Alec Bathgate had been making music for more than 40 years by the early 2020s, almost – but not quite – all of it with his old pal Chris Knox, first in The Enemy, then in Toy Love, but mostly in his duo with Knox, Tall Dwarfs. It was time to take stock.

Unravelled: 1981–2002, Tall Dwarfs' 2022 retrospective collection on the US Merge label.

Fortuitously, the opportunity came up to delve back into the Tall Dwarfs’ motherlode. It’s 2022 and Bathgate is proudly talking up the release of Unravelled 1981-2002, a four LP boxed set (and 2-CD set) that cherry-picks the best selections from the pair’s prodigious output. When I speak with Bathgate, he’s clearly very happy about the project, which he laboured over for many months.

The Tall Dwarfs discography was long out of print, and while the recordings were available on streaming services, there was nothing tangible to grab hold of. But it turned out that the original recordings, which had been carefully catalogued and stored at Knox’s house, were packed up and sent to the Alexander Turnbull Library, which – as part of the ongoing Flying Nun preservation and restoration project – has carefully digitally remastered them. These masters were available to compile into a kind of “best-of”, and American record label Merge offered to fund and release the project.

Tall Dwarfs: Chris Knox (foreground) and Alec Bathgate, 1983

Bathgate: “Chris had been very methodical in keeping everything. He has a work room in his house where we did a lot of our recording. I remember these tape boxes forever being on his shelves. I guess the tapes went off to the pressing plant and then when they returned, he put them up there so we had everything. And I gather the tapes were in pretty good condition as the room they were kept in was temperate and dry.”

 

Once sent to the Alexander Turnbull Library, hi-res digital transfers were made of the tapes, “So I had access to those as a way of putting the collection together. Without that it wouldn’t have been possible to do. The work that Turnbull did has made it possible.”

Tall Dwarfs: Alec Bathgate (left) and Chris Knox

The work in choosing the tracks – which are sequenced more-or-less chronologically – and preparing the artwork, including a 20-page book featuring drawings, posters and lyrics, was immense but rewarding. “I sequenced all eight sides and had them remastered, and then they went to the States to have test pressings made. I wanted it to sound as good as possible.

 

“All these tracks were recorded over a long period of time and part of it was balancing out the relative volume levels – trying to give everything a cohesive sound, so applying a little bit of EQ or compression, although I was very careful. On the tape boxes Chris had always written instructions to the mastering engineer of the pressing plant. His instructions were always no EQ, master flat, so I was conscious of not doing anything extreme, just subtle layers of mastering. But it sounds really good. And I think that a lot of those recordings lent themselves to this process because we didn’t use … if you go into a studio there’s lots of outboard equipment, equalisers and limiters and all the stuff that colours the sound. But we didn’t use anything like that, it was very direct to tape, just microphone going straight into the tape machine.”

Tall Dwarfs: Alec Bathgate (left) and Chris Knox

Bathgate says that choosing the tracks was the hardest part. “I did enjoy it though, because I hadn’t listened to our recordings for a long time, and there’s a lot, there’s over 200 songs. I made a list of everything, and then I went through and thought there’s certain songs that’ve got to be on there, so I ticked those off, and then it was a process of elimination and just trying different running sequences. I wanted it to be an enjoyable listen, so I spent quite a bit of time sequencing each side of the album so that it worked in its own right. Because a lot of compilations don’t. Sometimes when you take things out of the context of an album it doesn’t work. I hope that it’s a good listen and that it shows different aspects of what we did, trying to get a really good cross section. I really enjoyed listening to it and I never used to listen to our records back in the day. I think it’s good. It’s all over the place in terms of songwriting. There’s some stuff that’s just really poppy, almost bubble-gum, some stuff that’s really odd, and gentle lilting songs, and then full-on guitar bashes. So I think that makes it interesting. It’s not like there’s just one sound and it’s variations on that sound.

 

“And all our records have been out of print for a long time, so that’s a part of the motivation. Because probably nothing else will be reissued, I think this will be it. I felt like I needed to get it right, but also the book with photos and drawings … that was a way to give people an insight into who Chris and I are and what our relationship was. Because if you just hear the music in isolation, you don’t really know. And I feel like it’s kind of an interesting story about two guys with tape machines in our living rooms messing around making music.”

A 1998 Tall Dwarfs publicity shot. - Photo by Jono Rotman

How would Bathgate sum up the music he made during his long partnership with Chris Knox, especially having revisited the songs for the box set?

“Both Chris and I like songs,” says Bathgate. “But also, we like weird, experimental stuff, so you’ve got that marriage between sounds and odd tape loops but generally over the top of it there’s something fairly melodic. And I was really struck by Chris’s singing and his lyrics … I had to transcribe all the lyrics for the box set and I’d never read them properly before and I thought, ‘This is brilliant!’ Because I remember the recording process. We’d just put down some instrumental stuff, and then I’d go and have a cup of coffee and Chris would scrawl out some lyrics, and when I re-read some of the lyrics they’re just so good. But he never laboured over them, it’s quite amazing.

Tall Dwarfs: Alec Bathgate and Chris Knox

“It goes back to The Enemy because when we first started playing together Chris didn’t play guitar. I’d come up with a guitar riff or a chord pattern and Chris would try some things and eventually settle on a melody and sing gibberish or ad-lib lyrics and sometimes he’d go away and write proper lyrics or sometimes he’d just keep adlibbing them. I think that set the way we worked together, and it carried on like that through Tall Dwarfs where he’d just find something to sing over the top and sang with real conviction. That’s another thing that struck me, just how ‘in the song’ Chris is. The strength of his lyrics and his songwriting nous is what makes a lot of it work so well.”

Tall Dwarfs recording, 2007

At which point I points out that it’s obviously the way the two worked together that made it what it is, as Knox’s solo stuff is very different.

“It worked,” says Bathgate. “We worked out what both of us could offer that made us both compatible as a team and we enjoyed each other’s company, we’ve had a long friendship. It was always nice to be together again and catch up with what was going on in each other’s lives. I guess that contributed as well. We were in good spirits when we were together, and we were enjoying making this stuff.”