Carter to the cause

Funny, enigmatic and perpetually punk: veteran musician Shayne Carter gets his own rockumentary, at last.

- BY RUSSELL BROWN

He was a brat," says Francisca Griffin half an hour into Life in One Chord, the new documentary about her friend Shayne Carter. Indeed, "brat" was pretty much Carter's personal brand in early 80s Dunedin. He was bright, funny and sometimes, after a few drinks, just a bit much.

Margaret Gordon's film is the story of how Carter went from being a snotty kid from a rough neighbourhood to, as he currently is, a composer for the Royal New Zealand Ballet and an award-winning memoirist.

It is also, in part, the film of Carter's book, Dead People I Have Known. Life in One Chord opens in Aramoana, near Dunedin, and interviews him while he is still writing it, in 2018.

"I heard Shayne reading a passage he'd written and I just thought it was awesome and would be great to sort of bring to life," says Gordon. "Shayne's book is really lively, but it's full of stuff that I wanted to see or hear."

The director's intuition paid off – in particular, seeing Carter's mother, Erica Miller, and his father, Jimi Carter Carter's book still provides the narrative backbone of the film, albeit by a surprising means. His words are read for the soundtrack by Carol Hirschfeld. As shown in the film, drafting in Hirschfeld began as a joke when Carter was struggling to record his own words at a studio session.

It works remarkably well, but it's also symptomatic of Carter's discomfort with continuing to talk about the past. Gordon confirms he was at times a reluctant subject.

"I did talk him down off a cliff every now and then. When we started filming, he was real keen, he was up for it and we had heaps of fun. And then once the book came out, I think he felt quite exposed."