As fans at home and abroad mourn the passing of Martin Phillipps, 61, who led his Dunedin band The Chills for forty-plus years, we revisit two pieces from the Listener about him at pivotal moments in his career.
Both are by the late Roy Colbert, the writer and record shop proprietor who was dubbed “the Godfather of the Dunedin Sound” for his support of the southern city’s bands.
The first is from late 1982 with Colbert writing about the emergence of The Chills – and Phillipps as a singular songwriter – as the band released debut single Rolling Moon having been one of four groups on the Dunedin Double EP earlier in the year.
The second is from 1999, as Phillipps emerged from a period of depression and drug dependency after his music career effectively foundered in the wake of The Chills’ third and fourth albums Soft Bomb and Sunburnt.
December 1982
Variable Chills
As the curtain comes down on 1982, Dunedin’s Chills have left us with a record that should be poking Christmas from the top of every Christmas the stocking - their debut single “Rolling Moon”.
An irresistible slice of pop that bounces from the speakers with a grin from ear to ear, “Rolling Moon” comes backed with a pair of powerful Flip sides “Bite” And “Flamethrower” which together form a record that builds on the promise of the band’s three contributions to Dunedin EP earlier this year rather like Christopher Wren built St Paul’s Cathedral from ideas first floated in little chapels around Cambridge.
Frank Stark noted in this column a couple of months ago that the Chills had found the middle ground between Jonathan Richman and the Loving Spoonful.
That was “Kaleidoscope World”, the one that made it on to Radio with Pictures from the Dunedin Double EP. The single is something again.
“Rolling Moon” is the sort of song that could give the Jam the decent-sized hit they have deserved in this country for some time. “Bite” crosses the Clean and Toy Love at their most rampant (partly through the presence of the former’s David Kilgour on guitar), and “Flame-thrower” bows out with a drum-propelled climax that could have come straight out of the Electric Prunes’ Great Banana Hoax.
Dunedin Double has already shown three more sides to The Chills, and which coming up still we have “Pink Frost”, which has been sitting in Flying Nun’s vaults for some time, possibly scheduled to lead off an EP early next year, along with the instrumental “Purple Girl” and the two that were filmed for Shazam and Radio With Pictures in October " – the excellent Oncoming Day” and “Dolphins” (it is, incidentally, a measure of The Chills’ appeal that they’re an fit neatly into both television programmes.)
So, 10 very good songs, but per. haps most interestingly, 10 very different songs. Labellists clearly going to have a struggle with this band.
Nineteen-year-old Martin Phillipps writes The Chills’ songs, sings them, and plays guitar. He first surfaced in the Same, a seminal young Dunedin band who immediately showed they weren’t the same (as all the others) by singing songs “Thalidomide Baby”, about a lass who was fantastic even though her arms were made of plastic. Phillipps, squeaky-clean and just 16, didn’t actually write that one, but he did write a number of others and it was soon clear that something worthwhile was brewing.
The Chills brought that something to fruition in a stop-start two years battered by nine personnel changes, the last of which - caused by the tragic illness of drummer Martyn Bull side-lined the band in November.
Phillipps had not long found a new keyboardist to replace sister Rachel (through ads placed in Dunedin music shops which read “You’ve heard the record, you’ve seen the video, now – join the band”) and with vinyl and video rolling, the year looked to be ending in triumph. But Bull’s sudden departure left the band once again facing an uncertain future.
In November’s Radio with Pictures documentary on Dunedin, the conclusion drawn by Simon Morris that The Chills are next in a line already formed by Toy Love and the Clean was a logical one. Phillipps is the best of the city’s young songwriters, and in a musical scene where the songs often outstrip their writers’ ability to perform them, Phillipps working harder than most to ensure his band is at least reasonably professional.
Song endings are not left to chance, monitors are not abhorred. The songs seem to have come from all over. As someone who set up deckchairs for the under-agers out-Dunedin’s Captain Cook hotel while Toy Love raged inside, Phillipps not surprisingly draws considerable inspiration from that band. Bowie held fascination for a while and the Velvet Underground have left an inevitable mark. And Phillipps’ lyrics, well, who really knows where they come from.
