Interview: Alec Bathgate of Tall Dwarfs Chats About 'Unravelled: 1981–2002' Compilation

Aotearoa's noisy musical underground simply would not be the same without the pioneering work of Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate. Putting their own defiantly local spin on punk rock in the late '70s as co-founders of The Enemy and then Toy Love, they went on to casually reinvent themselves as globally influential lo-fi pop innovators Tall Dwarfs from 1981 onwards. Armed with Knox's four track reel-to-reel recorder and a DIY anything goes attitude, Tall Dwarfs foisted upon the world a no-dud run of classic Flying Nun releases, from their debut Three Songs EP (initially launched by Furtive) right up to 2002's The Sky Above The Mud Below.

Twenty years following their last album together, Tall Dwarfs have gifted fans Unravelled: 1981–2002, an epoch-spanning four vinyl LP (and double CD) retrospective, lovingly compiled and designed by Bathgate. Featuring fifty five tracks remastered from Knox's carefully preserved library of master tapes, the box set also includes a 20-page booklet "of lyrics, photos, comics, posters, and other ephemera". Bathgate generously spared the time to answer Chris Cudby's probing questions via Zoom about the monumental collection, out today in physical editions through Merge...

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alec Bathgate: The packaging includes a lot of archival materials, so I've had to source a lot of old artwork and posters, photographs. Lots of scanning of images and hours spent retouching things, transcribing the lyrics for all the songs.

Chris Cudby: Were you doing that personally?

Yes, I've done it all myself. I figured I'm the only person that can do it, I wouldn't really trust someone else do do it. I don't think I really knew what I was in for when I took it on... getting close to 400 hours that I've spent working on that. It's news to people, having just been announced, to me I've been living it for the last year and a half. I have a day job and I work as a graphic designer, so I've been doing it in parallel to my regular work. I'm pleased to be at the point that actually all my work on it has finished now, it's in the hands of the record company.

You touched upon this just before — what kind of technical challenges were involved with putting together the box set? Both audio-wise and because you designed the collection as well? Did you need to track down a lot of original recordings?

One of the things that made it possible, I don't know if you're aware of the Flying Nun project at the Alexander Turnbull Library? All of our tapes have gone to the library to be archived and to be digitised. They did very high resolution, digital transfers of all the tapes. That's really what made it possible, I think without that I couldn't have done it.

Was that from master tapes?

Yeah. Chris had kept all our tapes and had taken pretty good care of them. The front room in this house where we did most of our recording, they were all on the shelves there. Since we finished a record they'd just get filed. So they have been been well looked after, all that was there. I was able to go back and get the the tracks for this done from the original master tapes. All the tracks on the box set were remastered.

Though I would have liked to have done that for everything else. But it was just too big a task, because there's so much. My focus was just on the tracks for the box set. All the streaming versions (of albums and EPs) came from CDs. That's pretty good source material for a streaming site, given that files are smaller sizes.

What about the visual side of the project?

Chris and I kept a lot of our artwork and I've kept posters and all kinds of bits and pieces over the years. But another thing that happened in parallel with the work that Alexander Turnbull Library was doing, the Christchurch Art Gallery held a Flying Nun exhibition last year called Hellzapoppin'! for the 40th anniversary of the label and I designed the catalogue for that. There was also a lot of work that I had done and Chris had done. Also I took a lot of photos of Flying Nun bands back in the '80s. I was going through a lot of my old negatives, pulling out photographs, getting them rescanned. Just going through boxes of stuff that I'd kept, looking for stuff that could go in the exhibition. This has been happening at the same time as the tapes being digitised.

The other thing that happened was I had started an Instagram page, because I'd been putting some new music up on Bandcamp. I just thought no one no one's going to notice this exists, I need to do something. Started the Instagram page and I saw that Mac McCaughan, who's in the band Superchunk and he's also one of the owners of Merge, was following my page. So I messaged him, because they'd done a box set for The Clean that I really liked. I put the idea to him, would they be interested in doing a similar thing for Tall Dwarfs? And he came back and said yes. So it was a few things that happened around the same time — making that connection with Merge, the work the Turnbull's doing and the Flying Nun exhibition. As a result I've been going through a lot of archival stuff I had.

It seems like the perfect timing for this project as well. Looking back on a 20 year period, from a distance of another 20 years. How did you decide on the songs to include on the box set?

Another incentive for doing this was I'd thought it would it'd be a really nice project for Chris and I work on together. But actually that didn't work out because of Covid and lockdown. I wasn't able to travel and it's quite hard to communicate via email. I'd committed to doing the boxset with Merge, they'd set a deadline for supplying the sound files, because there's a global backlog backlog of getting vinyl pressed. They went ahead and booked in pressing the albums with pressing plant. So then for me, there was some urgency to get it all together.

