Friday Night Local: Tall Dwarfs, 'Nothing's Going to Happen'

What, more dwarfs?

No, not really. It's Friday - time for another New Zealand video! And this one goes out to my big brother, who introduced me to Tall Dwarfs, had a D&D character (guess what race - go on) named after one of their EPs, and who eventually accompanied me to see them play on an especially brilliant night at Sammy's Cabaret in Dunedin, long ago in a New Zealand winter.

The memory cheats, of course. My teenage mind would have had it that a Tall Dwarfs video could be viewed on local music magazine show radio With pictures most weeks, but it seems the Dwarfs did very few videos at all, probably because the stop-motion nature of many of them would have challenged even a Flying Nun release schedule. But what we did get is strong stuff indeed, even in a low-fi sense. Tall Dwarfs proved to be a big influence on me and my friends, each in our own way, and its been fun to reconnect with the band after too many years' absence. Its difficult to pick a favourite - the mouldy orange peel faces of euthanasia anthem The Slide? The rumbling cut-up montage that accompanies Turning Brown and Torn in Two's anti-sexism polemic?  Or what about the loopy too-many-f-stops-in-a-suburban-basement Frankenstein shenanigans of The Brain That Wouldn't Die? All too tempting. We'll just have to revisit the works of the great and much-missed Chris Knox and his stalwart fellow ex-Toy Love-r Alec Bathgate some other time. Instead, let's go back to the beginning, back to the basics, back to the classics:



Oh, and Stu - that Wall of Dwarfs version you told me about back in '85 can be found here.