{"id":295293,"date":"2025-12-02T18:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T18:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/295293\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T18:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T18:08:08","slug":"life-in-one-chord-review-the-dunedin-sound-through-the-eyes-of-a-music-maverick-pop-and-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/295293\/","title":{"rendered":"Life in One Chord review \u2013 the Dunedin sound through the eyes of a music maverick | Pop and rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

The years have not been kind to the musicians who formed the fabled scene that coalesced in Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1980s. Martin Phillipps, leader of the Chills, died last year<\/a>. Hamish Kilgour<\/a>, drummer and co-founder of the Clean, took his own life in November 2022. Andrew Brough, guitarist for the Straitjacket Fits, died in non-suspicious circumstances in 2020; David Wood, the same band\u2019s bass player, succumbed to cancer in 2010. On and on<\/a> it goes.<\/p>\n

In 2019 Shayne Carter, leader of the Fits (as well as Dimmer, the DoubleHappys and more), published an excellent memoir. He called it Dead People I Have Known. Sections from it form the spine of a new documentary by New Zealand<\/a> film-maker Margaret Gordon titled Life in One Chord, named after one of the Fits\u2019 early songs.<\/p>\n

The Straitjacket Fits, and Carter especially, are feted in their home country. Two of their songs, She Speeds<\/a> and Down in Splendour<\/a> (written by Brough) have been ranked<\/a> among the finest compositions the nation has produced. For a brief moment, around 1990\u20131991 \u2013 pre-Nirvana\u2019s crossover success \u2013 they were hyped as the greatest guitar band in the world. So what went wrong?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Well, lots of things. Some were within the band\u2019s control, most weren\u2019t, and none are unusual: think warring egos, clueless A&R flunkies, unsympathetic producers and an indifferent public that didn\u2019t get what all the fuss was about. Gordon, wisely, doesn\u2019t spend too much time dwelling on this side of things. If you know the band (and this partially crowdfunded film is for fans), you\u2019ve heard it before.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t, they were a volatile group. The handsome Carter wrote the spikier material<\/a>. Brough sported glasses, a perfect blond mop-top and added the kind of Byrds-inspired jangle-pop that was everywhere in the 80s. The sweet and sour combination was irresistible, but Brough\u2019s George Harrison-like strike rate of between one and three songs per release caused tensions. When he left, the band lost its point of difference.<\/p>\n

But this is Carter\u2019s story, not the Fits\u2019. The film opens with an aerial drone shot of the singer walking a narrow isthmus back to shore in Dunedin: a homecoming. The sound that explodes behind him is Crystalator<\/a> \u2013 the abrasive first single by Dimmer, made in 1995 after the Fits\u2019 split. Depending on how you look at it, it\u2019s the sound of a maverick talent who can\u2019t be bought, or a man familiar with the dark arts of self-sabotage.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Both are true, but Gordon\u2019s film gives more weight to the former than the latter. There\u2019s a slightly rote but necessary retelling of punk\u2019s impact on New Zealand and Carter\u2019s role within it, as \u201cPeter Putrid\u201d in his post-pubescent band Bored Games. Things really take off when he forms the DoubleHappys<\/a> with talented childhood friend Wayne Elsey and an unreliable drum machine they call Herbie Fuckface. Herbie dies after getting stomped on once too often and is replaced by another schoolmate and future Fit, John Collie.<\/p>\n

But Elsey dies in an appalling accident, Carter and Collie are traumatised witnesses, and Carter never quite puts the pieces back together. The odds were already against him: raised by an alcoholic mother and violent stepfather, born part-M\u0101ori but raised white, he\u2019s a perennial outsider with a serious Elvis fixation<\/a>. He hasn\u2019t spent a lifetime trying to find his place in the world so much as reconciled himself to life on the edge of it.<\/p>\n

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One of the best things about Carter\u2019s book is how, while he can be hilariously caustic to others, he doesn\u2019t spare himself. He too struggles with alcohol and anger management \u2013 but those are the embarrassing sections that we don\u2019t get enough of in Gordon\u2019s film. \u201cHe could be a bit of a brat,\u201d says Look Blue Go Purple<\/a>\u2019s Francisca Griffin, and it\u2019s an understatement. John Collie is more forthright: \u201cI think everyone went through a phase of hating Shayne.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a force of nature though. The best footage in the documentary is of the Straitjacket Fits playing one of their last shows at an outdoor festival in Palmerston North in 1994. They\u2019re playing in driving rain, the band is in serious danger of electrocution, and they\u2019re tearing through Dialling a Prayer like their lives depend on it<\/a>. For a moment, you get a glimpse of what might have been: an arena-scale band that mostly played small clubs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The years have not been kind to the musicians who formed the fabled scene that coalesced in Dunedin,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-295293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}