Straitjacket Fits
New Zealand band from Dunedin
Straitjacket Fits were a four-piece alternative indie rock band that formed in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1986 and broke up in 1994. They released three studio albums, Hail (1988), Melt (1990), and Blow (1993), and several EPs. Their line-up for their first two albums consisted of Shayne Carter (vocals and guitar), John Collie (drums), David Wood (bass), and Andrew Brough (guitar and vocals). Brough departed the band in 1991 and was replaced for the band's final album by Mark Petersen.
Straitjacket Fits were a prominent band in the Flying Nun label's second wave of the Dunedin sound. They were inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2008 and have three songs in the APRA Top 100 New Zealand Songs of All Time list, "She Speeds", "Down in Splendour", and "If I Were You".
In 2025 the film Life in One Chord was released, directed by Margaret Gordon and covers the lifespan of Straitjacket Fits.
Biography
Like many of their Flying Nun stable-mates, the band hailed from the southern city of Dunedin. They formed from the remnants of The DoubleHappys, a band comprising Shayne Carter, Wayne Elsey and John Collie. The accidental death of Elsey saw Carter and Collie join forces with David Wood (ex-Working With Walt) in 1986 to form Straitjacket Fits.
“Straitjacket Fits” enters the record as new Zealand band from Dunedin. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Straitjacket, Fits and Zealand can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7621157. VIAF identifies the subject as 154921950. The Library of Congress control number is no98016184. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1994, 1988 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “Straitjacket Fits” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.