"As a kid I had one of those cassettes with piano keys, a little mono machine, and I used to sing into that. I had a friend who had a little Revox that had sound on sound, so we'd build up stuff on that, but that was it."
His first experience in a studio came with his late '70s punk band, the Enemy. "We recorded 3 songs for a single which we were thrilled about, but it never happened. We sort of collapsed immediately afterwards." It was recorded "at an 8-track studio run by a guy who was in Ray Columbus and the Invaders, who had a hit in New Zealand called 'She's a mod'. The guitarist from that band recorded us, and he didn't like us one little bit, so he didn't spare much attention on us. It wasn't very good."
After the Enemy broke up, Knox continued in a similar vein with his next band, Toy Love. "Toy Love did a couple of singles in a 16-track studio. They were quick and easy. For the second one, I was writing the lyrics as we were starting to record it, and we didn't come up with a name for it until after it was recorded. And I asked Barbara in desperation, 'What should we call it?' and she said, 'Don't ask me!' So that's what it ended up being called, 'Don't Ask Me'. That had no relevance to the lyrics at all."
"Some of the best recordings are some 8-track demos that we did which I'd like to release some day, but I suspect the tapes have sort of got a bit past it, even maybe past the baking stage, not sure. They were done in a couple of small studios — the same one that the Enemy stuff was done in and another small 8-track studio. The album's producer, he was a good guy. He was a New Zealander. He was the bass player from a band called Dragon that had a huge Australasian hit which was called 'The April Sun in Cuba', a rather unlikely name for a hit, I know. Never was big in America for some reason, I can't understand why — something about 'Castro in the alleyway.' He was relatively sympathetic and we did more demos with him in his little studio, which was 16 [tracks] primarily."
"An Australian started sniffing around us, and decided that we should record in Sydney, which we didn't really want to do, and that we should base ourselves in Australia for quite some time, which we didn't want to do either. He said that if we did that for a few months, he'd get us to London, which is where we wanted to go. He never did, and we parted company after recording this album in a 24-track studio that was state of the art for the day, with faders that went up and down remotely. It was really disgusting and awful and just a horrible experience."
"We [had] demo'ed these bloody songs 3 times already, which was just nuts. I don't know why we kept doing it. Then we went into this 24-track studio. The engineer, a guy called Christo, was a very nice guy, but he was basically a hippie, and we were not. Alec had this lovely little amp, a Rockit amp, which is a New Zealand-built amp, and it was tubes. It wasn't all that wonderful, but it was pretty good and he got a good sound out of it. The engineer said, 'We can't use that.' 'Why not?' 'Because it buzzes.' 'Yeah, but when I start playing you can't hear the buzz.' 'Ah yes, but it buzzes when you're not playing.' 'Well you're not supposed to be recording me when I'm not playing.' Not the point. So he made Alec use this horrible little solid- state amp, and accordingly his guitar sound was pretty wretched. Our drummer couldn't get him to understand what he wanted in a drum sound, because the guy just wanted to do the drum sound he always did. Mike didn't have that sort of drum sound in mind at all. Our bass player was the nearest one who could communicate with him, because, you know, bass players are like that. He had a pretty peculiar sound as well — didn't have an awful lot of bass in it. We also had a keyboard player who was playing Clavinet and organ. She didn't really get what she wanted either. I did one song which required a very lilting sort of vocal melody. Because the drummer tended to play the song around my vocals, which is an odd thing for a drummer to do, I did this really clipped version as a guide track, and somehow that ended up on the finished mix. I don't know how. There were things like that all the time. After a fortnight of this, we just lost concentration and were totally sick of being there, and handed over far too much control. The second to last song on the album, 'Frogs', was our big experimental centerpiece. We had done a fabulous demo version of it almost a year before that, which was really good, and we tried to emulate that, but it just died. We said, 'Okay, look. We'll just leave it. You mix it, okay? You mix it and we'll go away.' So we went away and we came back, 'I've got a really good mix.' This is the very last thing pretty much. We realized at that point just how little he understood what we were doing, because it was so appallingly distant from what we wanted. We remixed it. It was still pretty bad. Now [the album] changes hands for fifty dollars on the collector market, so we must be wrong I guess. I'd just love to get the 24-track original but somehow, somewhere it disappeared. I've got the half-track master but I haven't got the 24-track. Ah, well."
"The band broke up after we got back from Australia, and my grandmother died, which was a coincidence. She left me some money, and I bought this old Tascam 3340S machine, and it was lovely. I just started mucking around with that, and then Alec came over and we just started doing some things. [The first song] was a riff that we had been mucking around with in the dying days of Toy Love. Just basically 3 chords over and over, which we thought could be some sort of huge anthem, and that became 'Nothing's Going to Happen' which is the first song on the first record. Then we recorded, and made up another couple on the spot, basically, and had a whale of a time making it as distorted and thin or fat as we wanted, and not having to worry about some goon saying, 'No you can't do that.' We know we can't do it, we're going to do it anyway." These recordings became the first Tall Dwarfs EP, 1981's Three Songs.