“I can’t believe he could have possibly experienced all this,” mused Chris Knox, as he ran his eye down the word sheets during the recording of Dunedin Double. True. There were lines there that read as though they had come from the scrambled mind of someone who had taken too many drugs in 1969, but as Phillipps was six years old in 1969, then a space case he cannot possibly be. But as with the music, everything is being tried, and as a consequence, a ton of room is left in which to move next. There is no painting into the corner here.
The Chills were badly shaken by Bull’s tragedy, and one wonders just what the future holds for them. Phillipps and the band’s pivotal lieutenant Terry Moore (bass) are not overly keen to work under The Chills name with a new drummer — live, anyway - though it does seem likely that these two will be together in 1983 as part of some form of display case for Phillipps’ songs. At the very least there should be more records, exceptional records. As Flying Nun producer Doug Hood says: “The demand for Chills’ product is ludicrous — it’s frightening.”
December 1999
After drugs and depression, Martin Phillipps raises himself from the very nearly dead
A knock on the door. Martin Phillipps, cassette in hand. He has some obscure Randy Newman and Jimmy Webb covers I may not have heard. The cassette is neatly annotated on a dayglo background to make it stand out on a shelf.
Phillipps says there must be hundreds of his tapes out there somewhere, he is forever making them. He did one for me once, where every song had the word “rain” in the title. Essential for any music lover’s tape shelf, that. But it was good to get this one, because for some time now Martin Phillipps hasn’t been making tapes. For anyone.
“The plummet began about four years ago. I had gone up to Lake Hawea for one of my songwriting sabbaticals. And the four-track crashed. Then my backup walk-man recorder died. All I had was a tiny dictaphone. Everything just came to a head, all the fighting against everything, all the disappointments … I just lay down in front of the television for two days and went into a deep depression.”
The breakdown was probably well under way before the tape machines died at Lake Hawea. Phillipps reckons he lost 30 or 40 close friends through the demise of The Chills after the Soft Bomb album and tour, a demise he wrote about in the song “Sunburnt”. These are lines he is particularly proud of, lines that would prove as prophetic as they were resignatory.
I reached for the sun, but the sun burnt my hand
I climbed on a mountain then fell on the land
I stand for a time when the songs were not old
I stood in the starlight, but the starlight was cold
Back in Dunedin, Phillipps sought medical advice. “I tried Prozac and Aropax, but they didn’t work. Then I discovered opiates, which did.” He pauses, nervously fingering his glass of cardboard wine.
“There was a comfort there, a self. confidence I wasn’t finding anywhere else.
I thought I was in control for the first couple of years, and I did stop during that time, but I was burning off all my connections. It was the eye thing – people communicate very closely with their eyes, and when you look at eyes that are like lizards, you can’t make that connection anymore.” As the drugs took over, the evacuation of those close around him continued. His relationship broke up, and he wrapped his uninsured 1964 Rover Coupe – the one gift he gave himself from The Chills’ golden years – around a lamppost. A silly accident, nothing to do with drugs, but a telling one – the big English car with its BB numberplate had been as much an emotional shelter as his wintry Ravensbourne retreat.
Word had spread through the Dunedin music community of Phillipps’ slide. Apocryphal stories abounded, incidents here, sightings there. Most people were just plain baffled. Here, after all, was a man who had always led the support groups for other musicians laid low by hard-drug addiction, someone who faithfully replied to every single Chills fan letter from all over the world, counselling many of the writers through their traumas. And someone who was regularly at the hospital bedside of friend Chris Hughes - effectively in a coma since 1993 from a brain aneurysm – when most other Dunedin musicians couldn’t bear to visit. Phillips had Hughes transported to Chills gigs, played him Velvet Underground videos and, of course, made him tapes, in an attempt to rekindle the cerebral ashes.
Phillipps had read all the rock’n’roll books, he knew the score. Wasn’t he a little, um, experienced to fall suddenly down this particular hole?
“I don’t think anyone can understand what it is like to lose everyone and everything like I had. My music has always been deliberately personal, so if people walk away from that, then they’re walking away from me. I felt that I was edging slowly towards a deep dark insanity, and I challenge anyone not to take the route I chose under those pressures.”
Okay. But there’s an insular naivete that has tripped Phillipps up before - the ill-judged advertisement in Art New Zealand for a wealthy sponsor – and which will probably trip him up again. Allied to what image-makers would call a telegenetically sad face, which was charming at 18 but something less than that at 30, the Dunedin musician’s media PR hasn’t been great in recent times. After one television interview bemoaning The Chills’ misfortunes and the scabrous nature of the music industry, newsreader Anita McNaught turned to the camera and said, “Oh, poor, poor boy.”
