On The Chills: “Not for the last time, they seemed to have the only song that could scratch the itch in my teenage soul.”
I first became aware of Martin Phillipps and The Chills one Thursday evening in 1986. Andy Kershaw played the New Zealand group’s single Rolling Moon on his weekly BBC Radio 1 show. Usually, I’d make sense of a new song by comparing it to other songs that sounded a bit like it. But whatever Rolling Moon evoked, it certainly wasn’t other songs. It sounded like youthful wanderlust, powered by fuzzy-felt organs and breathless cymbal crashes. It sounded like the belief that elsewhere in the future had to be better than here and now, especially when you had like-minded spirits onside: “And the rolling moon rocks on by / We dance until we start to cry / We’ve got feverish sweat and aching bones / Please, oh God, don’t take us home.” I was 16. Not for the last time, The Chills seemed to have the only song that, in that moment, could scratch the itch in my teenage soul.
By the end of the year, I’d become a full-on fan. The three Chills songs on the double-disc, four-group 12-inch Dunedin EP released by their label Flying Nun revealed in Martin an earnest, wide-eyed wonder that chimed with the defining energy of British indiepop in the mid-80s. This music was antithetical to the predatory energy of rock. The woozy Frantic Drift attached notes, chords and words to soft ecstatic haze you feel when slipping into slumber beside the person you love. Kaleidoscope World, like so many of Martin’s early songs bounded blissfully along in the belief that the forever love of fairytales, films and bubblegum pop songs was there for the taking if you merely chose to believe it was. The song also gave its name to a 1986 anthology which gathered together Chills recordings from the preceding years. For a lot of British fans, this represented the first chance to own their 1984 single Pink Frost — which stands comparison to Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers’ Hospital and Van Morrison’s T.B. Sheets in the tradition of songs whose protagonist can scarcely deal with the darkness into which they’ve been thrust at such a young age.
A few months after the release of that record, I got to see The Chills in action and meet Martin Phillipps for the first time. They had booked some British dates to coincide with the release of their first “proper” album Brave Words. Asked to interview Martin for a short-lived indie music monthly called Underground, I turned up to the Birmingham venue they’d been booked to play. The Mermaid was a grotty red-brick Victorian pub about two miles out of the city centre. The indie bands that played in the function room upstairs usually drew a decent crowd. But on the weekday night where The Chills were due to play, roughly a dozen paying punters were present in the room to watch Martin lead from the front with a performance of spittle-flecked urgency.
The visceral self-flagellation of Look For The Good In Others And They’ll See The Good In You — a list of lessons learned too late in the day to save the relationship described in the song — was all the more startling for the emptiness of the room in which it was delivered. An almost literal howl into the void. No less extraordinary was Wet Blanket. There may be better songs written in the space between the declaration of love and the reciprocation of that declaration, but I’m not sure you could fill one side of a C60 tape with them. Somehow the mood of the evening was compounded by the manner of my encounter with Martin prior to that performance. Perched on the end of the flimsy fold-out camp bed laid on by the venue for visiting musicians who couldn’t afford a hotel, his mood was one of shrugging fatalism. This was the path he had long since chosen. Underattended nights like this one weren’t going to change his mind at this stage.
Twenty-eight years would elapse until our next encounter. Between those two points, The Chills had a brief shot at major-label success and Martin was right to feel aggrieved that Heavenly Pop Hit, the lead single from 1990’s Submarine Bells failed to push him over the line. In 2015, when I interviewed him for the show I host for Soho Radio show, he’d just reconvened The Chills with Silver Bullets — an album which suggested he’d had enough time to reflect on the qualities that made those early releases so uniquely otherworldly and was able to reawaken them for his best set of songs since Brave Words.
He sounded inspired by the wave of new bands emerging from Dunedin — The Shifting Sands, The Prophet Hens — and in particular by the regard in which they held The Chills. Inevitably, since reading the news about Martin’s sudden passing yesterday, his music hasn’t left my record player. Among the first songs that came on when I searched for The Chills was I Love My Leather Jacket — written about the garment Martin wore to remember the deceased friend who left it to him. And now, it’s our immeasurably good fortune that we have so much more by which to remember this soft-spoken genius. The needle drops on any number of heavenly pop hits in a more just parallel universe and all is momentarily well with the world: “Don’t need a red lightbulb / I can see Mars / We got a stereo and electric guitars / The sounds that we make / Echo on through our kaleidoscope world.” Safe travels Martin.