"Even then when I went to the cutting session, which right from the word go I made sure I was at all the cutting sessions, we were told we couldn't have the kid's rattle at the end going through distortion like it did. It had to be limited. I think in effect the whole second half of the track was limited, which was a bit of a bummer. It made me learn just how much you could do at the cutting session. It was great because the guy who did the cuts was the guy who had cut the Beatle records that I listened to as a kid, which were particularly good cuts, because they had all the same gear that Abbey Road had."
"When I got the opportunity to get a 4-track, it was like Wow! This is what the Beatles used up until and beyond Sgt. Pepper. I'm on a par with those guys now. Oohahooh. I haven't quite got the Neve desks and the beautiful old tube effects, but, you know, it's not bad."
"I'd been mucking round with home-recording sporadically for more than a decade, so it was natural to me and this 4-track stuff that (particularly) Alec and I were coming up with sounded better than the 24-track rubbish we'd done in Australia. It really felt like we were doing the listening public, if any such thing actually still existed, a huge favor rather than a disservice. Certainly we [mixed] the first Tall Dwarfs songs at a 'real' studio but that was not through choice. As soon as I could afford a little Tascam 32-2B 1/4" machine, which I'm still using two decades later, it all became in-house." Knox was comfortable with the sound of home recordings after listening to many of them. "I'd listened to Paul McCartney and Roy Wood's solo albums, and those great first punk singles were all really ragged. [Bands like] Swell Maps and Half Japanese were out there. If you looked hard enough there were plenty of precedents. The entire history of recorded music up till the very early '60s, only 15 or 16 years previously, was lower tech than what we were doing."
"For 'Nothing's Going to Happen', we just put that riff down and just tried to come up with something over the top, which we eventually did. With the other 2 songs, we just started making interesting noises, and with one of them, 'Luck or Loveliness', there was an awful lot of bouncing in there. There were 12 discrete tracks on that, and I've never done anything like that since, 'cause it's such a pain in the arse. 'We can make sound sculptures, whee'. Both of us were really interested in English and American music, world music I guess, from like '65 to early '69, when the psychedelic thing started really revving up. Both of us were pretty disgusted that, in most English speaking countries anyway, that was just sort of discarded to a great degree, in the bands that we knew of at the time, in favor of country rock and other roots music. There was so much more that could have been done. We've got to show people that you know, you can start at 1967, the weirdest stuff out of 1967, and do more, so that was our game plan."
"There's lots of Beatles stuff — things like 'Baby You're a Rich Man' and 'Only a Northern Song'. There were things like 'Maybe the Madmen' by the Troggs, which is a pretty offbeat sort of song. The Kinks, on Face to Face, did some nice drone-y stuff that was rather lovely. People like Jefferson Airplane occasionally spun out quite nicely, with things like 'Ballad of You Me and Pooneil Corners' and some of Grace's stuff like 'Greasy Heart', though a bit more R&B. Mostly mainstream stuff because we couldn't get the really weird shit in New Zealand. The weirdest stuff I had was probably Lothar and the Hand People, which was great — that was a big influence. Incredible String Band, which you wouldn't really call psychedelic, plunged into the same 'anything goes' area that all those other people did. At the time I got this record, side one of which was a 26 minute David Tudor performance of a John Cage piece, which was basically attacking a piano with styli attached to cartridges, and pickups and all sort of things. It was just this glorious thing that sort of went "ggggk, eeek, bwwww," and that was fantastic. That was a formative influence — it's a great album. The other side was an Henri Pousseur piece which was tape cut-up, like 'Revolution #9' but a bit more twee, and that was fantastic. I was discovering all that sort of stuff, which was having a huge impact. What thrilled me most was doing things like, on a Saturday night when my parents were out, I wasn't drinking, I had no recourse to drugs or anything. I'd lie in the middle of the room with the lights out, and have something like 'Revolution #9' or the John Cage piece going on the turntable. Then also have 2 transistors tuned to different stations, and have the TV on as loud as possible and just lie in the middle of it all."
For the first Tall Dwarfs recordings, "I think we had Alec's amp, and that was it, and one mic. It was a Pearl, sort of SM 58 copy that fell off the back of a truck. It was pretty shitty, but it had a nice mid-boost which I liked, and it had a lot of character. It's a piece of crap, you know. It developed a 'cck' every now and again. Despite my lo-fi reputation, which I utterly dispute — lo-tech certainly but not lo-fi — I don't like cck having cck when I don't want cck, so I very seldom use it." To get different sounds, "it was just [recording] in a different corner of the room, or putting the mic somewhere else, or Alec just coming up with a stupid sound. He had a 12 string acoustic as well. On the first couple of albums, we didn't have a bass, and haven't any keyboard either on the first couple. [On the] second one [1982's Louis Likes His Daily Dip] there was a little bit, because we did that down in Christchurch, and we had access to a keyboard that Paul Kean, the bass player from Toy Love, had. [We used] kazoo, and just putting down backward tracks and that, that was a thrill, which we'd done on the Toy Love album as well, so we knew that was fun."
