Historic music collection gifted
Invercargill-born musician Chris Knox’s tape collection will be preserved by the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Knox is one of New Zealand’s most significant and influential musicians and songwriters, not to mention cartoonist, artist, filmmaker, reviewer and social observer.
The collection of 254 tapes covers his musical career from the Enemy through Toy Love, Tall Dwarfs and his rich solo catalogue, and includes many unreleased recordings. It also includes other projects in which he had a hand, as an artist, producer or adviser.
The significant donation is the result of more than a year of work by The Flying Nun Foundation, which was was constituted to help preserve the heritage of Flying Nun Records, one of New Zealand’s most important and influential independent record labels.
Foundation board member Barbara Ward said: ‘‘Chris is pleased that his tapes are going to be looked after and their content digitised.’’
‘‘We are lucky that Chris kept the majority of his recorded output at his home where much of it was recorded and that this collection will be kept together and accessible.’’
Foundation chairwoman Caroline Stone said the project had been possible because Knox kept so much. ‘‘The past year’s work has been about going through all the material, cataloguing it and checking its condition.’’
At the library, the tapes will be preserved during the next three years and, where necessary, restored.
The recordings on them will be digitised, and part of the agreement with Knox and his family is that the high-quality digital versions will be available for future releases.
In 2018, Flying Nun Records donated many hundreds of master tapes from recordings made between 1981 to the mid-2000s, to the Turnbull Library’s Archive of New Zealand Music.
The Archive of New Zealand Music at the Alexander Turnbull Library was established in 1974 by composer Douglas Lilburn and contains the largest collection of archival material relating to New Zealand music and musicians.