A TRIBUTE TO CAPTAIN HOTKNIVES

Everyone at MPF is devastated to hear the news about Chris “Captain Hotknives” Smith. A true one off that had the ability to bring people together with music and stories that just shouldn’t be as funny as they are.

We go back a long way with him now but one of our favourite memories was his slot on the acoustic stage at the very first MPF to an absolutely heaving Thirsty Scholar. A real special moment for us all.

A very intelligent, loyal, kind and unapologetically Bradford soul, it’s very hard to articulate what he meant to a lot of people. We really are grateful for the time we got with him. It will be an impossible hole to fill.

We asked his close friend Pete Williams whether we could share his tribute to Chris. An abridged version will also appear in this year’s programme.

I want to say something about my friend Christopher HK Smith.

Chris was born on Mischief Night, in 1969. The Britain he grew up in – the Britain of Thatcher, the Miners’ Strike and the IRA – came to furnish his comic universe. When he finally became Captain Hotknives, his songs drew on a mythical, stylised Bradford of the 80s and 90s: one of dole queues, grey post-industrial decline, and simmering racial tension.

The music of his childhood shaped him as a person. He discovered Jimi Hendrix as a schoolboy, and then the Clash and the Specials. He had a particular love for Ian Dury, a man whose sense of the absurd permeated his art, and they even had a chance encounter when Dury visited Chris’s school (as far as I can tell, while touring a stage play in the 1980s). Chris was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he told Dury he wanted to be a punk musician. “Go on my son!” Dury replied.

Chris did become a punk musician. But he became more than that too. To me, first and foremost, he was a folk singer. He sang songs and told stories for the people – in pubs, clubs, fields and kitchens – and like a true folk musician, he saw music as a common treasury to be used by all, regardless of authorship. Chris was irreverent, especially to the musicians he revered the most – Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley. He’d often say something onstage like, “This one is called Johnny Cash Converters. And it’s a good thing he’s dead, or he’d come down here and kick my head in.”

To meet Chris was to be initiated into his comic universe, whether you wanted to be or not. My own introduction came sometime around 2004, when I walked into Chrome in Keighley (or whatever it was called at the time) to the sound of Keighley Bus, Chris’s homage to Marley’s Exodus. Chris was opening for Random Hand, and he always credited the band with helping him find an audience in the punk scene, something that would define his life for the next two decades. A couple of years later, we were the last ones awake at a house party, smoking pipes outside Joe Tilston’s flat on Cavendish Street with one last straggler who we didn’t know. Chris loved to perform, and he didn’t need a stage to do it. You’d see a little glint in his eye, and before you knew it the gig had started. We were debating a taxi back to Saltaire, but he bemoaned the price.

“They should put up benefits in line with taxis,” he opined. Our new acquaintance thought he’d said “taxes”, and didn’t take kindly to the suggestion, launching into a boilerplate rant we’re all familiar with, about benefit scroungers already having it too easy. Chris smelt blood, and continued to press the issue before changing tack to his next policy idea.

“Why do they teach French and German in schools? When’s the last time you met a French or German person? They should teach Punjabi, or Polish!”

Our bald friend was getting more and more wound up.

“If they did that I’d go up to my daughter’s school and tell the fucking headmaster what’s what!”

“So would I,” Chris deadpanned. “I’d go and thank him.” Before he could respond, we scarpered and went to get the taxi.

Chris’s first love was the bass guitar, and many people knew him as the skinny, bespectacled bassist of Chest, a cult Leeds indie band in the mid-90s. Years later, he tattooed “APB” on his wrist, the name of his band with Jim Dobson, but which he read as “Always Play Bass”. He was a brilliant, instinctive player, and like his heroes Robbie Shakespeare and Norman Watt-Roy, he knew when to play and when to leave space. That musical ease carried over to the guitar, the banjo, the mandolin, and a collection of other obscure instruments he acquired over the years, which came to litter the front room of his terraced house in Shipley.

He also had an ease with people, and felt most at home with those who lived on the margins. He had Irish and traveller blood, and became embraced by punks, crusties and new-age travellers. In 2013, we were smoking a pipe outside a pub in Stockwell, South London, where he’d just done a gig with the Inner Terrestrials. Out of nowhere, a police van pulled up while Chris was taking a long, slow draw. As we were both being searched, an assortment of punks started to gather. “Fuck the pigs!” someone shouted. But Chris kept the mood light. “I really like your fluorescent jacket, Officer,” he said with a faux childlike innocence. Within a few minutes the police were cracking up at Chris’s benevolent shit-talking, and he even persuaded them to let him keep his pipe. “It’s a lovely soapstone pipe, my friend gave it to me years ago. It’s got a lot of sentimental value.” We left for the long night-bus journey back to my flat in Hanwell, where there was plenty more weed.