"We had a great old Jensen Transonic organ, which is like a New Zealand copy of a Vox Continental but gruntier and with more bass. It's a great machine. The guy who designed the organ is the guy who used to do all my technical stuff and fix everything. He put a percussion attack thing in there so I can do DUM-DUM-DUM-DUM- DUM-DUM-DUM, which is really useful. You can get those great robotic bass sounds. I still use that more than I use the MS-20 for repetitive, looping type bass noises."
At roughly the same time as the early Tall Dwarfs recordings, Knox began collaborating with Doug Hood to record like-minded New Zealand bands. "That was great because Doug was a live engineer, so he had a few clues. He could work a mixer and stuff like that. I didn't have any fucking clue and still don't. It was great having his experience there, and he had a pretty in-depth knowledge of the sort of stuff that these bands were doing too."
"The first Clean gig was like a month or two after the first Enemy gig, and we just loved them, probably more than they loved us. That was a natural that we should record them after their first single. These other bands, in Dunedin and Christchurch, started appearing, and we recorded them as well. The Chills, the Stones [not the Rolling... -LC], Sneaky Feelings, then a couple more obscure bands, like Mainly Spaniards, just a single, a really great single actually. Doug went on to record a lot without me — sometimes using my gear, mostly not. There's legend that I was this big producer guy, but if you actually look at the credits, there's not many that can be credited to me."
"I was sort of like the producer, I guess. Doug was the engineer. I was the one who said, 'You can't do that. Throw that amplifier away and we'll get a transistor one in.' No, but it got close to that. I was the one that forced Graeme Downes from the Verlaines to bury his vocals on one song ['You Cheat Yourself of Everything That Moves'], which he intensely regretted from ever on. When it came to putting out the Juvenilia compilation of his early stuff, he pumped the vocals up, but I still think it sounded better with the vocals buried."
"Because it was just 4-track and very primitive recording gear, 99 percent of the effects were environmental. [We relied on] microphone placement and weird rooms. We recorded Sneaky Feelings under a blanket and half a mattress for one song, because there was some weird drum sound or something. [We recorded] trumpet with the microphone in the strings of a piano for one of the Clean records, ['Getting Older']. That was recorded in a great room, Legion of Frontiersman's Hall. It was experimentation with the very little gear that we had. Doug had access to a Roland Space Echo, which was just like 'Whoo! Yeah! Hoo!' How 20th Century is that? And I've now got one of them too, which is really nice. It's my only effect, actually, apart from fuzz and compression, if that's an effect."
The Tall Dwarfs "recorded a record at Peter [Jefferies]'s house. He tried desperately to play on a couple of bits — we wouldn't let him. We may have used his 4-track, actually — that may have been the reason why we were there. My 4-track may have been bunged — I can't remember. For some reason we used his place for [1985's That's the Short and Long of it]. We thought that was going to be the last record we did, because Alec was going to London. We did some extra special stuff, like get Mike Dooley, the original Enemy drummer, to do an Enemy song that we'd never recorded. [For] the huge, long, sprawling ridiculous versions of 'Nothing's Going to Happen' and its little remix, 'Nothing's Going to Stop it', we recorded in the same 16-track studio that the second demos for Toy Love were recorded. That was really fun, getting 22 people in and recording them in batches. We'd record like 10 guitars, literally, on 10 tracks, and then bounce them down to 2, and then go back and record 3 basses and bounce that down to 2, and then record a few cellos and strings and so forth, and again bounce them down to 2. At the end we had about 5 or 6 sub-mixes, and we were stuck with them. We let them go through the song twice, once straight and once they could do anything they wanted to do over these 3 chords. And then mixed those together for each of those sub-mixes. We were absolutely stuck with whatever noises they made. Whether it worked or not, we just had to use them. For the remix it was great fun, just pulling things in and out. I like that a lot better than the straight song. 'Nothing's Going to Stop it' was written in about the time it takes to sing it, and it was great fun."
"Throw a Sickie was a little bit later [1986], and it was recorded back at home again. It was probably our rattiest sounding record in many ways, some superb ratty sounds on that I think. That was called Throw a Sickie because we were both very ill while we recorded one of the songs we did in an 8-track studio. That particular song, it was really complex. We wanted a lot of vocals and stuff, and the 4-track wasn't really up to it. It worked out fine. It was still all just overdubs, but when I was doing something, Alec was lying on the bench, sick as a bastard. When he was doing something, I was lying on the bench in the same state, so it was very tough."
