On the evening of Sunday, July 28th, news began to break on social media about the death of Martin Phillipps, the founder of the celebrated Dunedin indie rock band The Chills, aged 61.
Over the last week, as Phillipps’s family, musical collaborators, friends and colleagues have paid tribute to him, I’ve found myself snatching stolen moments to revisit his extraordinary discography while thinking about the music and the man who devoted everything to it.
From the beginning, Phillipps’ ambitions were expansive.
In 1984, when The Chills only had a few singles to their name, he wrote to the acclaimed American children’s author and cartoonist Dr. Seuss to ask if he would illustrate their cover art. Although Seuss declined, he responded to Phillipps with a signed letter. The impossible was still out of reach but not beyond his sight. “Right from the start, when I was very young, I was always very much an escapist,” Phillipps reflected at the start of For as Long as it Takes – The Chills, a documentary Ian Garner produced for New Zealand’s TV3 in 1992.
A preternaturally gifted songwriter and a highly expressive guitarist, Phillipps first came to prominence in New Zealand during the rise of the Dunedin sound in the early 1980s. Having played organ on The Clean’s breakout hit “Tally Ho!” (1980) as a teenager, he was inextricably intertwined with the rise of Flying Run Records. Throughout his lifetime, he was a master of rolling, jangly pop songs where beauty, loss, innocence, and melancholia came together like the blinding beauty of blue skies and unexpected sunshine in the depths of winter.
Phillipps’ gift came from deep within. In a sense, it was innate, but it was also a product of his encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music, countless hours dedicated to his craft, and an uncompromising vision.
As the late Dunedin record store owner and writer Roy Colbert remembered in For as Long as it Takes, “Martin [Phillipps] started coming in here when he was about thirteen. He was a very shy, polite and even apologetic thirteen-year-old wanting David Bowie records. It soon became apparent he wanted every David Bowie record.”
Part of Phillipps’ uncompromising vision involved playing with the right musicians. Over his lifetime, the band cycled through over 20 different lineups. Regardless of the personal, social and professional costs, the songs came first. In a tributary conversation with RNZ’s Afternoons host Jesse Mulligan, the Auckland journalist Russell Brown noted, “It was a remarkable commitment to whatever was coming out of him.”
From a young age, Phillipps was all too intimate with the pains of grief and loss, which he worked diligently to transform into bittersweet beauty through song.
Presaging the success that lay beyond the isolation of Dunedin’s hills, singles such as “Rolling Moon”, “Pink Frost”, and “I Love My Leather Jacket” captivated listeners with Phillipps’ psychedelic stories of young love, friendship and tragic goodbyes. In the process, The Chills music helped sure up a growing understanding that New Zealand bands could operate outside of the major labels and still have real chart success.
By the mid-to-late 1980s, Phillipps and The Chills had solidified their early promise with the release of a compilation of their early Flying Nun material, titled Kaleidoscope World, and their debut album, Brave Worlds, which included fan favourites “House with a Hundred Rooms” and “Night of Chill Blue”. During those years, they became increasingly busy touring overseas where they found a cult audience across the UK, US and Europe.
Half a decade after Phillipps wrote to Dr. Seuss, The Chills signed a worldwide deal in the US with the Warner Brothers’ imprint, Slash Records. In 1990, their second album, Submarine Bells, reached the #1 spot on the New Zealand Albums Chart. That same year, one of the band’s signature singles, “Heavenly Pop Hit”, made its way to #2 in New Zealand as well.
Heavenly as it was, outside of his home country, “Heavenly Pop Hit” was the almost pop hit that should have been. Despite coming closer than many would have dreamed, The Chills didn’t break into the American mainstream. However, alongside their Flying Nun peers, they influenced the US college rock scene, helping to inspire the likes of Pavement, R.E.M., Yo La Tengo, and Elliott Smith.
During the first half of the 1990s, they released two more albums, Soft Bomb (1992) and Sunburnt (1996), before fading from view for a time. Over the following years, Phillipps contended with depression, drug and alcohol issues and Hepatitis C, topics he later addressed in Julia Parnell and Rob Curry’s candid and celebratory documentary film, The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps.
In the 2010s, Phillipps and The Chills reemerged internationally through several studio albums and live records, including Silver Bullets (2015) and Snow Bound (2018), released through the UK label Fire Records. Emboldened by well-received live performances across the UK, Europe and the US, Phillipps experienced a joyful late-career renaissance, culminating in the final album The Chills released before his passing, Scatterbrain (2021).
A twilight reflection on a lifetime spent chasing the otherworldly music he heard in his head, songs like “Hourglass” and “Destiny” were the work of an arch-melodist who was still able to tap into the wide-eyed innocence of youth as he came face-to-face with the inevitability of decay.
Intertwined with his songwriting pursuits, Phillipps had the mind of an archivist and a historian. He was an avid collector of music, VHS tapes, DVDs, concert posters, books and toys. Even when he finally joined the stars onstage, he never lost touch with the thrill of a new obsession.
As the Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad observed on X (formerly Twitter), “One of the endearing things about the late Martin Phillipps was that he wasn’t just a gifted songwriter and musician, he was a big music fan: he was One of Us. He knew the rush we get from hearing a favorite song. In fact, he named his band after that feeling: the Chills. RIP.”
