Interview: Shayne P. Carter - North Island Solo Tour

Shayne P. Carter is a rock icon that needs little introduction. One of this country's most naturally charismatic frontmen, his career has moved between the prepubescent garage sounds of Bored Games and The DoubleHappys, to the soaring indie rock of Straitjacket Fits and the minimalist yet incantatory Dimmer. His recent spate of work includes piano balladry, ballet scores and collaborations with the NZSO.

I spoke with Shayne P. Carter ahead of his 2026 North Island Solo Tour over Zoom one evening after a rainy 8 hour work day. As I pull into the Zoom call with Shayne, he’s grousing about a recent amp blow up the day before the first show of the tour, which sets us off on the topic of guitar gear…

Shayne P. Carter
North Island Solo Tour

Saturday 28th March - Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui
Sunday 29th March - Snails, Palmerston North
Tuesday 31st March - Raumati Social Club, Paraparaumu (sold out)
Wednesday 1st April - Carterton, Private House Concert (tickets via venue)
Thursday 2nd April - Pukehou Church, Small Hall Sessions, Hawkes Bay*
Friday 3rd April -  Haumoana Hall, Small Hall Sessions, Hawkes Bay*
Saturday 4th April - Dome Cinema, Gisborne
Friday 10th April - Tauranga, Jam Factory^
Saturday 11th April - Monkey House Lounge & Cabaret, Whitianga
Friday 24th April - Artworks Theatre, Waiheke∞

Tickets on sale HERE via UTR
*Small Hall Sessions tickets on sale HERE
^Tauranga tickets available HERE
∞Waiheke tickets available HERE

Oscar Toy: I’ve got a bit of a nerdy one here… in your book (Dead People I Have Known), you talk about how you don’t like hiding your guitar sound with a lot of pedals, but in that new press release that I just got from you, it seems like you’re using quite a few now. What changed your opinion on that?

Shayne P. Carter: Well, you know, I'm a firm believer in the saying, which I think I made up, which is that "hypocrisy is the human prerogative." I'm just exercising that particular saying at the moment. Look, my whole life, I think I used four pedals at most, but what happened over the pandemic, in the lockdown in Auckland, there was nothing else to do. So I started watching pedal demonstrations on YouTube. It’s invariably music shop dudes, and nothing against music shop dudes, but it’s primarily dudes who work in the music shops. Although I must say that Louisa Nicklin, who is in my band, worked in a music shop, but that’s by the by. With nothing else to do, I started getting pedals, and it just spiralled into this sort of unhealthy obsession.

Any particular favourites that you’ve just brought, anything you’re playing with at the moment?

I must big up Fairfield Circuitry… I had this old delay, before my pedal obsession. It was real crap. It was a DOD one, from Salt Lake City. I thought DOD meant "Donny Osmond Developments", so I was really psyched about it, but apparently he’s got nothing to do with it. It was a really shitty delay, but sometimes shitty can be really good. You have to take the top shelf stuff with a grain of salt, really, because like I say, it can be the most unlikely music gear that can make the coolest sounds.

My favourite pedals at the moment… yeah, the (Electro-Harmonix) POG with sort of subtle settings, I really like the Minifooger pedals, or Moog pedals, they’re great. I also like the Electro-Harmonix Attack Decay that makes your guitar sound quite backwards, and then I've got a couple of other freak pedals that I sort of misuse. I don’t know, I still hold by the maxim that when you’re playing you really don’t want to be going nuts with your pedal changing, really best to keep it simple in the live forum.

Nice one, ah… do you have any advice for the trainspotters who want to recreate the Shayne Carter sound?

Haha… Nah! Not gonna give away my trade secrets man! My whole life, before my pedal obsession of the pandemic in 2021, I had about three pedals. I used Paul Crowther’s Hotcake, I used a Boss CS3 sustain pedal turned up to full as a boost. I just had a touch of reverb and a wah and volume pedal, which was a combination of the two, and I used the wah primarily as a filter. That was my setup for years.

Moving on from the gear talk… I noticed on this tour, you’re doing sort of an extension of the solo tour you did last year. Is there something particularly energising you’re finding about playing these smaller towns?

