Chris Knox: From Kiwi punk firebrand to contrarian renaissance man, captured in a definitive biography
In the afternoon of his 73rd birthday in early September, Chris Knox did what he’s done most days for more than a decade: he went to the front room of his Hakanoa St home in Grey Lynn, Auckland, trawled some favourite internet sites and took out his paint brushes.
In this cluttered room, he once recorded, created cartoons, comics and illustrations, and scrupulously – if untidily – filed his innumerable writings, drawings, handmade posters and more.
Master tapes of his recordings were also once housed here before being gifted to the Alexander Turnbull Library in 2019.
There are piled-up paintings, some violent and disturbing abstracts of what a grand mal seizure feels like from the inside, all done left handed since his debilitating stroke in 2009 paralysed his right side, took away most of his voice and left him with cognitive issues.
Those who kept in touch after that awful day – especially his many caregivers, of which I was one a few days a week for about three years – would attest to his courage, resilience and wicked humour, which, although curtailed or difficult for him to express, was always evident.
On this day, he shows me new paintings, but is especially enthusiastic about the massive TV screen commanding the lounge with its scores of DVDs, mostly of classic films, arcane horror flicks and B-grade – at best – monster movies. He would, with almost maniacal glee, inflict some of these on caregivers.
But he’s tired, in part because the morning had been stimulating: Sam Elworthy of Auckland University Press arrived to give him a copy of Chris Knox: Not Given Lightly, his biography by Craig Robertson, who interviewed more than 80 people for the project, but admits some who gave their time will be disappointed.
“I made the decision not to quote directly from interviews,” says Robertson from his home in Boston, “because I wanted to foreground Chris’s voice. Aside from reviews, the only person directly quoted in the entire book is Chris.
“It was an attempt to compensate for the fact I wasn’t talking to Chris [because of the stroke]. But he’d left ample examples of his voice on paper, tape, canvas …”
Not Given Lightly – its title Knox’s best-known and most financially rewarding song – is a remarkable piece of well-illustrated research and lively writing covering Knox’s life as an only child in Invercargill, through shiftless days and short-term jobs in his late teens and early 20s in Dunedin with writing, LSD and a trip to Christchurch to see (and film on silent Super 8) Lou Reed in concert.