Doidge, On Working With Michael Knott

by Steve Ruff

I had to ask Brian Doidge about working with Knott. If you’ve ever seen the footage of Cornerstone ’93, or if you were fortunate enough to have been there, they always seemed to have a zany sense of humor. There were the outfits… Doidge in the clown mask next to Knott wearing a gigantic cookie monster head. Brian laughs and says, “Mike with the cookie monster hat… yeah, we went into a costume shop in the town where we played that festival and asked if we could rent the costumes (more laughter), then we just wore them for the show. It was some weird humor that we had.” Then I asked Brian about Michael’s penchant for dumping canned food all over himself. “Oh yeah,” Brian said, “and it gets all over everything. It used to be that white face clown make-up, and it would get all over everything, I could never get it out of my clothes. At least he switched from clown white to canned food, because I could get the food washed out. I would be playing and I didn’t know what he was going to do, or when he would do it, then I would smell something and think ‘Corn?’, and I would look over and there’s Mike covered in corn. Then sometimes it would smell like when you’re camping, and there’s Mike, covered in pork and beans… and I start to get hungry over here playing. Mike would become whatever he was pouring on him, it got everywhere.”

On playing with Michael he says, “I’ve always felt blessed that I got to play Christian music and send out a more positive message, even though at times it seemed we were addressing the more negative side of things, but I believe there are positive and negative things to life. I think Christians, whether they want to admit it or not, have a lot of hard things they have to go through… that’s part of being a human being.”

“Mike and I always worked really well because I could just follow along, we got stuff done really quick. Mike was always a privilege to play beside because he was a good showman and a great songwriter. He was my best friend and it was always just fun to see what he was going to do next. I was always like the little brother sitting behind him thinking, ‘Yep, he’s nuts, but I love him.'”