All My Friendship to You: The Story of New Zealand Indie Pioneers Tall Dwarfs

There’s a famous quote often attributed to Brian Eno: “The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

In isolated New Zealand, in the middle of 1977, two mad music fans, Alec Bathgate and Chris Knox, met for the first time. New Zealand indie music would never be the same again.  

Knox was Bathgate’s senior – he was in his mid-20s when he met the 18-year-old Bathgate – but the pair quickly bonded over their “surprisingly similar” taste in music. “He educated me,” Bathgate said of his friend. “He had a big record collection, and he would just tell me stuff that he liked. And generally it was stuff I ended up liking. We were really in tune in terms of what we thought was good and what we didn’t like as well.”

There was a shared love of The Velvet Underground, and The Beatles were their “mutual reference point.” They became “totally absorbed” in the punk-rock of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – The Stooges, The Sex Pistols – which showed them that they were “able to get away with playing music.” 

Get away with it they did. Bathgate and Knox first formed The Enemy, a proper (though not restrictive) punk band based out of Dunedin. They never officially recorded any music but their ferocious live shows were hugely impactful, becoming instrumental in the development of rock music in Dunedin and wider New Zealand. 

Upon the dissolution of The Enemy, Bathgate and Knox, alongside drummer Mike Dooley, became Toy Love in 1978, a talented ensemble that would spilt in fewer than two years. Australia called, promising the nascent band popularity and fame, but Toy Love’s idiosyncratic style was a mismatch in that country’s raucous pub-rock world. 

The demise of their second band, however, would be a blessing in disguise for Bathgate and Knox. 

Eager to keep making music together, they formed Tall Dwarfs, a resolutely lo-fi project that didn’t so much as simmer their more virulent, earlier tendencies than eradicate them completely. A bassist and drummer? Who bloody needed them, was the pair’s anomalous motto. “The bass player’s always the real muso of the group and thinks he knows everything, and the drummer is just a fuckwit, so it’s much easier to be without them,” as Knox hilariously told Audioculture in a 2007 interview. 

Not that they needed any assistance to create a racket: Bathgate and Knox simply plugged in their TEAC 4-track reel-to-reel and recorded and recorded and recorded. Knox mainly wrote the lyrics (The Exponents singer Jordan Luck hailed him as the best lyricist in New Zealand in a 2015 Stuff interview) while Bathgate handled most of the instrumentation. Foregoing a traditional rhythm section, they made noise any which way they could. 

In conversation with Rolling Stone AU/NZ in 2022, Bathgate couldn’t emphasise enough how “primitive”, as he called it, their recording equipment was.

“It was pretty much like a microphone plugged into the tape machine! We worked really fast and it was pretty spontaneous… we would finish one track because we had time constraints, and we’d just jump on to the next thing.”

Even on their first EP, 1981’s Three Songs, which had, you guessed it, three whole tracks, Bathgate and Knox were conjuring melodic gems from the most raw materials. Three Songs was bookended by the mischievous-meets-cathartic “Nothing’s Going to Happen” and  “All My Hollowness to You”, which remain two of the finest entries in the lo-fi music songbook. 

After releasing that first EP on Furtive Records, Tall Dwarfs moved to Flying Nun Records with 1982’s Louis Likes His Daily Dip, starting what would be a fruitful relationship for both label and band. 

Even when Bathgate moved to Christchurch (which has remained his home for the last 40 years), the pair’s musical partnership was undiminished; the distance and time apart, if anything, only strengthened Tall Dwarfs. 

“[…] Chris and I were really close friends. It was like three or four years where we were just together all the time,” Bathgate said. “I think it did keep it fresh because it wasn’t like that thing where you’re in a band and you’re with the same people all the time and [you] invariably get sick of each other. So then when we got together and were recording, we were just enjoying having each other’s company and the kind of freshness of just being able to play some music together.

Rolling Stone AU/NZ spoke with Bathgate at an opportune moment. In 2022, Tall Dwarfs released Unravelled: 1981-2022, a packed compilation of 55 songs pulled from two decades of recordings. 

At the close of the previous decade, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington took on the ambitious but worthwhile project of preserving over 250 tapes spanning the career of Knox. The collaborative archiving project between the library and the Flying Nun Foundation was the result of more than a year spent diligently sifting through Knox’s vast music collection.

Around the same time, Bathgate started posting some of his solo recordings on Bandcamp. He also made an Instagram account, which came to the attention of Mac McCaughan, founding member of Superchunk and renowned independent label Merge Records. 

