Chris Knox: Never Just a Tall Dwarf
Sometimes you can be so close to a subject you can't see it properly.
That's how I feel about Chris Knox; I thought I knew him. But now – with the publication of Craig Robertson's insightful, meticulous and highly readable Knox biography Not Given Lightly – I realise I'd only had a small part of the picture.
I first met musician, artist, cultural commentator, television presenter and arts provocateur Knox in 1987 when he started his weekly Max Media cartoon in the New Zealand Herald. I'd arrived at the Herald just a month before and subsequently encountered him delivering the hand-drawn strip on roughly cut white card and picking up the previous week's.
I'd seen him around previously of course – in shorts and jandals he was hard to miss in central Auckland and his home suburb of Grey Lynn – and had caught the band Toy Love, which he fronted with maniacal energy, a few times.
Knox was known as confrontational, quick to challenge anyone's ideas and foreground his own with forceful rhetoric. A lot of people shied away, some retreated wounded but – maybe because I was his age and had been around a bit – I don't recall him being unpleasant to me. Mostly we had a polite standoff although we'd talk about music we had in common.
I saw Chris quite often after that in various places, went to parties at the house and so on. But I wouldn't say I was a close friend. However when he suffered that debilitating stroke in 2009 I was among the first people his partner Barbara called, just to let me know before we heard it on the news.
My wife and I were at the hospital the next day. I asked the barely conscious Chris – a massive Beatles fan – if he'd ever been to Abbey Road, the studio the Beatles used. He shook his head. I said I'd get him there because within a few days we would be in London and I'd been invited to the studio to hear the remastered Beatles' songs.
I took with me a Knox album cover which had his papier-mâché image of that manic face on it, propped it up in a chair at the mixing desk and took a photo.
We got it framed for him. And then for about three years I became one of his caregivers for two or three days a week.
He painted – left-handed now – and we talked about music (I talked, his language was down to a few words), went on errands, watched the god-awful B-grade horror films he liked, did his exercises, took strenuous walks and so on.
Some days were hard, but most were a lot of fun with jokes and shared laughter.
Sometimes we'd have to source material from his office-cum-workroom which looked like a chaotic clutter but was in fact extremely organised, in a fashion.
One day I found a series of extraordinary caricatures of New Zealand musicians he'd done – Bic Runga, Dave Dobbyn and others – and was taken aback. I don't know who or what they had been for, and of course he couldn't tell me. I got to know Chris very well, I thought. But close as I had been, I didn't know him.
The sheer complexity and diversity of his enormous output of art, articles, reviews, opinion, comic strips, caricatures, sketches and paintings – not to mention the many albums with Toy Love, under his own name or with Alec Bathgate as Tall Dwarfs – is astonishing.
The well illustrated, much researched, 450 page Not Given Lightly is – against considerable odds – an exceptional, honest and important biography of a unique and uniquely creative New Zealander. Read it and you'll get to know him better. I did.
– Graham Reid
