Alec Bathgate

ROCKHAPPENZ Public Collection

Alec Bathgate  —  vastly experienced musician featuring in Tall Dwarfs, The Enemy, Toy Love .....

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 the Tall Dwarfs duo with Chris Knox.  Unravelled 1981-2002 and Tall Dwarfs' 2022 retrospective collections were issued on the US Merge label.  Fortuitously, the opportunity came up to delve back into the Tall Dwarfs' rich historical repertoire.  Come 2022 and Alec 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.  He is 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 acquire, but it turned out that the original recordings, which had been carefully catalogued and stored at Chris 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.  The masters were available to compile into a kind of best-of, and American record label Merge offered to fund and release the project.

Alec Bathgate's musical career started when The Enemy burst onto the unsuspecting Dunedin music scene in 1977 (a spectacular and ground-breaking arrival in its own right) with a young Alec on guitar.  Right from the moment that Alec formed The Enemy with fellow art student Mick Dawson and talented misfit Chris Knox, he's been involved with Chris in one of this country's most enduring and original songwriting partnerships.  Alec and Chris were The Enemy's songwriting core and after the group evolved into Toy Love in 1979, they were hammering out classic tunes for a band who were rapidly becoming the most highly-rated act in the country.  Toy Love was over less than two years later, but Chris and Alec were straight into a new project, The Tall Dwarfs.  After one EP on the Furtive label, The Tall Dwarfs hooked up with Flying Nun and ten records later they remain the virtual creative stalwarts of the label.  The duo are now legends in the world of four-track home-recording, and they were invited to headline the inaugural Fast Forward home-recording festival in Holland where they were joined by the likes of Sebadoh.  Alec went on to release solo albums Gold Lame (1996) and The Indifferent Velvet Void (2004).

1996

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1996

2004

2020