“I saw [he] was following me, and we had a bit of an exchange. I just pitched the idea to him of doing a Tall Dwarfs box set,” Bathgate said. “They had done a box set for The Clean, old friends of ours – we started in Dunedin in the late ‘70s, same time as them, so there’s kind of a connection there. Merge was into the idea of doing something and all the tapes had been archived, so I had access to everything.”

A 20-page collector’s booklet containing photos, comics, and posters accompanied the box set. It helped that Bathgate was prone to keeping physical memories from the old days. “I had old posters and also I took a lot of photography that either I did or someone else did using my camera, so I had all the original negatives… I had everything.

“[I had] hi-res scans done of negs [negatives], and then I retouched them all, scanned posters, because we did all our own artwork. So I thought all that stuff was sort of interesting, and it’s nice to show that as part of the package.”

Bathgate was adamant that the booklet wasn’t to be a dry “historical document.” 

“I just wanted it to be a collection of interesting images. I think there’s enough there that you kind of get a sense of what we were about. I work as a graphic designer, that’s my profession, so [I] put a lot of effort into the packaging!”

Don’t even think about asking Bathgate to pick a favourite song in the compilation. 

“There’s probably too many to choose from! There’s a song I really love called “Rorschach”. I think it was on either (1990 album) Weeville or (1991 album) Fork Songs. But I couldn’t pick a favourite because I could probably pick a dozen favourites. I like some of the really thrashy, punky stuff, and I like some of the gentle, folky stuff.”

Even if you haven’t heard Tall Dwarfs’ music, your favourite indie musician has. Eno’s quote about The Velvet Underground could easily be rewritten: “Tall Dwarfs’ records only sold a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band.” 

Unravelled received a generous endorsement from Jeff Mangum,’90s lo-fi icons Neutral Milk Hotel’s famously elusive frontman, in words only he could have written:

“This box set will bless you with some of the catchiest and most intelligent songwriting ever conceived. Acoustic outsider poetry punk, mixed with a ‘studio as instrument’ artfulness. What more could you want?”

Bathgate and Know actually got to meet Mangum in person shortly after Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, came out in 1998. 

“I don’t know how Chris got to know him, but Chris was doing a lot of solo stuff in the ‘90s and touring in the US, so maybe they met at some point,” Bathgate said. “So he’d [Mangum] come out here and holidayed with Chris and then Chris and I supported Neutral Milk Hotel.

“I thought it’d be really nice to get an endorsement from him, but I don’t have any contacts. They [Merge] kind of took that idea and someone must have got hold of them… that was really lovely to get that quote from him.”

In 2005, The Olivia Tremor Control – incidentally Mangum’s former band – took Tall Dwarfs on tour with them in the US. Even some of contemporary indie’s most promising newcomers, like Chicago-born trio Horsegirl, have cited Tall Dwarfs as an influence. (Of their sublime, scuzzy 2022 track “Word of Pots and Pans”, they described the lyrics as imagining “a (possibly unrequited) romance unfolding through references to Tall Dwarfs, Belle and Sebastian, and The Pastels.”)

“There are various bands that have kind of mentioned us,” Bathgate acknowledged. “It’s kind of hard to know how to take that because, I mean, I’m influenced by a lot of stuff and I listen to a lot of different bands. It’s nice if people hear us and they take some inspiration from it.”

How could you not be inspired by Bathgate and Knox’s alchemical musical partnership? “There’s a lot about the way that we work that is kind of outside the normal way of making music,” Bathgate said.

There really was nothing “normal” about Tall Dwarfs: when summing up the music that they were inspired by the most, Bathgate said “the weirder, the better.” There was something of the outcast about the two music lovers, who had soberly flirted with commercial success as Toy Love, coming together to make proudly DIY songs that were challenging, scrappy, and wonky. (It’s little wonder that Mangum found such an affinity for their music.)

Listening in 2024, the songs on Unravelled sound like alien transmissions. Lo-fi pop long ago came to be termed bedroom-pop, which may have started out with good intentions – cheap music-making, democratized for everyone – but bedroom-pop has since become a tired ‘aesthetic’, the title of algorithmic Spotify playlists with the most polished, definitively non-DIY music you’ve ever heard. But back in Tall Dwarfs’ early days, their musical approach felt genuinely revolutionary, if rudimentary. 

