Heavenly pop loss: Russell Brown on the death of Martin Phillipps
Goodbye, boy Genius: Martin Phillipps died unexpectedly a week ago at the age of 61. Photo / Chris Sullivan
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.