Get Inventin’.
He even managed to take Deja Voodoo around the world, including the prestigious SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, and a trip to the UK with MTV.
‘‘Lots of insane things happened. The best thing about that was Matt got to interview Brian May from Queen and I got to interview Nigel Planer, who played the hippie Neil in The Young Ones. I’m a massive fan.’’
Stapp’s life is still full of art, be it his graffiti art park or his comic book, The Killer Goodlooks.
‘‘My day job is to do the storyboard animatics on an animated cartoon version of the children’s puppet show, The Moe Show,’’ Stapp said.
‘‘It’s the most adorable job I’ve ever had, making cute heartfelt cartoons. This show is kind, lovely gentle TV, it’s the opposite of everything else I’ve ever done, and I’m loving it.’’
Stapp’s art guards over K Rd. ‘‘Part of my art is trying to carve out some territory here,’’ he said. ‘‘This is where the line is, don’t cross it, stay on your side of the fence and do your weird gentrified s... over there and this is our side, the K Rd side.’’