“It’s definitely something I have been made aware of, and it’s been a horrible thing to learn, that it can come down so much to personal appearance over the music.”
For Phillipps, the music is always all-important. He says he never stopped making it, even when the walls were closing in.
So, there must have been some weird stuff written back then. “Very much, there were some pretty odd things. There was a burst of energy in songwriting ability to start with. It was music that I now realise was very self-centred. But, as with any period when I had used marijuana or hallucinogens to bring out facets of my songwriting, the editing process on the other side was still the same.”
By 1998 Phillipps clearly wasn’t in control. Everyone around him was saying the right things, but he wasn’t listening. Hamner Springs was mooted, but Phillipps baulked at the religious undertow he had been told was part of the hospital’s recovery programme.
“Opiates can be nice to be alone at home with, but you can’t move through society with them. Then I got hepatitis C, and it came to the point where I had just enough energy to get from my bed to the toilet a couple of times a day. I suddenly realised 1 was dying.”
Not surprising that at this point came epiphany.
“I had a dream where I was visited by these spiritual tohunga people who had me singing a chant in the guise it would lift a tapu. But when I finished, they were all laughing at me, and I saw they had conned me into singing this healing chant. I woke the next morning feeling extraordinarily vibrant. It also showed me that my music should be used for more positive things, not for the anger I was using it for with opiates.”
Word of Phillipps’ predicament had leaked overseas and Andy Holt, who runs The Chills’ English website, asked around the globe for messages of encouragement and support that were turned into a huge Internet Christmas card.
“That was amazing. For someone on the other side of the world to go to so much trouble for me touched me very deeply.”
Phillipps had made the decision to clean up, but there was a frustrating wait of a few months before he was accepted for the methadone programme earlier this year.
The friends began drifting back, his family had never been away - and he started making plans for a new Chills. A mutual friend linked him up with Todd Knudson and Rodney Howarth, two Dunedin musicians “with 60s garage-punk sensibilities and finesse”, and keyboardist James Dickson leapt out at Phillipps one day from a piano shop begging to join. In view of previous struggles assembling Chills bands, this one happened with ridiculous ease.
“The chemistry has been phenomenal, it’s my best band for years,” he says.
Phillipps is sticking with equal portions of old, recent, and brand new for live shows, but he retains an obsession with not letting old unrecorded songs die. He agrees the wider public gets confused with releases such as this year’s Sketch Book compilation of demos and, although there will be more sketchbooks, these will probably have an own label/website release. And he still hopes to record two volumes of early 1980s unrecorded Chills songs.
A more pressing problem is completing a home computer studio whereby he can access the “800 to a thousand” riffs he has inaccessibly logged on a mass of dictaphone tapes. “I think I do have a better ability than some for seeing links, for knowing that bit I did two months ago might fit into this bit I’m doing now. At the moment it’s hard to find those bits. Is it on tape B? Tape D? But I won’t let a good piece of music go, like some of my peers do.”
When news first broke of the millennium concerts with David Bowie and Split Enz, Phillipps was immediately on the phone to Neil Finn. He has been a lifelong Enz fan, and Bowie was his first pop idol.
Split Enz gave The Chills a hand up with South Island support gigs in the mid-80s.
It made musical sense, thought Phillipps, for the hand to he held out again. And for what became a Split Enz two-nighter in Auckland, Finn agreed.
The Chills are playing right up the country before the two big waterfront concerts on December 30 and 31. And a new album, with the long-held Silver Bullets title, will, he hopes, come from this lineup in time for the band’s 20th anniversary in October of next year.
In those often-tough decades, Phillipps has seen everything from Dunedin degradation to Los Angeles largesse. He went to the Madonna mansion, saw the $4 million paintings, dipped fingers into her pool. And he sat in the wreckage of his Rover in Ravensbourne eight years later wondering how things could possibly get any worse. He is slowly putting his life back together. He wryly admits he sold a healthy portion of his legendary record collection, but he says that it’s still so big it makes people gasp. And he has all the other collectables his completist personality demands, the Yowie toys, the Thunderbirds videos. He is working informally with the Dunedin City Council to improve resources for local music, with the same idealistic optimism he has for himself. And he’s making tapes for people again.
