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Listening Post: The Tall Dwarfs

The Tall Dwarfs emerged out of Toy Love in the early 1980s. It had two members. In the beginning, Alec Bathgate set up the basic instrumental foundation for duo’s pop-slanted, fuzz-crusted oddities, while Chris Knox wrote the lyrics. Later, their roles overlapped, as Bathgate sang the lyrics he wrote, and Knox began playing instruments beyond the loops around the second or third EP.

The two of them had a knack for compressed, transporting lyricism, hitched to eccentric, roughly recorded production, in line with the fuzzy tunefulness of the rest of the Flying Nun roster, but quirkier and more eccentric. The duo never had a drummer or a bass player and were known for MacGyvering a rhythm section out of whatever was at hand, banging on boxes and stomping on floors to improvise a beat. They were also early experimenters with tape loops, often splicing recorded fragments together with scotch tape, playing them back and recording to two- or four-track recorders. The pair of them lived in different cities, Bathgate in Christchurch and Knox in Auckland. As a result, they saw each other infrequently and often arrived at one or the other’s house to with only the vaguest framework, writing and recording their songs at the same time.

Their very first EP, the 3 Song EP, was meant to be a one-off. Instead, it initiated a 30-some year collaboration that ended only when Knox had a debilitating stroke in 2009. Alongside, their friends and fellow Flying Nun artists the Clean, the Chills, the Bats and others, the Tall Dwarfs defined the outer edges of New Zealand lo-fi. Douglas Wolk, in his Trouser Press entry on Chris Knox summed up their influence, stating, “Chris Knox is the godfather of the New Zealand alternative-music scene — if Iggy Pop, Joan Jett, Robyn Hitchcock and Lou Reed were all the same person, that’s how important he is to Kiwi pop.”

For Unravelled: 1981 – 2002, Bathgate compiled a roughly chronological sampling of 55 Tall Dwarfs songs, from this giddy, serrated-edged glory of 1981’s “Nothing’s Going to Happen” to the jaunty garage stomp of “Gluey, Gluey” from 1998. It was too much of a joy to assign to a single writer, so we decided to all listen to it together and share our thoughts with you.

Intro by Jennifer Kelly (with some help from Bill Meyer)

Unravelled: 1981–2002 by Tall Dwarfs

Jennifer Kelly: How are you all getting along with the Tall Dwarfs compilation? I've just listened to "Life Is Strange" four times in a row, marveling at the way it balances scrappy raw-ness and lyricism, oddity and a universal hook. What are you guys liking the best?

Jonathan Shaw: I listened to Tall Dwarfs a ton through the late 1980s to late 1990s (my wife loves Knox's music, the solo stuff as much as Tall Dwarfs, and I like the band a lot, too). What's really knocking me out is the early stuff, which I felt like I knew very well. I suppose some time away from those records is giving me fresher ears, but holy shit, songs like "Paul's Place" and "Turning Brown and Torn in Two" are just as confounding as they ever were, even with so many, many bands working out of similar bags of tricks. I didn't expect to be so floored again by those early tunes. It's really fun.

Bill Meyer: Like you, Jon, my acquaintance with the Tall Dwarfs goes back to the 1980s. I started with the Hello Cruel World LP and the Dogma EP. Those songs you picked are ones that also stay with me, because they are simultaneously as pop-catchy as a good Beatles tune, and constructed with pop-music-rules-disregarding Kiwi ingenuity. The MacGyvering that Jen refers to, I think connects to that ingenuity. There’s a certain cultural pride in the ability of a typical New Zealander to make things work using fencing wire and the contents of your toolbox.

However, when it came to music, people in the 1970s were expected to pay a lot of dues and do things a certain way. Tall Dwarfs arose from Bathgate and Knox deciding they would never do that shit after the miserable experiences their previous band, Toy Love, had while making an album and playing to hostile, uncreative audiences in Australia. They did it there was, with the gear they had, and put the songs together in ways that sounded right to them.

