STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART
Oh, Shayne Carter. Rock god. Guitar neck thrust into the faces of the front row. Crouching. Grinding. Killing it. All that pouting they always talk about. A big sound in a small room. Sex and sweat and rock’n’roll. His shoes look pretty ordinary, though – like ones you’d get from Hannahs when your kid goes to college.
It’s December, and Carter is in Wellington doing two gigs: half the show is songs from his former band Dimmer, and the other half is from the earlier Straitjacket Fits days. About 25 years covered in those bands, and the two sets reprise much of the gold that came from that time. Carter closes his eyes in the chorus, and devotees repeat the words with him. The sensible ones wear earplugs. The reckless let the chords burn.
If anyone is New Zealand’s Mick Jagger, it’s Carter: Jagger without the string of illegitimate children and tax evasion. Jagger without the pilates and heart surgery. Jagger with less prancing. Jagger with a wanging guitar. Jagger with a whole lot more shit in his past.
We know much about Carter’s upbringing and much of the shittiness it contained, because he details it in his new autobiography, Dead People I Have Known. About the physical violence; about the drinking; about the hidings; his parents splitting and the new father; the depression; loathing school; the sexual abuse on the family’s fringes; the grim contours of life on the slopes of a working-class Dunedin suburb.
Punk rock rescued
