REAL GONE
Cold comfort
The Chills’ Martin Phillipps, New Zealand indie-pop flagbearer, left us on July 28.
Seeing beauty: Dunedin’s heavenly pop hitmaker Martin Phillipps in 1992.
Ebet Roberts/Getty
DUNEDIN, HOME to The Chills’ Martin Phillipps who died at the end of July, is an Antipodean Manchester: more often than not damp and grey; its nightlife attuned to a vibrant, student-led culture; rich in sport and musical heritage. But mostly damp and grey.
Phillipps believed Dunedin’s climate and geography helped shape his songwriting. Asked in 1986 if The Chills’ Pink Frost, a spectral single of intangible loss, longing, confusion and despair, was “a touch gloomy”, he replied: “But that’s where we live.”
Likewise, the brash, wide-eyed psychedelic pop of 1982 debut 45 Rolling Moon evoked the windswept, rugged hilltops and remote beaches of the Otago Peninsula, just a short drive outside Dunedin in old cars packed with stoned teenagers ready to party around all-night bonfires.
The son of Methodist minister Donald and his wife Barbara, and brother to two sisters, Martin Phillipps was born in Wellington on July 2, 1963. Although he formed The Chills in 1980, few outside New Zealand heard them until 1986 when Creation released Kaleidoscope World, a compilation of their early singles. Back home, meanwhile, The Chills were having Top 20 hits in spite of an alarming number of line-up changes. So many people played in The Chills over 40 years that fellow Flying Nun artist Shayne Carter once joked that the always-polite, self-deprecating Phillipps was “the least malevolent person to ever have 3,000 people go through their band”.
“The least malevolent person to ever have 3,000 people go through their band.”
Before the mid-’80s, few Kiwi groups ventured far beyond their own shores, but as the band most likely to take the lo-fi ‘Dunedin Sound’ international, Phillipps always looked to a far-distant horizon. So in 1987, after I Love My Leather Jacket hit Number 25 on the UK Independent Singles chart, he moved the group to London and recorded debut album Brave Words.
Heavenly Pop Hit from 1990’s Submarine Bells brought The Chills within a whisker of Top Of The Pops, but mainstream success never materialised, and recording 1992’s Soft Bomb in LA proved disastrous. Phillipps gained a heroin habit and lost not just his band but the sense of wonder that made his name. Returning to Dunedin, broke and demoralised, he contracted hepatitis C from a shared needle and, after a breakdown, was caught shoplifting cheese and a banana milk.
It was a rock-bottom turning point. Diagnosed with stage four hepatitis and given maybe a year before it mutated into terminal liver cancer, rehab and an extraordinary experimental drug programme would see him free of both addiction and the disease. It also led to a creative rehabilitation, and The Chills went on to release three remarkable LPs, particularly 2015’s ‘comeback’ Silver Bullets, where Phillipps wrote about facing his mortality and fallibilities.