Christian Carey: The Tall Dwarfs operated at the periphery of my listening in the 1990s and 2000s. This boxed set is a great opportunity to acquaint oneself with their earliest, most experimental work. It is clear that their colleagues in New Zealand, as well as the US and UK, listened closely, using Tall Dwarfs’ approach as a template for, successively, college rock, indie rock, and experimental music. It would be interesting to know if Robert Pollard heard the Tall Dwarfs and when. One can also surmise that, if They Might Giants, Yo La Tengo, and Stephen Malkmus weren’t listening to Tall Dwarfs, they truly were missing out on a possible wellspring for their own work. Hard to pick favorites, but “Turning Brown and Torn in Two,” “All My Hollowness to You,” and “Sign the Dotted Line” were on frequent repeat at our house.

Jonathan Shaw: Bill might be able to tell us which American bands were early, enthusiastic listeners of Tall Dwarfs. If Pollard and Malkmus were tuned in, I wish they had picked up on the approach to lyrics. So many Tall Dwarfs songs are disarmingly direct (see "Luck or Loveliness," "Beauty," or in a different way "Crush," a song I love). Don't get me wrong: I really like some of Pollard's early writing ("Marchers in Orange," "Blimps Go 90"), and Malkmus has a way with rhyme. But they were so very, very much of their postmodern moment, bathed in endless layers of ironizing.

Bathgate and Knox could get ironical, too. The mock-heroic guitar of "Nothing's Going to Happen" is comically undone by the lyric's fixation on banality. But the songs that just say it lay me out. So many of the songs from the 1980s do. Check out "The Slide," which is harrowing stuff.

Jennifer Kelly: I am nowhere near as long or as deep a fan as some of you (ahem, BIll), but I had Stumpy on my phone for about a decade (it feel off in one of those data wipes native to the digital listening experience) and it seems to me that the selection in this box, while great in a lot of ways, irons out some of the oddity of the Tall Dwarfs. Am I just imagining it or is it a lot more accessible and pop than the total catalogue?

Bill Meyer: The Tall Dwarfs could be playful and weird, or they could apply spontaneous means to rapidly conceived songs that were as ruthlessly formal as anything by the Beatles. Sometimes the catchy stuff and the goofiness coincided, but I think that as time went on those elements tended to manifest on different songs. Some of the weirder stuff just didn’t make the cut. Also, the gradual accumulation of gear meant that in later years, it was easy to make a pro sounding rhythm track as it was to make a loop out of a spoon whacking a pot, and they’d already hit the pot, so it was probably more interesting to make the pro-sounding track.

I think that Bathgate compiled what he thought were the strongest tunes, and since he did it during COVID and Knox has ongoing communication challenges, he did a lot of the compiling alone, on a deadline, during COVID time. So, I think the perspective of a guy in his 60s looking back on his wild times with his wacky old friend may shape the way this box was compiled.

Jonathan Shaw: Stumpy is a strange one, given the collaborative nature of the record. I like it. "Up" is epic and moving, but it's an outlier.

I think Jen and Bill both have sharp takes on the collection. I wish more of the noisy stuff from Up the Down Staircase had made it onto Unravelled, and more of the quietly freaked out songs like "This Room Is Wrong." There's a fondness to the selection, skewing things toward the charming end of the band's spectrum. As a result, the collection feels quite coherent. It listens well.

Bill Meyer: A month ago, Jon opined, “Bill might be able to tell us what American bands were early, enthusiastic listeners of Tall Dwarfs. If Pollard and Malkmus were tuned in, I wish they had picked up on the approach to lyrics. So many Tall Dwarfs songs are disarmingly direct (see "Luck or Loveliness," "Beauty," or in a different way "Crush," a song I love). Don't get me wrong: I really like some of Pollard's early writing ("Marchers in Orange," "Blimps Go 90"), and Malkmus has a way with rhyme. But they were so very, very much of their postmodern moment, bathed in endless layers of ironizing.”

I do not know how tuned in Pollard and Malkmus were, but I suspect that each of them were set on their own paths as lyricists before they might have heard Tall Dwarfs. The lyrical thrust of the Tall Dwarfs, I suspect, comes more from the extent to which Chris Knox backed up his in your face attitude with a big, bleeding heart, whose sentiments spoke directly through him and onto whatever notebooks he was keeping during the time leading up to a Tall Dwarfs session/whatever microphone he improvised into as he knocked out words while the hours counted down until one of them had to take a plane back home.

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