For most purposes, Martin Phillipps was announced to the world in June 1982. Three months earlier, his band The Chills had travelled from Dunedin to Christchurch to make their first real recording, playing some shows to cover their costs, taking another band, The Stones, with them. Two weeks later, two more groups, The Verlaines and Sneaky Feelings, did the same thing. All four had practice rooms in Dunedin’s Regent Theatre, and none were long out of school.
The record released by Flying Nun that June, the so-called Dunedin Double EP, featured all four bands and came to embody a good deal of the label’s founding mythology. It held the essence of a cultural flowering in the southern city, in which a crowd of kids – some there to study, some born and bred – picked up guitars and found themselves in a movement.
The three Chills songs that made up one side of the EP are not entirely successful recordings. The band’s ambition exceeded its skills and, to an extent, the equipment (Chris Knox’s legendary TEAC four-track recorder) the songs were captured on. But they offered a glimpse inside the magic mind of Martin Phillipps.
“The stars and planets just glide on by,” he sings on Kaleidoscope World, an invitation to dream, “cold and patient like white gods’ eyes”. In Frantic Drift, he begs an interlocutor to “tell me a story, let me drift – make me think I’m not really in this place”. For neither the first nor the last time, Martin longed to escape into space.
By the end of the year, The Chills had their own single, Rolling Moon, about revellers who “dance until we start to cry”. Its closing refrain pleads, “Please oh god, don’t take us home.” Martin wrote it when he was 16. He was, recalled Shayne Carter in his award-winning memoir Dead People I Have Known, “a stoned boy genius, out of it on comics, garage rock and full moons over water”.
It happened that Rolling Moon was blaring out the window of our tumbledown flat in Timaru when I met Martin that year. He was driving Sneaky Feelings home from Christchurch when they stopped off to play a gig in our backyard, but we were both really headed north. A few months later, the Chills released a song they’d made in a miraculous session at the Lab, a fledgling studio in Auckland: Pink Frost, which might be a perfect record.
Martin was a keen student of pop history, even by the standards of Dunedin, where people were matchmade by record collections. He would never claim to be the most skilled guitarist or the best singer: he was good at both, but it was the abundance and ambition of his songwriting that set him apart.
He felt a lifelong duty to what sprang from inside him, and that duty came at a personal cost to him and sometimes to the people he played the music with – over the years, various members of The Chills would discover that the mission was more important than they were.
So, The Chills were always destined to be the first to go further, – but when they made their first foray to London in 1985, they might as well have been embarking on a voyage to the Moon. No local band had ventured there since Split Enz. No one in a Flying Nun community where, under Knox’s influence, careerism was frowned upon and contracts barely existed, really understood how these things worked.
All anyone knew was that BBC DJ John Peel had played their records on his radio show and a few journalists were interested. They arrived to discover that Craig Taylor, a Dunedin native who had been involved with the Thompson Twins on their way up, had heard Pink Frost and wanted to help.
Then they came home and imploded. By the time they returned to London in February 1987, Martin had an entirely new band, with Justin Harwood on bass, Caroline Easther on drums and Andrew Todd, a classically trained pianist, playing keyboards. In the interim, Taylor had set up Flying Nun’s UK branch, building on a European beach head established by the German label Normal Records. He became The Chills’ manager. Martin was more serious than ever about his dream.
It turned out they could fill rooms around Europe, so they toured there repeatedly. I’m eternally grateful that sometimes I came along with them.
“On the best nights,” I wrote in the sleeve notes for last year’s Brave Words: Spoken Bravely, a long-overdue remix of The Chills’ first proper album, Brave Words, “they were the sound of a band breathing in unison, inhaling and exhaling in great swoops, or whispering, or breathless and urgent.”
But Brave Words as it emerged in 1988 was, if anything, a setback. In the hands of a distracted producer, it sounded weirdly muffled. As an excerpt from his diary included with Spoken Bravely reveals, Martin took it hard: “Why, why, why. We’ve worked so hard on it, and I’ve waited so long.”
There was a lot of waiting. There were good reviews, “hits” in the independent charts, a Peel Session, a Glastonbury slot, a single of the week on Radio One, but The Chills were in the strange space where everything is on offer, just not yet, and there is no money. After a trip home, they returned (with James Stephenson on drums in place of an exhausted Easther) to what seemed like the turning point: a five-album deal with the American record label Slash.
That deal produced 1990′s Submarine Bells, the most fully realised Chills album, which led off with the exultant widescreen imagery of Heavenly Pop Hit. The album topped the charts in New Zealand, but barely featured elsewhere. Even though the New York Times raved about its successor, Soft Bomb (“Strange and majestic, these songs are Mr. Phillipps’s attempt to test and reshape the possibilities of pop”), it fared no better.
Things began to fray, band members came and went even more regularly, and Slash lost interest. The next album, Sunburnt, had to be made with session musicians because his band members had visa problems.
It all conjured up, not for the first time “the curse of The Chills”, an ironically romantic idea that misfortune would strike just as glory beckoned. It was born in the context of Martin’s love for the doomed genius of Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett and Nick Drake. In the past, it had been as colourful as Martin missing his first music awards ceremony because the ferry he was on struck a whale in Cook Strait. Now, the curse turned very dark.
Martin disappeared into drugs and depression in Dunedin. A needlestick injury left him with a hepatitis C infection that became the central fact of his life. And a long creative silence did not break until 2015, when a new deal with the British label Fire Records gave Martin the great second wind he deserved. The albums Silver Bullets, Snow Bound and Scatterbrain followed, and he was able to tour again, with a band whose loyalty to him was critical.
He was still close to the edge. Julia Parnell’s 2019 documentary film The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps captured a time when the liver damage done by his infection very nearly ended his life. He was saved by a new antiviral drug, but the respite was temporary and his health was very poor at times. On July 28, his time ended. He was 61.
Martin had been taking care of business. He never forgot the dozens of songs he had written in the years before the band got to make an album, and a recently completed project, Springboard: Early Unrecorded Songs, has captured some of them, with the assistance of artists who had been touched by his music, including Neil Finn, Troy Kingi and Julia Deans. (It will now emerge posthumously later this year.) He’d even begun sorting out his house, with its huge collection of rare records and ephemera.
If Martin never forgot a Chills song, neither, it appears, did a legion of fans. Newspapers on the other side of the world reported his passing, and fans and other artists took to the wires to say how much his music had meant.
“When I was 16, I probably spent 100 hours just listening to Satin Doll,” wrote the young New Zealand electronic producer Amamelia. Martin was 16 when he wrote it.
What Martin Phillipps has left us with is a unique vision, one that helped power a distinctly New Zealand cultural awakening that echoes yet around the world. Perhaps it is simply part of that vision that he would always be reaching for something just beyond his grasp.
Then it’s appropriate to see him out with a line from The Oncoming Day, a thrilling, blazing song about refusing to give up a memory that lit up the stage but was never, in half a dozen attempts over 40 years, quite captured in the recording studio.
“No way,” he sang. “No way will I give in to the oncoming day.”
