Chris Cox grew up on the northeast side of Christchurch in the suburb of Dallington. As a child, he spent a lot of time with his maternal grandfather, who regaled him with stories of singing on stage – in the style of Frank Sinatra – at a local working man’s club. “He immigrated here from the UK, had a job as an accountant and started a football club in Christchurch, but he was into entertaining,” Cox says.
Although he didn’t know it then, Cox was destined to find his way into music as well. While his grandfather’s tools of choice were his voice and a microphone, he was at the beginning of walking down a different path. When he was in his early teens, Cox was lucky enough to have an older brother who worked at a music store in the nearby Linwood Mall. After he finished his shifts, his brother would bring home albums from late 1980s Manchester scene artists such as The Stone Roses. Given this influence, it’s unsurprising that the first album Cox bought was a Happy Mondays record.
Despite this induction into the British sounds of indie dance and acid house, Cox quickly gravitated towards listening to acid jazz in the mode of Jamiroquai and, later on, American jazz-funk and progressive soul artists including Stevie Wonder. “Back then, so much of our musical tastes were formed through relationships with the staff at record stores,” he says. “A classic one for me was Tim Baird at Galaxy Records. Once you’d been shopping there, he’d start pulling out records and CDs he thought you might like.”
Ostensibly, Christchurch still seemed like a sleepy place to be a teenager in the mid-1990s, but thanks to music, Cox started to find some real texture beneath the surface. “There were the beginnings of a pretty fertile music scene in Christchurch then because, let’s be real, the place could be quite boring,” he explains. “That’s why I gravitated towards record stores. It was about thinking of ways to feel excited. At the time, it felt like your options were get into rugby, become a bogan, or gravitate towards a subculture.”
Isaac Aesili and Chris Cox in 1997.
Cox began using his growing music collection to record mixtapes for his friends. Musician, producer, and DJ Isaac Aesili, who went to high school with Cox, says he was a wealth of musical information. “Chris [Cox] introduced me to Pharcyde, Digable Planets, De La Soul, and the acid jazz movement,” says Aesili. “I remember him giving me a Stevie Wonder mixtape.”
Nightlife In The Garden City
By the time Cox was 16, warehouse raves and outdoor dance parties had become a massive part of the local counterculture. “The scene in Christchurch was super ravey,” he says. “It was all about taking generators out into the hills and playing dance music, but I wasn’t into it at all.” Instead, Cox and his friends would go to house parties or sneak into nightclubs and lounge bars like Hofbrauhaus and Lick Er Lounge. When he heard local DJs such as Jason Dean (the owner of the Hunters and Collectors clothing store) and Global Influence play jazz-funk, soul and afrobeat, his ears pricked up.
Not long after, one of Cox’s brothers’ friends passed him a jazz hip-hop CD that changed everything: Shift Left (1995), by New Zealand saxophonist and producer Nathan Haines. “In my head, good New Zealand music was indie stuff on Flying Nun, so I almost couldn’t believe Nathan was a Kiwi,” Cox says. “I was too young to understand the soul and jazz history in New Zealand. This was all pre-internet. You couldn’t just go online and look up similar music.”
Manuel Bundy, Nathan Haines, Sani Sagala on the Shift Left tour, Queenstown, 1995 - Photo by Simon Grigg
A year after Shift Left, Haines released a live album called Soundkilla Sessions Vol.1 and went on tour around New Zealand. When Haines brought his show to Christchurch, Cox had to be there. In a twist of fate, however, the performer who had the most significant impact on him was Haines’ DJ, Manuel Bundy. “My standout memory from the night was Manuel DJing beforehand,” says Cox. “I can clearly remember thinking, this guy is playing all the music I like, but I never hear people playing. It was significant.”
