MARTIN PHILLIPPS, REMEMBERED AND RESPECTED (2024): Pop hits for those that still want them

Like most people, I knew Martin Phillipps from a distance: me down there as just a face in the crowd and him up there under the lights, wringing out his songs with a passionate intensity or delighting in their uplifting pop quality.

Martin wrote some of the most engaging and endearing songs in popular music, not just in this country but in the world.

And the breadth of his lyrical intellect and melodic gifts was evident right at the start of his career with the Chills in 1980.

When I was teaching at the university I would consider it a pleasure and a privilege to introduce students to Martin's music in just four songs: Pink Frost, I Love My Leather Jacket, Kaleidoscope World and Heavenly Pop Hit.

These might seem obvious to longtime fans who would pull out much more obscure items from his body of work, but as a handy introduction look at what they deliver: a moody and brooding soundscape of hypnotic lyrics; punk anger and love for the vanished friend; liberating psychedelic pop and a classic song of ascending and descending melodic lines which pull you in and upward. (Heavenly Pop Hit always made me think of the Beach Boys' Heroes and Villains for the same tidal flow of melody.)

Just four songs, but from each you could follow Martin's music in many directions.

I interviewed him a few times and the one thing you could never accuse him of was guile: Martin was honest about himself, his ambitions and his shortcomings if that subject was broached.

In a world where musicians frequently cloak themselves in the myth of the outsider or of being different, Martin – who was also all that – just spoke from the heart and what he believed, often to his own cost.

His candour was evident in the 2019 documentary The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps.

I said to someone recently there was a childlike quality to Martin which manifested itself in that candour sometimes verging on the naive, and especially in his collecting of comics, records, toys, films on VHS or DVD . . .

It was as if here was the way he could define himself, not the possessions per se but as signal: “Look at these and you will see who I am”.

And he knew who he was and where he wanted to be. The first time I interviewed him he quickly said, "two Ls and two Ps" so I'd get it right. 

After the depths of the Nineties and early 2000s, it was heartening to see Martin and his stable line-up of Chills enjoying success. He was recording and releasing albums again (through Fire in the UK) and the band was touring regularly and winning favourable reviews, albeit playing to sometimes smaller audiences than they deserved.

But the recent SB series of albums – Silver Bullets, Snow Bound, Scatterbrain and the live Somewhere Beautiful – contained excellent songs, some the equal of those early days when their music sounded fresh and original. Because it was.

When I spoke with him in 2018 about Snow Blind he was in an excellent mood, and as always completely candid. 

And how pleased Martin must have been to see Brave Words and the Kaleidoscope World compilation remixed and appearing last year.

Things seemed to be going well – although he was selling off memorabilia online which probably hurt him deeply.

But Martin had been to the bottom many times, not the least when I interviewed him in 1992.

He'd announced the end of the Chills on-stage in New York (to the shock and surprise of the band members) and flown home, depressed, broke and disheartened.

You'd think he'd hide away but, straight off the plane, he and I went to the Occidental pub in Auckland's Vulcan Lane, a regular haunt of journalists and Flying Nun people whose office was just around the corner on Queen Street.

My story started, “Martin Phillipps looks bad. His skin is pasty, he’s unshaven and his eyes look like an owls in an arc light. He’s been up for 24 hours and although it’s only lunchtime he’s going to hang out until the Iron Maiden concert that night. He’s tired ... though an 18-hour flight from the States does that to anyone. But it’s more than that.

“Back there in America only days before, Phillipps has left the corpse of his 12-year dream, the Chills.

“He cups the pint of beer he will intermittently sip for the next hour or so and talks of a dream gone sour . . .” 

Martin spoke of his disappointments, self-belief, the shortcomings of the band members who he'd put on a wage so they would do their best . . .

It was an awful experience for me – when he said former band members would say their experience with him wasn't that bad I checked, they didn't say that – but cathartic for him in a way.

It was that no-filter lack of guile. He just said it, whatever was going through his head. He knew how he was perceived: the maddening search for elusive perfection which ground down all those people who had passed through the ranks of the Chills . . .

He went back to Dunedin and as we know life took a very dark turn for a long time. No need to rake up those old ashes.

Martin Phillipps was one of the most gifted songwriters to emerge from this country and his songs will endure long after that first generation of Flying Nun fans have gone into retirement homes with their memories.

When I took him and the Chills around the Volume: Making Music in Aotearoa exhibition at the Auckland War Memorial Museum -- where the famous leather jacket was displayed -- he was humble and modest about being included.

That was the private side of Martin, most of us only saw the public side. 

Those faces in the crowd around me were all looking in admiration at the same small  figure up there under the lights and we were willing him on.

We yearned for his success, applauded when it came – as it often did – and were saddened when life for him turned bad and damaging.

But in recent years we could applaud again, literally, when Martin Phillipps and the Chills got back up there under the lights and once again he wove his magic with a passionate intensity or delighting in the songs' uplifting pop quality.

Thank you Martin.

You will be much missed.