Not given over lightly
Well the Alexander Turnbull Library just became more interesting.
It is now the repository for a collection of tapes by the semi-celebrated and entirely extraordinary Invercargill-raised musician-artist Chris Knox.
Fully 254 tapes of his music are to be contained – we would like to think glowing with cultural radioactivity – in a way accessible to those who wish to access and savour his fearless creativity.
If, to the uninitiated, that sounds like an immodestly large collection you have to understand how much ground there is to cover.
Spat from Invercargill in the days of late-1970s punk, he was an angry young man who by his own account hadn’t had an altogether happy time of it at Southland Boys’ High School.
He was soon enough venting with the Enemy, then the more new wave-ish Toy Love and in time the, erm, unrestrained
Tall Dwarfs, followed by an extensive solo career.
A significant and provocative member of Dunedin’s Flying Nun label, he gathered international respect more easily than substantial sales, though his 1989 song Not Given Lightly, a tender and open-hearted love song delivered to sound of a distant chainsaw, found an unexpectedly wide audience and grew to be favoured by more than just a few wedding parties.
The Southland Times once described him as making music ‘‘felt deep down in the demi-monde of Independent New Zealand music where musicians bring succour and stimulation not just to the misfits and disaffected bedroom-dwellers but to anyone seeking music sprung from somewhere deeper than the lukewarm mainstream’’.
Hammered hard by a stroke in 2009 it was an indication of the esteem in which he was held that a collection called Stroke, released later that year, featured 33 artists performing his songs.
Preservation of his work at Alexander Turnbull is less about what he deserves, or even what the work deserves, than about what we deserve.
It withstands and rewards scrutiny and the more accessible it is, the better.
And somewhere in that little lot there there is one particular body of work in there that should be of particular interest hereabouts.
In 2000, Knox released Beat – songs drawn from his return visits to be with his end times with his dying father Fred, a Southland stockbroker, RSA president, competitions society president and choral and operatic performer. The album was reviewed as in part sunny, dark, stark, smart, sorrowful, odd and uplifting.
There’s enough nutrition in his collection to merit the attention of more than just nostalgists.
Honoured by the Invercargill City Council for his artistic achievements in 2004, Knox had, by that time, at least to some extent made his peace with the city, acknowledging a good childhood here.
By this stage he was ready to salute, and to encourage those who sought to live creatively here.
As he, himself, still strives to do.
Preservation of his work at Alexander Turnbull is less about what he deserves, or even what the work deserves, than about what we deserve.