Yeah, I did the South Island last year, and then I went over and did a few dates in Australia as well, but in the south… I actually just wanted to go on a road trip, and I’ll play these small places as I drift though them, and it was awesome, I really loved it, and I loved it primarily because I did an entire circumnavigation of the South Island over two or three weeks, and the South Island, even though I’m from there, is glorious, so that in itself is awesome. But I loved going to play places that I normally don’t get to play with my bands.

My whole musical career, I've pretty much just played the main centres because I've never been hugely mainstream, so I don't even know how well known I have been in those regional centres… but it’s just been great to be mobile and to get out and play shows like that. I also love stripping the songs back to that level, you know? I do all sorts… I've just put out a record with an orchestra, and I've big bands and all that kind of stuff, but there’s something about stripping it right back and making tunes work, and making it still ROCK at that kind of level. I really love it, I really love the elemental, mobile quality of it.

Do you find that when you’re playing these smaller places — do people come to see the show because you’re Shayne Carter, or is it just because you’re the entertainment that night?

I really couldn’t tell you what the peeps were thinking. Maybe it’s a bit of both, I’m not sure, but the reception of the shows has been really nice. The best thing about it is that it’s great just to drift though these communities. I always make sure I go out and man the merch table at the end of the show, it’s a really great way to meet peeps and also, the South Island towns have been awesome so I’m hoping to do the same in the north as well.

Do you try to make time for a lot of sightseeing when you’re on the road?

In the South Island, we had a few days in Tākaka and a few days in Hokitika, and it was awesome. The same in the North Island shows, we’re gonna go muck around on the East Cape, there’s a bit of a gap in between in the schedule. I like road trips, do you like road trips?

Yeah, I just got off a two week tour. I’ve lived in the North Island my whole life and I’ve never really been down south, but we went down to Tākaka, Nelson, Greymouth, Picton… I was pretty shocked by the locals and the scenery and everything.

It’s amazing the number of North Islanders who haven't been to the South Island. I guess if you’ve got no reason to go there… This trip I did, going through deeper Southland. That's just New Zealand's best kept secret, it would be great to keep it a secret I guess.

You’re doing a very stripped back live show at the moment. Is that a minimalist reaction after working with the NZSO, or is this something you’ve always planned to do?

It’s just another tangent. I’ve always liked minimalism anyway, and I like the challenge of it. I like the challenge of trying to make it work without being the plaintive folk guy, strumming his guitar, just to make it sizzle at that level. I think of really old stuff, like John Lee Hooker on his '40s and '50s records, where he’s just playing this voodoo music on a broken guitar and stomping his foot. It's really heavy. It can still be heavy and it can still be intense, and I really enjoy the stripped back challenge of that, but I said elsewhere, I don’t wanna be the dude relying on his hits from the golden era or whatever, even though I am pulling out songs from all over my songbook.

Just as a musician, I want to keep challenging myself. Doing this solo thing, and all the other bits and pieces I've been doing, whether that’s ballet scores or film work or whatever. It just keeps me interested, it keeps me challenged. The last thing I want to be is complacent about what I do. Just to go off on a trip here, if anything my commitment to music, and the power of music gets stronger the older I am, y’know? I’m so far down the road that there’s no turning back for me, so I want to stay passionate about it. I want to stay interested and I want to feel like there’s places to explore. Places to explore that are beyond deeper Southland.

For these next questions I've got some stuff I wanted to ask you, just because i’ve always been personally curious about them. This is kind of a conspiracy theory of mine: all the Straitjacket Fits album titles, they’re all four letter words. You did Hail, Melt, Blow and then the Done EP as well… and then when you went to Dimmer, to me it sounds like all the album titles are bits of spoken dialogue… I Believe You Are A Star, You’ve Got To Hear The Music, and There My Dear. Were either of those intentional choices?

Yeah, with the Straitjackets we did ponder the four letter word title thing. I don’t know how that came about, whether we did it deliberately or it just sort of came out that way. We also noticed that the L was shifting closer to the front with each title. We joked that our last record would just be called Last. With the Dimmer stuff, with the titles… I guess they’re kind of phrases. I didn’t really think so much about the titles. What I really liked about the Dimmer albums was that every album cover was an empty ambient space, whether that was a race track or an empty cinema or the Moon with an astronaut on it. That’s what I thought about with the presentation of that particular unit. I really like the suggestion and the evocation of empty ambient spaces.

Speaking of album covers, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot, but what’s the deal with the cover of Melt? What’s the symbolism of the guy with his eye stitched up?