Two turntables and a Gemini mixer
After high school, Cox studied Political Science and English at Canterbury University. He also purchased two turntables and a basic Gemini DJ mixer, slowly taught himself how to DJ, and began playing records anywhere that would have him. “The way I saw it was simple,” he says. “When I went out, I wasn’t hearing the music I liked or my friends liked. So, I figured more people would also want to hear this stuff.”
Cox says that from a young age, he had strong ideas about what he considered good or bad music. Despite his innate conviction, he never had a clear eureka moment where he decided he wanted to be a DJ. “I just kept stumbling along and was surprised at every juncture,” he says. “The first big surprise was someone paying me to do it. I always try to remember that when I’m playing to a dancefloor, someone is paying me to do this. It’s amazing.”
Chris Cox and Isaac Aesili during a Solaa practice, 1998.
At the time, Aesili and his musician friends had just formed the Solaa band. Their mission was to use improvisation to explore the possibilities of hip-hop, broken beat, funk, soul, R&B, and Latin music. Given the synergies between their sounds and Cox’s record collection, having him come down and DJ at their shows made sense. “Some of my first gigs were playing before and after Solaa at The Green Room [formerly Hofbrauhaus],” he says.
Going professional
In 1998, Cox scored his first proper DJ residency at Base Bar & Nightclub and started working as an advertising sales rep at local student radio station RDU 98.5. Alongside working there, he began hosting the station’s specialist house music show, Rhythm Zone, alternating weeks with the DJ Allan King, aka King Al. “I don’t have specific memories of Chris [Cox’s] early DJ sets,” says Christchurch DJ and promoter Simon Kong, who would have first met him around this time, “but it’s the same as today: reliable, musical, funky, soulful, emotional, deep and real.”
At first, to Cox’s father, having a son working as a DJ was a bit of a foreign concept. However, having worked as a signwriter and fire engine salesman before finding his footing in meat trading while the kids were growing up, he understood entrepreneurship. “Although, in some ways,” says Cox, “I’m the black sheep in my family, as soon as I started making DJing work as a job, my dad was super proud of me.”
That said, they did have one funny moment. When Cox’s father visited his flat to see his turntables and mixer, he said, “Son, I’m happy for you, but why did you have to buy two of those things?” Although visual representations of DJing are commonplace in popular culture now, it’s easy to forget that even in the late 1990s, it was still somewhat of an unknown quantity in New Zealand.
Outside of his opportunities with Base and RDU, 1998 was a crucial year for Cox in several other ways. In April, British downtempo band Portishead played a show at the Christchurch Town Hall. It was a noteworthy performance. However, as with that Nathan Haines show he attended a couple of years earlier, the real eureka moment was hearing Portishead’s tour DJ Andy Smith play a red-hot set of rare Northern Soul 7"s at Suite, a small bar the Base Bar & Nightclub owners operated across the road.
Another pivotal moment was when Cox was booked to open for the late UK house music DJ and future broken beat pioneer Phil Asher at Suite. “I was playing okay music, but I couldn’t really mix yet,” he says. “At the time, it was all about my selections. The technical skills came later.” Regardless, Asher gave him some encouraging words and said to drop him a line if he ever made it to London. We’ll come back to this later.
In 1999, Cox helped the RDU team organise a solstice rave at the Canterbury science and technology hub Science Alive. “The place was basically a kid’s fun park for science,” he explains. Having already made connections within New Zealand’s national music scene, Cox was able to arrange for two high-profile DJs to fly down and play: Bevan Keys from Auckland and Jason Harding aka Clinton Smiley from Wellington.
“Those guys had such a positive influence on me,” he says. “Bevan’s musicality was amazing. He had access to all these imported soulful American house records none of us could get our hands on. Jason quickly became a mentor figure in my life.”
Around the same time, a steady stream of higher-profile house DJs from Auckland and Wellington, including Mikey Havoc, Soane and Roger Perry, started coming to Christchurch to play at Base Bar & Nightclub. “Most of the time, I’d be the support DJ, so I started to get to know all those guys,” says Cox.