I just went back and listened to everything from beginning to end, which I hadn't done for years. I forget the exact number of songs, there's well over 200 songs. I felt like there were quite a few that had to be on there. Then I set about working on each of the eight sides of the album and working out the sequencing of tracks. I really wanted it to be enjoyable listen for people. Because I know sometimes with compilations, there's something kind of unsatisfying about them, oddly. A bit like sometimes when we listen to iTunes Essentials lists and (it's) like a weird selection that just somehow doesn't feel right? I spent quite a lot of time just working out the sequencing of the songs and kept it all kind of chronological, but I haven't stuck to that really strictly.

I was very much in the mindset of — if somebody just played one side, I want that to be a good experience for them. That was the overarching thing, that directed the selection of songs, because I didn't want too much repetition. I didn't want to have songs that were similar. It was actually quite difficult because I had to leave off a lot of stuff that I like. But then I was of the opinion that if someone gets this and they're interested and they want to hear more, everything else will be up on streaming sites. It's all there. I feel like, for a lot of people this would be enough. Four albums is a lot — fifty five songs.

I personally discovered your music in the early / mid '90s, probably around the Three EPs era. That was a funny time because I was quite aware of Tall Dwarfs, but Toy Love, I think you could only get your hands on a couple of songs on the AK79 CD at the time. Whereas now when I talk to people in their twenties, they're quite familiar with Toy Love's music, but may not be so familiar with the Tall Dwarfs recordings. I'll be very keen to see what the reaction is to hearing Unravelled.

I hope it's favourable [Chris laughs], I don't know either. Because I collect records, I wanted it to be a really satisfying purchase for someone so I put a lot of work into the into the packaging. There's a slipcase and then there's two double gatefold sleeves and 20 page booklet, it's a lot of content. Just from a visual point of view it will be quite a nice thing to look through... I think it looks good. Merge have been really great and all the people I've been dealing with have been supportive and excited for the project. I'm optimistic it will come out well.

Is there any specific era of Tall Dwarfs that's particularly close to your heart?

It's hard to answer, a lot of it just blurs. Because a lot of recording we did was a Chris' house and he's lived in the same house since the early '80s. When I think back to us recording, a lot of it is going up to Auckland, staying with Chris.

Did he ever come down to Christchurch?

Yeah he did. We did quite a bit of recording here. We only ever recorded in either Auckland or Christchurch. We did a few songs in studios but very little, mostly it was on four track or later on with an eight track. And generally just in his house or my house or somebody else's house. It was quite a simple way of making a record. A tape machine, some microphones.

As it was just the two of you, and you were working with quite minimal recording technology, did that help with the decision making and maybe even the speed of working together?

A lot of songs we wrote on the spot, there was very few that were written in advance. Often we would just start recording something. It might start with a tape loop or we would create some sort of rhythm and then just add something. At that point, we'd just make it up as we went along. Which was really was really enjoyable at work. Because the experience we had previously in bands was that we'd that write a song, but then play it live dozens of times before we'd got to record it. But the way we were doing the Tall Dwarfs was much more spontaneous. I feel like that's something in the quality of what we did that catches that spontaneity. We didn't know what we're going to come up with. We would just start and go like, "play some chords, okay let's add something". Because we only had a few tracks to work with, whatever you added had to contribute to the overall sound of the track. We couldn't just keep layering stuff up, we had to be quite spare in what we did.

Do you feel like your relationship with each other changed over that period of time? Or was it a consistent catching up kind of thing?

We've always been really good friends and we'd had the experience being in The Enemy and Toy Love together. Initially we were both living in Auckland... after Toy Love split up we did the first Tall Dwarfs EP and we never talked about carrying on, we only saw Tall Dwarfs as a kind of one-off thing — no long term plans. I decided to move to a Christchurch because my musical career was over. [laughs] I was 21 and I had been through the whole Enemy / Toy Love thing. Chris and I had decided neither of us really wanted to carry on doing that. I wasn't even sure I was going to keep on playing music. That was how it began.

The second record we made, Louis Likes His Daily Dip, we recorded in Christchurch. Chris came down with Doug Hood and brought his four track to record the Dunedin Double with The Chills and the Verlaines etcetera. He stayed with me, so of course we took the opportunity to do some recording. And that just became a pattern over the following years, we would get together whenever we could. I think because we had a close relationship and we were good friends, we were just always happy to see each other. There was always just an aspect of that. It was just nice to catch up and talk about music, talk about films. That was kind of the basis of relationship I guess.

That is so great. Who came up with the idea of using tape loops in the band?

Chris did. He was just playing around with his tape machine and seeing what he could do. I remember he played me something he had looped, it was just a found sound kind of thing and we both loved that effect. There's something quite hypnotic and repetitious about a tape loop. We just loved that sound. We didn't have a drummer, so you know, it was a really good starting point for recording the songs. Just make a tape loop. And it was fun making them because we didn't have any percussion instruments. If it was in the living room, we would just hit a sofa.

'Unravelled: 1981–2002' is out today on 4 x vinyl LP and double CD via Merge.