My Vanished Friend: Remembering Martin Phillipps of The Chills
Reflecting on the career of New Zealand’s greatest songwriter
Martin Phillipps knew loss well.
The second half of the chorus of “I Love My Leather Jacket” – one of the handful of hits his beloved band The Chills scored for New Zealand’s pioneering indie label Flying Nun – goes “I love my vanished friend.”
The leather jacket in question was a token from the vanished friend in question, bandmate Martyn Bull, who’d succumbed to illness in 1983. Phillipps would lose over a dozen additional Chills, proving the only constant, to less tragic circumstances over decades of fitful existence. Meanwhile the artist, a slowly recovering addict, would lose swathes of time. A 2004 EP called Stand By came eight years after the previous Chills album, and legions of ardent fans stood by for eleven years, before the disarmingly beautiful Silver Bullets kicked off a comely trilogy of comeback albums.
This morning brought with it the horrible news that these albums, which included 2018’s Snowbound and 2021’s Scatterbrain, would be the last of their like. A sufferer of Hepatitis C, Phillipps’ heath had teetered on a mortal edge numerous times. He has now passed away, at only 61. Only ever as chill as his restless, sleeve-bound heart would allow, Phillipps had been tirelessly touring with the rejuvenated Chills for years – in 2019, I caught his spirited first Stateside show in two decades in Brooklyn. Many of those I shared that packed room with, singing loudly along to favorite after favorite, will be spending a tearful day over many brilliant, undersung records initialed S.B.. For listeners yet to thrill to The Chills’ wondrous body of work, all but 1996 Sunburnt and a few stray collections are available for streaming.
VIDEO: The Chills “I Love My Leather Jacket”
As was Phillipps’ wont, the band took a while to find its sound – yet the one it arrived with was a classic. Fitting in handsomely with Flying Nun’s scrappy roster of homegrown guitar-pluckers and cheap keyboard-plunkers, The Chills’ tracks from the Dunedin Double EP feel as elusive and ethereal as dreams – yet also like fragile, tangible things, retrieved crumpled and faded from between the pages of an old library’s dusty deep cuts. Phillipps was a daring, ambitious artist, but he had a perpetually uncomfortable air about him. And on those first records, his voice is scarcely there, bashfully buried in in the lower range near his speaking voice. But as captivating single after captivating single followed – like the arresting murder ballad “Pink Frost” – he polished his janky jangle pop into a long string of the rarest gems.
The first two long-playing records in the Chills’ discography are total classics, full stop. The compilation Kaleidoscope World, which collected sweet mystery after sweet mystery from that first four-year trickle of Flying Nun fragments, grew over years of reissues from eight to eighteen tracks, and only got better. And Brave Words, unavailable for most of the quarter century after its release, suffered a botched master that left its sound hopelessly dim – but if you could get the songs loud enough, all of them soared. (Phillipps finally fulfilled his long-held desire to correct and reissue the record last year). But it was with his first major label LP (for Slash) in 1990, Submarine Bells, that Phillipps’ pop finally emerged from its devoted obscurity. Cryptic words stayed poetic but grew bravely clearer – as did the artist’s voice, whose built-in creak could melt your heart with the well-chosen upward leap of an octave.
Embracing the sounds of the time, Submarine Bells came with a luminescent sheen, and readier pop concessions than many of Phillipps’ newly major-leaguing indie peers – kindred spirits the Go-Betweens had buckled out of the race only two years earlier under the weight of label “encouragement”. So Bells was a chimera, an album that gave up countless deep rewards over years of instantly satisfying replays. Though he had real-life acquaintanceship with being a fuckup, Phillipps’ lyrics evinced a seemingly bottomless emotional wisdom; he could write about politics and mortality as trenchantly and incisively as anyone. He upped the expensive frosting for his next try, Soft Bomb, which had even more songs, and thus even more great songs, than Bells. Bomb made four for four masterpieces in ten years.
But none had sold enough to make the Chills a household name, and the candidly strung-out Sunburnt followed. Phillipps seemed as lost in the late-‘90s industry confusion as any aging dinosaur. He put out a rarities compilation and a box set, each of which gave up gems and the need for an editor (not to mention graphic designer), but new music came hard as the artist agonized through the darkest parts of his recovery. Stand By is, to these years, an anomaly in his catalogue – it’s simply bad, a botched and bewildered affair. Thankfully, it was only an EP. Over a decade later, Silver Bullets provided an uncommonly gratifying level of that intense relief you feel when your favorite band finally comes back, as strong as ever.
“We made mistakes and we caused heartache/woke up, it was time to atone,” sang Phillipps on his victory-lap album, right after noting “even bad sugar makes the bitter taste sweet”, over nearly the same sweet, stalwart chords. As is unsparingly explored in an excellent (and aptly long-gestating) 2019 documentary, The Chills: the Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, the band’s leader had always wore a kind of weary darkness on his countenance, cut through by a sense of almost childlike wonder and hope. Sometimes his messages of positivity verge into the saccharine, but they’re couched in such melancholy they seem hard-won, and more rousing as a result. There’s so much dread, and so much optimism to shrewdly counter it, throughout Submarine Bells. In the first song, Phillipps is newly dead.
VIDEO: The Chills “Heavenly Pop Hit”
“Heavenly Pop Hit” is a torrent of posthumous words over unstoppably sunny music, and simply put, one of the most incredible songs ever written. “Each evening the sun sets in five billion places/seen by ten billion eyes set in five billion faces/then they close in a daze and wait for the dawning/but the daylight and sunrise are brighter in our eyes”. (Getting through the unbroken stream of words was no mean feat onstage). “Once we were damned, now I guess we are angels,” muses Phillipps’ new ghost, coming to in, and to grips with, a strange yet undeniably heavenly afterlife. Deeper into the song he starts testing out his new powers – “we can swoop low on trees, or we sweep under carpets/we can dive into suns, though it’s not recommended”. It makes death sound enviable, and can prove a tonic in times of fresh grief, when that newly vacant space hurts you the worst. Perhaps
Phillipps is hovering around some sun somewhere out there right now, cheekily contemplating his first plunge.
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