Lounge music

Alec Bathgate reflects on the career and upcoming boxset collection of pioneering lo-fi , alt-pop band Tall Dwarfs, which he started with his mate Chris Knox.

Alec Bathgate – one half of this country’s most idiosyncratic alt-pop group, Tall Dwarfs, with Chris Knox – is charmingly bashful when talking about the project that has occupied him for almost two years.

It is Unravelled: 1981-2002, a loosely chronological box set of 55 Tall Dwarfs songs spread over eight sides of vinyl. It arrives in a slipcase with a 20-page booklet of posters, album covers, artwork and lyrics, all of which Bathgate, who has his own graphic-design company in Christchurch, has pulled together into a striking package.

But listening back on this music – some songs more than 40 years old, the most recent two decades ago – did he think, “What a great band”?

“There were some songs like that, but I can’t say it,” he laughs. “It’s a bit boastful.”

Tall Dwarfs began life intending just a one-off EP, Three Songs, but – despite Bathgate living in Christchurch and Knox in Auckland – subsequently recorded seven more EPs and six albums.

They’d still be recording today, Bathgate says, were it not for Knox’s debilitating stroke in 2009, which meant his Dwarfs career was over for the Arts Laureate, post-punk polymath and lighting rod of music, animation and cultural criticism.

Bathgate and Knox had prior form together in the punk-era the Enemy and the short-lived but influential Toy Love, and their shared passion for pop was brought to Tall Dwarfs.