The next summer, Chris asked me if I’d drive him to some festivals, and offered me half his fee. I told him I’d do it for petrol money and a bit of hash, and so it came to be that we were strolling together through a Glastonbury campsite on the first night of the festival. Next to one campfire was an old, out-of-tune upright piano. Chris had an idea.

“Start playing I Hate Babies,” he whispered to me.

“OK, what are the chords?”

“G and C.”

I started badly hammering out the triads, and as if we’d never met, Chris started booming to the unsuspecting audience, “I hate babies! I fucking hate babies!” A crowd started to gather: first a dozen, then 50, then 100. People were crying with laughter at the seemingly improvised song, and then erupted into applause when it was finished.

“Right, Anti-Gravity Cats! D minor, G minor… you’ll work it out.”

After a three or four-song set, we left to thunderous cheers and slunk off into the night as conquering heroes. Chris later told me it was one of the best gigs he’d ever done.

From those early years playing pubs in Bradford, the notoriety of Captain Hotknives steadily grew, and every summer would be spent with his backpack and guitar, traipsing up and down the country from festival to festival, making himself at home in tents, vans and caravans. I’ve watched Chris perform hundreds of times and he never disappointed, but sometimes, like an evangelical preacher moved by the spirit, he would enter a kind of flow state, effortlessly improvising new verses to his old songs. After the gig, he’d have no recollection whatsoever of what he’d said to make a room of surly punks howl with joy.

Gigging was Chris’s lifeblood, and part of him died in 2020 when the pandemic brought that to a halt. When he first caught Covid, he almost died from pneumonia, keeping himself alive by propping himself between two amps so he would stay upright and not choke on his own blood. In his delirium, he dreamt he was Bobby Sands on his deathbed at the Maze.

He lost friends who told him it was just a bad cold, or a scam engineered by the New World Order. The pandemic also put an end to a twenty-year stint of (relatively) stable mental health. After being sectioned in the 90s, Chris was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was given lithium to manage the symptoms. Lithium is a heavy chemical with many side effects, but it kept Chris out of hospital and well enough to gig. But in the depths of his isolation, that seemed to stop working too.

I tried to keep in touch, first from my own lockdown in a flat in Oxford, and then from abroad. I’d send him videos of Buddhist temples on Himalayan mountainsides, and once, when I was struck down myself with vicious food poisoning, I called him from my tent and we spoke for almost three hours. Travelling musicians can end up with a thousand acquaintances, but few friends.

“What about so-and-so?” I’d ask.

“I think they gave up on me a couple of manic episodes ago.”

I got back into the country at the end of 2024, when Chris was last in hospital. He’d call me at work, and I’d run off to the staff room to answer. Chris seemed happy, but I soon realised he was in the depths of mania as he fed me stories about smuggling drugs from the Swat Valley to his contacts in Dublin. When he got out, I started going round as much as I could – every week or so. The first few times I’d just tidy around him as he lay on the sofa. Sometimes we’d get out for a walk or a bite to eat; sometimes there would be glimmers of the sense of humour that defined him, and sometimes there wouldn’t be. I’d pick up a guitar, and encourage him to pick up the banjo. It worked once or twice, but mostly it wouldn’t. He talked about it coming back to him for an hour or two a few weeks ago. He talked about his friend Lewis coming round for a jam that one time, and the little glimmer of hope he’d felt because of it. He talked about festival promoters getting in touch about the summer. He talked about gigging again.

I kept going round, but like all of us, I’d be derailed by the petty and quotidian concerns of life. The last time I saw him was January 20th, when I ran the 12 miles to Saltaire and visited him for a couple of hours. I knew that house well. I’d once spent a month living in the spare room upstairs when I had nowhere else to go. Chris refused any money for rent. I let myself in, as usual.

“Pete man, we’ve got to stop the boats!”

“You what?”

“You don’t understand, they’re coming over the canal! Immigrants, from Baildon! Big boats! Narrow ones!”

He had that glint in his eye again.

When I think of Chris, I try not to think of him lying on that sofa. I think of him outside the 1in12 Club, filling pipes and making anyone in earshot laugh. I think of him singing Black Velvet Band to me in his best Luke Kelly impression, but replacing the word “diamonds” with “biscuits”, the tic of his friend Jess (aka Touretteshero). I think of when we used to film ourselves playing old folk songs in his living room and putting them out on his Facebook page (“It can be like Jools Holland, but without the shit honky-tonk piano on every song,” he told me). I think of my kind, warm and generous friend who brought joy and wisdom to so many of us. I think of how lucky I was to know him.