You’d have to ask John Collie, the drummer. He did all our art work, including that one, which I must say horrified our American major label record company. Melt is based on a song called 'Melt Against Yourself;, which is on that album. That song is about emotional suppression, and that’s why the eyes are stitched up. I think he was playing on the themes of that particular tune… 'Melt Against Yourself', that tune was basically about sabotaging yourself, and not facing up to various issues within.

It seems to me that in a lot of the songs you write, it’s very much about experiences you’ve had, or things that you’d like to say to someone that you couldn’t say otherwise. Are you ever worried that you’ve given too much of yourself away in your songs?

I probably gave away a lot more in my book than I've done in my songs. Nah, man. With my book I didn’t want to be afraid of that, I didn’t wanna feel like I had to construct some fucking Instagram personality or something. I actually thought it was punk rock to be that brazen about stuff. With the songs, I never really feel like that. A lot of my tunes and a lot of my lyrics… they’re actually really ambiguous and I really play on having ambiguous lyrics that can mean more than one thing. That’s sort of an out for me, but it also leaves room for the listener to invest themselves. So people can just have a completely different viewpoint of what the lyric’s about, I think that’s the same with any kind of music and any kind of lyric, really.

To sing a song, I have to believe in it. I work really hard on my lyrics because I have to believe in them. If I don’t believe in my tune then no one else will, and it means I can commit to my songs because I can believe them, and they’re true. So as far as worrying about (that)... I don’t give a shit. Life’s short, man. Who cares what other people think? I care what my friends or my peers think, but I am really way beyond being concerned with that sort of stuff. I just want to communicate in my own small way, something that’s true, and something that’s strong. I've got the tools and the ability to do that, so that’s what I'm into.

You touched on this briefly but I was going to ask you, your book was very… open. Was there anyone who got mad at how they were portrayed in it?

Yes. Hahaha, yeeeeah. My publisher warned me right from that start, with those kinds of books there’s always someone who’s going to be offended. Even though I got a couple of digs in there and stuff, I really wanted to treat everybody fairly, especially the people that are important to me. You can’t take liberties with other people, especially people who aren’t here any longer, so I was really conscious of respecting people. There were a couple of incidents in there where I was probably… Not harsh, but, on a couple of those characters, a lot of that I find funny. Like a bad running gag really, haha. As far as being malicious, I didn’t want to use it as a tool for that, and I also didn’t want to use it as this tool for justification. I just wanted to write what happened, because I thought it was a good story.

Was it much of a challenge, adapting some of those stories to your movie (Life in One Chord)?

Well, that wasn’t my problem. That was Margaret (Gordon) the director’s thing. The way that she interpreted the book… I didn't actually have anything to do with the movie. I was in it, cause I did a couple of interviews with Margaret when she was making it, but that was her baby. There were lots of bits in the book, and in my life, that aren’t in that movie, but generally I left it to her, because A) I was completely over myself, having put out the book, but B) I knew she was committed to that project. I also felt like I could trust her, and that she wasn’t going to do the dirty on me or any of my friends, and she vindicated that. Props to Margaret, she had no budget and she made it completely off her own back. Good on her. She’s a cool person.

Yeah, it was a great movie, I went and saw it right when it opened up in cinemas.

One thing I really liked about it was that… There are kids who don’t really know that much about me, because I'm from a different generation, from what I got, some younger people that I know, through my nephews and all that kind of stuff. They found it… good to see that you can live that kind of life. That artistic kind of life and that it is a possibility, and that’s how you go about it. I'm glad I could be involved in providing that kind of encouragement to people, that you can actually exist that way, rather than exist the way the mainstream says you must.

Wrapping up now, is there any new music, from New Zealand or otherwise, that excites you right now?

I find it really hard to be specific about stuff. One thing is, I was talking about my nephew, Tane (Cotton). He does this thing called Sivle Talk, and he’s involved in the bands down in Dunedin at the moment. The young band scene down there is really great and it’s really going off. That’s been great to witness, there’s some good stuff happening down there. Look, there’s always been good stuff going on, you’ve just gotta find it. I guess with so much information that’s out there, there’s a bigger pile of crap sitting on top of the good stuff. I’m always listening and there’s always great stuff to find. Because there’s humans on this planet, there’ll always be good music.

Are there any parting words you’d like to leave us with?

No!

Well, great. Thanks for your time, Shayne.