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. Hamish Kilgour, 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’s bass player, succumbed to cancer in 2010. On and on it goes.
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 film-maker Margaret Gordon titled Life in One Chord, named after one of the Fits’ early songs.
The Straitjacket Fits, and Carter especially, are feted in their home country. Two of their songs, She Speeds and Down in Splendour (written by Brough) have been ranked among the finest compositions the nation has produced. For a brief moment, around 1990–1991 – pre-Nirvana’s crossover success – they were hyped as the greatest guitar band in the world. So what went wrong?
Well, lots of things. Some were within the band’s control, most weren’t, and none are unusual: think warring egos, clueless A&R flunkies, unsympathetic producers and an indifferent public that didn’t get what all the fuss was about. Gordon, wisely, doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on this side of things. If you know the band (and this partially crowdfunded film is for fans), you’ve heard it before.
If you don’t, they were a volatile group. The handsome Carter wrote the spikier material. 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’s 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.
But this is Carter’s story, not the Fits’. 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 – the abrasive first single by Dimmer, made in 1995 after the Fits’ split. Depending on how you look at it, it’s the sound of a maverick talent who can’t be bought, or a man familiar with the dark arts of self-sabotage.
Both are true, but Gordon’s film gives more weight to the former than the latter. There’s a slightly rote but necessary retelling of punk’s impact on New Zealand and Carter’s role within it, as “Peter Putrid” in his post-pubescent band Bored Games. Things really take off when he forms the DoubleHappys 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.
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-Māori but raised white, he’s a perennial outsider with a serious Elvis fixation. He hasn’t spent a lifetime trying to find his place in the world so much as reconciled himself to life on the edge of it.
One of the best things about Carter’s book is how, while he can be hilariously caustic to others, he doesn’t spare himself. He too struggles with alcohol and anger management – but those are the embarrassing sections that we don’t get enough of in Gordon’s film. “He could be a bit of a brat,” says Look Blue Go Purple’s Francisca Griffin, and it’s an understatement. John Collie is more forthright: “I think everyone went through a phase of hating Shayne.”
He’s 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’re playing in driving rain, the band is in serious danger of electrocution, and they’re tearing through Dialling a Prayer like their lives depend on it. For a moment, you get a glimpse of what might have been: an arena-scale band that mostly played small clubs.
Life in One Chord is screening at select cinemas in Sydney and Melbourne from 4 December.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
