“I backed down from the mic. Here was a new world of sound. Its sky was borderless, and its horizon curled off a previously flat earth. Id been given a virtual super power and a flame to shoot from my fingers.”

In Dead People I Have Known, the legendary New Zealand musician Shayne Carter tells the story of a life in music, taking us deep behind the scenes and songs of his riotous teenage bands Bored Games and the Doublehappys and his best-known bands Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer.

He traces an intimate history of the Dunedin Soundthat distinctive jangly indie sound that emerged in the seventies, heavily influenced by punkand the record label Flying Nun.

As well as the pop culture of the seventies, eighties and nineties, Carter writes candidly of the bleak and violent aspects of Dunedin,