Throwing Parties
In 1999, Cox teamed up with Simon Kong, who worked for the seminal South Island outdoor party The Gathering. Together, they organised a series of dance parties under the brand Sole Tree at the now defunct Harbour Light Theatre in Lyttelton, headlined by DJs from the US and UK, including Corey Black, aka DJ Corster, from Imperial Dub Recordings and Paper Recordings co-founder Miles Hollway. Alongside these exciting developments, Cox also travelled to Auckland for the first time to DJ with Mark de Clive-Lowe at the Galatos venue.
Chris Cox in 1998.
“To be a DJ in the 1990s,” says Kong, “you had to be a mixture of things: a record collector, a researcher, a listener, a socialite and a technician.” While revisiting memories from several decades ago, he remembered Cox constantly buying music, spending countless hours listening to records, reading imported magazines, holding good conversations with other music heads, and putting in the time as a DJ. In short, he ticked all the boxes. “When we started throwing parties, the connections, knowledge, and motivations were all from Chris [Cox],” he says. “He was a proper head who knew what he loved. I was just the production guy with a basic record collection who was discovering everything.”
Moving to Auckland
As the 1990s ended, Cox was booked to play a prime-time spot at The Gathering in the house tent. After making a good impression on the DJs, promoters and punters assembled at the festival, he started receiving more booking requests from around the country. Things were looking good. In March 2000, he flew to Auckland to play a high-profile show for the Lightspeed promotion group. Afterwards, he DJed at Calibre (now Double Whammy) and The Box/Cause Celebre. “I was working the angles,” Cox laughs.
While he was in Auckland he met his partner Sonja through a mutual friend. Two weeks after he’d returned to Christchurch, Cox packed his life up and relocated to Auckland. He wanted to pursue things with her and see what the City of Sails had to offer him as a DJ. “Auckland felt like home straight away,” he says. Within weeks, Cox had fallen in with the communities surrounding the inner-city Calibre and Khuja Lounge venues and was playing at both weekly.
He recalls DJ stints at Khuja from 1.30 to 4.30am, playing jazz, funk, soul, hip-hop, and early broken beat records. Sometimes, he’d be accompanied on percussion by his old high-school friend Isaac Aesili, who had also relocated to Auckland. Through playing there, Cox and Aesili befriended Gareth and Yasmin Farry, the siblings who co-owned the venue at the time. Alongside Khuja Lounge, Gareth Farry also established a boutique agency, record label and production house called Sugarlicks, with his brother Lukas serving as the in-house recording engineer and producer. As the 2000s began to unfold, these connections became increasingly important.
Over at Calibre, Cox spun soulful house and garage 12" singles in the mode of the New York legends Masters At Work. There, he befriended the then London-based Wellington DJ, producer and broadcaster Christopher Tubbs, who stopped in one night while he was back in the country for a summer holiday. “I remember listening to him DJ and thinking, this is very refined, tasteful and well put together,” says Tubbs. “I’d been in London for a few years, heard a lot of people, and had a bit of an idea of what it was all about. He was definitely that guy for me from the get-go.” Later on, Tubbs would play an important role in a crucial phase in Cox’s career.
Soane in 2001
Cox attributes much of his initial success in Auckland to his friendship with the late Tongan DJ and producer Soane Filitonga, aka Soane. “The fact that people like him saw I had good intentions and didn’t close the door on me was everything,” Cox said. At the time, Filitonga was beginning to release his own original percussion house productions and collaborations through the UK labels Paper Recordings and Shaboom Records. He also toured the UK and Europe, where he’d play at celebrated parties such as Robodisco. “Soane’s success was a huge source of pride for us,” says Cox. He had disciples who’d follow him around from party to party. It was really amazing to see him playing at Calibre in all his pomp.”
