Chris Knox

Chris Knox and yours truly

In 1995 I was a student doing a tv production course. At the end of the course we had to make a tv half hour documentary. I made mine about Chris Knox. Since then, Chris made numerous recordings, until he had a stroke in 2009. He's made a few sporadic musical appearances and recording appearances since then.

Tonight, AUT's Dave Yetton (ex JPSE, Stereobus) presented a screening, in association with the Film Archive, of Chris Knox-related material, called "Why Chris Knox is F***ing Brilliant!". There was some amazing live footage of Toy Love, lots of music videos Chris had made for Tall Dwarfs and his own solo songs, and in the middle was my documentary, "Chris Knox: Songs of you and me."

Now, I hadn't seen this in over a decade, so I was sitting there as it started hoping it hadn't dated, or, you know, didn't suck. It held up pretty well - I basically got out of the way and let Chris talk about his life and his work. The audience seemed to enjoy it.

After the screening Chris came over - did I mention Chris Knox was there too? Sitting on two rows behind me- anyway, he came over and he seemed genuinely pleased to see it again, so I was thrilled by that. It was quite an emotional night.

Thanks to everyone involved in putting it on. Great intro from Graeme Humpries (Able Tasmans, FNun alumni) too, who pointed out that he hated how people used to label Chris's work as low-fi - Graeme said it was really honest-fi.

Backgrounder on Chris Knox over at Audioculture

One of the music videos screened at the AUT event, love this clip, and the song....