Life in One String Review – Dunedin Sound Through the Eyes of a Musical Maverick | Pop and rock

TThe past years have not been kind to the musicians who formed the legendary scene that gathered in Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1980s. Martin Phillips, leader of Goosebumps, died last year. Hamish Kilgour, drummer and co-founder of The Clean, committed suicide in November 2022. Andrew Brough, guitarist for Straitjacket Fits, died under unsuspicious circumstances in 2020; David Wood, bass player in the same band, died of cancer in 2010. And so it continues.

In 2019, Shane Carter, frontman of Fits (as well as Dimmer, DoubleHappys and others), published an excellent memoir. He called it “Dead People I’ve Known.” Clips from it form the backbone of a new documentary by New Zealand director Margaret Gordon called Life in One String, named after one of the Fits’ early songs.

The Straitjacket Fits, and Carter in particular, are celebrated in their home country. Two of their songs, She Speeds and Down in Splendor (written by Brough), are ranked among the best compositions the country has ever produced. For a brief period, around 1990-1991 – pre-Nirvana success – they were heralded as the greatest guitar band in the world. So what went wrong?

Well, a lot of things. Some of it was under the band’s control, most of it wasn’t, and none of it was unusual: think warring egos, ignorant A&R subordinates, unsympathetic producers, and an indifferent audience that didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Wisely, Gordon doesn’t spend much time thinking about that side of things. If you know the band (and this partly funded film is for fans), you’ve heard of them before.

If you didn’t, they were a fickle bunch. The handsome Carter wrote the thorniest material. She sported glasses and the perfect blonde mop top and added the kind of Byrds-inspired pop that was everywhere in the ’80s. The sweet and sour combination was irresistible, but Brough’s George Harrison hit 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 story of the seizures. The film begins with an aerial drone shot of the singer walking down a narrow isthmus back to the beach in Dunedin: Homecoming. The sound that explodes behind it is Crystalator – Dimmer’s first single, made in 1995 after the Fits split. Depending on how you look at it, it’s the voice of a maverick talent that can’t be bought, or the voice of a man familiar with the dark arts of self-sabotage.

Both are true, but Gordon’s film gives more importance to the former than to the latter. There is a somewhat perfunctory but essential account of punk’s influence on New Zealand and Carter’s role in it, as Peter Buttread in his post-pubescent band Bored Games. Things really take off when he forms the DoubleHappys with talented childhood friend Wayne Elsie and an unreliable drum machine they call Herbie Fuckface. Herbie dies after being run over once too many and is replaced by another schoolmate and future favourite, John Cooley.

But Elsie dies in a horrific accident, Carter and Colley are shocked witnesses, and Carter never puts the pieces together. The odds were already against him: raised by an alcoholic mother and a violent stepfather, born partly Maori but raised white, a lifelong outsider with a dangerous obsession with Elvis. He did not spend his life trying to find his place in the world so much as coming to terms with life on its fringes.

One of the best things about Carter’s book is how, although he can be hilariously scathing toward others, he doesn’t spare himself. He also struggles to control his alcohol and anger, but those are the awkward parts of Gordon’s film that we can’t get enough of. “He can be a bit naughty,” says Francesca Griffin of Look Blue Go Purple, and that’s an understatement. John Cooley is more blunt: “I think everyone went through a phase of hating Shane.”

Nevertheless, he is a force of nature. The best footage in the documentary is of Straitjacket Fits playing one of their last shows at an outdoor festival in Palmerston North in 1994. They’re playing in the pouring rain, the band is in grave danger of electrocution, and they tear up during prayer requests as if their lives depended on it. For a moment, you can look at what could have been: a full-scale band that played mostly in small clubs.