That summer, the British multi-instrumentalist, producer, DJ and broken beat pioneer Kaidi Tatham spent several months living in Auckland. Cox was lucky enough to spend some time with Tatham. He was already interested in how broken beat producers in the UK were combining jazz-funk, fusion, boogie, spiritual jazz, Afrobeat, Latin music, jungle, techno, house, and hip-hop into a new sound, but seeing Tatham at work sealed the deal.
Kaidi Tatham and Frank Booker in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2014.
Outside of DJing, Cox spent a couple of days a week working as a record store clerk at BPM Records with Simon Grigg, Greg Churchill, DJ Philippa, and Nick Dwyer. Most of his wages went on records, but as he said, “It was nice to be on the frontline of record store culture for a time. For a period there, we used to move big numbers.”
Around the same time, Cox rebooted the Soultree event brand he’d shared with Simon Kong in Christchurch to throw some shows in Auckland. This time around, he worked with house DJ Mark Burgess. For one of their first collaborations, they booked the Detroit electronic music producer and DJ Matthew Chicoine, aka Recloose. Cox and Chicoine became good friends and stayed in touch.
Thisinformation
While hanging out in Auckland, Cox and Aesili started creating broken beat, future jazz and house music together as Thisinformation. By this stage, Cox had spent a couple of years learning his way around an Akai MPC2000XL MIDI Production Center and had a basic sense of how to programme and arrange drum patterns and samples. When it came time to record, they’d head out to the Sugarlicks studio in Waterview to see Lukas Farry. “I’d programme the drums, and Isaac would come up with some musical ideas,” says Cox. “Lukas would track it into Pro Tools on his Mac and help us arrange it.”
Alongside Lukas, Cox and Aesili also recorded with Mark de Clive-Lowe, bassist Marlin Bobo, Ladi6, and some members of Solaa, including Johnny Lawrence, Dave “Taay Ninh” Wright, Kurt Dyer and Dan Clarke.
In 2002, Thisinformation released its first 12" vinyl, ‘Extensions Of Da Mindz (Remix) / Galaxy Blues’, through Christchurch-based independent label Pinacolada Records. “That was Tim Baird from Galaxy Records’ record label,” says Cox. “So that’s a callback to when I started buying music in the nineties.”
On release, the 12" found its way into Manchester DJ-producer Mr Scruff’s record bag, as well as some of his peers like Recloose, Jazzanova, Les Gammas and Kyoto Jazz Massive. “All we were looking for at that point was some validation,” says Cox. “These guys playing it was a big deal.”
Red Bull Music Academy: São Paulo
That year, Cox took a trip to the northern hemisphere with Sonja. The plan was to visit her family in Croatia, but they also spent some time in Italy and London before returning to New Zealand via Asia. While in Europe, Cox played a few gigs and got some of the best news an emerging at the time DJ could get: his application to attend the 2002 Red Bull Music Academy in São Paulo had been accepted. “Finding out I was going to Brazil was huge for me,” he says. “I’d already been buying records from Brazilian jazz-funk bands like Azymuth, so I was pretty excited.”
Chris Cox in São Paulo while attending the Red Bull Music Academy, 2002.
During the two weeks he spent at the Red Bull Music Academy in São Paulo, Cox was exposed to a wellspring of inspiration. “I often think about the lineup of people I got to meet and listen to that year,” he says, mentioning Madlib, JRocc, Gilberto Gil, Osunlade, and Fourtet. At the academy, Cox also befriended Spencer Weekes from Goya Distribution, one of the main industry forces behind the rise of broken beat in the UK, who added him to their DJ promo list.
In 2003, Cox and Aesili started running Places And Spaces at Khuja Lounge, a local club night associated with Mark de Clive-Lowe’s Antipodean Records label. Over the next six months, they hosted a range of respected international and local DJs, including members of London’s Bugz In The Attic crew and Auckland locals Manuel Bundy and Cian. They also presented a range of live performers, including Cherie Mathieson, Rikki Gooch, The Nabatean, and The Illphonic Orchestra.