“[…] back when we were doing it [recording at home], it was a very unusual way to go about making records,” Bathgate said. “I feel like most people would have avoided it because they would have thought, ‘Oh, it’s not a studio, it’s not fancy recording equipment.’ But for us, I think it worked really well because the benefits of working that way was that you could be very spontaneous.

“We’d just be sitting in our living room or bedrooms, [with a] tape machine and just kind of writing songs on the spot and recording them. We didn’t really labour over things and perfect them the way you might if you were trying to be more commercial. I think in doing that, there’s a kind of energy to it that you perhaps lose sometimes if something’s sort of honed.

“We never had a lot to work with and we never had money. So we didn’t have any fancy instruments – like I had a 12-string acoustic and a kind of cheap electric guitar, and that’s what I had all the way up through our whole recording career. Chris had a couple of keyboards, a little casio, so often we would just [be] making do with what was handy.”

Recording in their houses, they took to utilising whichever objects were around them to create songs. “There was one where Chris had played – oh, what was it? It was like an upturned wooden bowl for rhythm. So it was like a fruit bowl!”

In the midst of Tall Dwarfs’ heyday, New Zealand indie music found its way to the outside world. Not that Bathgate knew anything about it at the time. 

“We’re so isolated here, so initially we were making records – no, I would never have ever considered that they would be heard outside of New Zealand.” They persisted as Tall Dwarfs, he added, because “Chris and I were enjoying the process. And we were lucky that someone was prepared to put them out. I just saw our audience as being local.”

When Flying Nun started exporting records, bands like Tall Dwarfs reached critics and fans’ ears in the US, UK, even Europe. “The reviews would start to crop up in overseas magazines,” Bathgate remembered,” but even then I had really no sense of – at that stage I had a day job and young family. That was kind of my lifestyle. So the sort of thing of having any sort of musical career felt quite removed for me. And I didn’t get any firsthand experience of it because we weren’t touring overseas. So it was kind of hard to kind of know what it meant, really.

Bathgate and Knox would eventually tour Europe and the US in the early ‘90s, in the latter country on tour with Yo La Tengo. “We had no sort of ambitions – we weren’t trying to be famous or whatever,” he says about the experience. “The only reason we did those tours was because someone asked if we wanted to do it. We were never career-minded, so we never thought about it.”

It was their time in Toy Love that soured them on the idea of ‘making it’ in music. 

“I think we sort of came out of that being like, ‘No, we don’t really want to play in a band.’ We just want to have normal lives. And so that kind of just changed our mindset – we knew that Tall Dwarfs was not a band that’s going to have huge success.

“We just weren’t commercial. So at that point you stop thinking about all that stuff because we’re not going to be successful and we’re not going to make lots of money. I guess you just do it for your own enjoyment.”

Bathgate still listens to music all the time. He’s not particularly fussed whether he’s “discovering old stuff” or indulging in old favourites. He has a fondness for Tiny Ruins, Hollie Fullbrook’s wonderful indie-folk project, and the ever-consistent Canadian indie-rock band Destroyer. 

He’s particularly enamoured by US singer-songwriter Kevin Morby, whom he got to see roughly half a decade ago supporting Waxahatchee in Auckland. “It’s a really good record,” he said of Morby’s excellent seventh album, This Is a Photograph. (One year after I spoke with Bathgate, I met Morby in Auckland and told him about those kind words. He seemed genuinely touched; I wish I had gotten the chance to tell Bathgate.)

It would be a facile read to say that Bathgate and Knox never ‘made it’ in music, and what a miserably diminishing view that would be. 

When Knox tragically suffered a stroke in 2009, Bill Callahan, former touring mates Yo La Tengo, The Mountain Goats, Will Oldham, Dinosaur Jr.’s Lou Barlow, and so many other notable indie musicians rushed to cover Knox’s songs for a benefit compilation. Tall Dwarfs opened for John Cale when he visited New Zealand in 1983, surely a staggeringly proud moment for the two Velvet Underground fans. They got to see just how much their music meant to people almost five decades after they first met thanks to the release of Unravelled.

Fuck being commercial, fuck chasing fame, fuck selling out: the music of Tall Dwarfs is a reminder that the only things that really matter are that you made music you loved, and you made it with people you loved. 

That’s what Bathgate knew. “[…] part of the incentive to record was [it] just was nice to see each other… the recording was a byproduct of just being able to spend a few days together.”

Tall Dwarfs – Unravelled: 1981-2022 is available here.