Olly of the shed was one out of the box

It was about 15 years ago. I was at the Bats' house, well, two of the Bats, Paul and Kaye, in Christchurch. A guy walked into the kitchen.

"This is Olly," said Kaye. "He lives in the shed out the back."

I thought the cat lived in the shed out the back. I went out there later to talk to Olly. Oliver Scott.

He had the shed like a storage container: books, records, tapes, guitars, music things everywhere. I can't remember a bed. Maybe he slept out on the lawn beneath the stars. By the end of talking to him that afternoon, I had decided he was the sort of person who might do that.

Olly was a wonderful story-teller. He gave me his life in spectacular bits and pieces, each anecdote pulled from all over, triggering another one from another time, leaving me still wanting the previous one to finish. Some of these stories couldn't possibly be true, but then he'd throw in something which I knew WAS true, which meant the other stuff, back in England, could be true too.

Like when he was seen by David Bowie in his band 69 before there was a Ziggy Stardust. Olly was nibbling away at that concept then, and he felt Bowie had taken it in.

Or the time he was picked up hitching by George Harrison. Neither of them spoke. He knew I knew, said Olly, and I knew he knew I knew. This was story-telling at its finest.

Olly came from a privileged and very smart family. His father was a Cambridge maths professor who worked cracking codes at Bletchley Park in World War 2.

Olly's three brothers were all successful high-achieving professional people. One presumes Olly, whose life was guitars, was a bit of a disappointment in that respect, living in a shed and all.

But Olly didn't say that. People in Christchurch had enormous respect for Olly. His bands played punk before there was punk - Olly loved being somewhere before anyone else - and personnel from these bands were later to be found in pre-eminent New Zealand indie legends like Toy Love and, of course, the Bats.

Olly had an opinion on every band. He would have made a great rock critic. Actually he WAS a great rock critic. He took few prisoners.

I later went back to the shed and had a long session with Olly for a magazine feature on his specialist topic, Buster Keaton.

Olly had decided very early on, before the many now attaching carriages to this train, that Keaton was filmdom's truest genius. And when a family inheritance brought him 30 grand, he spent it all producing a book on Buster, The Little Iron Man.

I never got the full story, but I think it came down to acknowledgement of borrowed material. There were rejection letters from nearly every major publishing house in the world.

But praise too, like from movie scion Leonard Maltin. Definitive, said Leonard. Olly was left with a book manuscript of nearly 500 A4 pages, which he later made available on his website, printing out each order one at a time. I read some of it. Marvellous. Comprehensive. Every Keaton fan should have one.

Olly left us on Christmas Eve.

He had moved to Invercargill to be with his daughter, Dommie, and he was hoping to make it to Christmas Day so he could share that with her. Complication from heart surgery and artery transplantation had made Olly's life miserable in recent years, and he had had to become a real little iron man himself just to get through some days.

There were 30 at the funeral. They played songs from Eddie Cochran, the Gordons, Desmond Dekker, a track off Olly's solo album, Graffenstaden, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

When people die, words are impossible; you can only use the words that everyone else has used before. He was one out of the box, said Kaye. Yes. Olly was absolutely that.

- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.