I’m not sure how to write about the death of Martin Phillipps, a man I never met and who made things I can barely describe. And so what follows might be thought idiosyncratic. So be it. I respect Phillipps too much to describe his music, or his death, with cliches – to smother his work with the gloss of hacky sentimentality.
Martin Phillipps made songs. Great songs, middling songs, dull songs. The first song of his that I heard was “Rolling Moon”, when I was well into my twenties, but it was strange how it evoked the first time I’d heard Rubber Soul as a kid. My parents weren’t really into music, but had collected a few records nonetheless, and when I got interested in their dusty artefacts, and started playing them alone, I remember the feeling of hearing “Norwegian Wood” for the first time: it was unsettlingly, but thrillingly, weird.
That was the feeling I had as a boy. Not pleasure, exactly, but some kind of electric discomfort that later evolved into pleasure. But at the time, I didn’t have the knowledge, the vocabulary, for assessing The Beatles’ music – though I’m certain that as naïve as I was, and as incapable of placing the band in a larger context of popular music, that I instinctually registered their heroic oddness.
If I remember first receiving “Hey Jude” rapturously, like a miracle, “Norwegian Wood” was bewitching but sinister (the melodic, mid-career experimentalism of The Beatles was strangely confronting to me as a boy).
And so it was that I received “Rolling Moon”. I should’ve been too old to find strange shivers, but I did. Objectively, here was simply some well-crafted jangle-pop by an obscure depressive from another era. But it was, of course, much more – there was something distinctively moody in how Phillipps complemented the brightness with solemnity; poppy licks with despairing lyrics. The Chills’ second single was about a man who’s accidentally(?) killed his girlfriend – or, at the very least, woken to find her dying beside him.
Even if you could sometimes hear Ray Davies in the music of The Chills, most of the songs were heavy with grief or the sense of a man in fearful thrall to his own sensitivity. Which I suppose was the signature of early Chills – the frisson of pop craft meeting psychological gloom.
A familiar story blighted Phillipps: his music would slowly acquire a cult following, but not before he suffered the bitterness of sustained obscurity. His early run of songs, from the 1980s to early ‘90s, was inspired – but no-one outside of New Zealand really cared. Tours went largely unwatched; impatient record labels abandoned them. He lost his good mate – the Chills drummer, Martyn Bull – to leukaemia in 1983. Bull was just 22.
There was bad luck and there was injustice – and then there was Phillipps himself. Maniacally committed to his craft, his perfectionism and jealously-defended visions ensured that the band’s line-up became comically revolving. “I’m not going to sacrifice the quality for just a bit of team spirit,” he once said.
Often aloof, dour, and aggrieved, Phillipps could not depend upon his own charm to help The Chills’ commercial fortunes. Eventually, his commitment to music yielded to heroin, and 1996’s middling Sunburnt would be the last album they released until 2015.
In 2019, an intimate but low-key documentary about Phillipps was released. And there it was again: that fragility. The border between Phillipps and the world seemed gossamer thin. A membrane made not for protection, but the channelling and reflection of pronounced sensitivity.
In The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, we see him driving around Dunedin in a beat-up car and sharing his modest home that’s stuffed with books, records, DVDs and comics. He was an enthusiastic collector of culture, and also a fastidious archivist of The Chills, and if Phillipps was not terribly animated in person, he’s candid before these cameras, which he consents to following him to doctor’s clinics. Alcoholism has fucked his liver; so too the advanced Hep C he contracted when sharing an infected syringe. We watch as he’s told the severity of the infection, and informed of the 30 percent chance that he’ll be dead within a year. Should he start drinking again, he’s warned, those odds increase a lot more.
I had assumed after watching the film that Phillipps had dodged premature death – it turns out it was only modestly deferred. But I was touched by an interview he gave after the film’s release. After watching the documentary, he said that he was struck by how odd he was – and how it had taken the intimate footage for him to make personal adjustments.
As it was, he did not have much time to act upon this revelation – to change from the reflection he saw in the mirror. He died suddenly last month, aged 61. At least, after The Chills’ revival in 2015, great music continued. The production was shinier, the mysterious moodiness lost, but there were still impressively shimmering melodies. Silver Bullets and Snow Bound both contained gems, and I cherish the gig of theirs I saw in 2016.
“I was irritated from early in my career by pop music being written off as superficial, when some of the most moving experiences I had were listening to beautiful melodies and finely-honed lyrics,” he told KCRW in 2022. “And they stay forever. It doesn’t matter what we do now as The Chills. The stuff that really moves people is related to memories, and the general feeling of being younger. You can never change that.”