Saying Goodbye to the Chills’ Martin Phillipps, a Master of Pained Indie-Rock Beauty

Farewell to the great Martin Phillipps, the New Zealand indie-rock pioneer of the Chills. He was one of the most brilliant songwriters of his era, with a string of Eighties and Nineties guitar classics: “Pink Frost,” “I Love My Leather Jacket,” “Heavenly Pop Hit,” “The Great Escape,” so many more. Phillipps had battled liver disease for years and recently entered a Dunedin hospital, but his unexpected death, at only 61, is a real loss. His tunes were full of alienation and misery, yet with his own distinct touch of human warmth. Once you heard the moody guitar splendor of “Rolling Moon” or “House With a Hundred Rooms,” it wasn’t a sound you could forget. 

The Chills rose from the New Zealand rock underground, based around the Dunedin label Flying Nun Records, one of the most innovative and influential indie labels ever. The Clean kicked off the Flying Nun scene with their 1980 single “Tally Ho,” featuring a teenage Phillipps on organ. The Kiwi bands kept thriving in the Eighties, while the rest of the world paid no attention, with free spirits like the Verlaines, the Bats, Tall Dwarfs, Bailter Space, the Great Unwashed, Snapper, and more. Word about these bands began to spread in the U.S. on a grass-roots, take-a-zine/make-a-tape level, with the Chills lighting the way. 

Phillipps had an amazing hot streak from 1982 to 1993 — on a good day, he could hang with Lou Reed or Ray Davies in their prime. He was writing jagged guitar songs that had the edge of the Velvet Underground, but with a New Zealand sense of weirdo pastoral — a Lou Reed reborn on an island where sheep outnumbered humans 22 to one. Alas, it was the wrongest possible moment for his kind of songwriting to reach any broad audience. If he’d begun six years earlier, or six years later, his tunes could have become the heavenly pop hits he always dreamed about. 

But the Chills had a deep impact, especially on American indie rockers like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Wilco. He sang about loneliness like a guy who knew he was born to be the recluse from the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” yet instead of moping, resolved to spend his life writing songs on that same level of pained beauty.

Even in his early days, he was obsessed with grief and loss. “I Love My Leather Jacket,” from 1986, might be his most poignant tune — it comes on like a scruffy, upbeat fuzz-guitar groove, yet he’s wearing his leather jacket because it belonged to his dead friend, who left it behind. “I love my leather jacket, and I wear it all the tiiiiiime” — you could sing along with that irresistible hook, whether or not you noticed the darkness in it. “It’s the only concrete link with an absent friend,” Phillipps sang, with no irony at all. “A symbol I can wear till we meet again/Or it’s a weight around my neck while the owner’s free/Both protector and reminder of mortality.” 

Who the hell sings this way about a leather jacket? Who the hell sings this way about death? Who wouldn’t want their friends to remember them this way? Who wouldn’t want to have a friend worth mourning like this? And all this in a three-minute post-punk guitar rave that hops like “Roadrunner” or “Dirty Water”? This guy was in a league of his own.

Like nearly every American indie kid who flipped for the Chills in the Eighties, I heard them because a friend put a song on a tape — “Pink Frost,” their 1984 death-trip classic. The song could have turned out overwrought and hokey (a man wakes up to find his lover dying in his arms), but that’s not how it sounds. The real story is in Phillipps ghostly guitar, the slow-burn terror in his voice, the urgent drums. “Pink Frost” really does feel like a nightmare, which is why it remains their most famous moment. Drummer Martyn Bull would soon died from leukemia; he’s the friend who left Phillipps the leather jacket.

But compared to the cool U.S./U.K. bands of the day, the Chills sounded shockingly earnest and irony-free. “Rolling Moon” sums up their playful spirit of young adventure, gazing up at the night sky. “The rolling moon rocks on by,” Phillipps sings. “We dance until we start to cry/We’ve got feverish sweat and aching bones/Please, oh, God, don’t take us home.” It’s a highlight of Kaleidoscope World, their essential 1986 singles collection.The title tune is his invitation to fly off in a space capsule, two lovers adrift in the cosmos. 

Brave Words, their proper debut, has melancholic gems like “Wet Blanket” and “Night of Chill Blue.” The 1987 single “House With a Hundred Rooms” is a gorgeously wistful ode to getting lost inside your own imagination. Anyone else would have called it “House of a Hundred Rooms,” but the clunkier, more everyday “with” is a wonderfully anti-dramatic Martin Phillipps touch. “The Great Escape” is the hushed B-side confession of a loner yearning to break free from his nothing life.

Seeing the Chills live, it was impossible to miss the joy all over Phillipps’ face as he sang these miserable songs. The first time I saw them (October 1988, Boston, the Paradise) I couldn’t believe how he smiled, especially when all his angst blew up into the openhearted guitar rush of “Oncoming Day.” These songs all hold up smashingly — they made a big comeback for me in the early days of the pandemic. That whole claustrophobic spring of 2020, I went days at a time listening obsessively to the Chills, especially my battered old cassette with Brave Words on one side and the Verlaines’ Juvenilia on the other.

The closest they ever came to a U.S. breakthrough was the damn-near-perfect Submarine Bells, in 1990, going all the way with his pet theme of grief. The album’s punch line, hidden near the end: “Yeah, the world might end/But at least it hasn’t/No, at least it hasn’t.” “Heavenly Pop Hit” was a sly fantasy of death and the afterlife, with a Beach Boys-worthy “dum-de-dum dum” hook. But Phillipps meant just what he said when he offered the chorus, “It’s a heavenly pop hit, if anyone wants it.” 

Soft Bomb squashed the Chills’ career momentum, partly because of the terrible single “Male Monster From the Id,” partly because of the inept sequencing (it’s crazy how big a difference that made in those days). But it has keepers like the piano ballad “Song for Randy Newman Etc,” where Phillipps yearns to emulate his favorite eccentric cult heroes — Nick Drake, Brian Wilson, Scott Walker. (The title was misleading, given that Phillips had not a drop of Randy Newman’s smart-ass irony, and also that Newman was trading in his “long-suffering underrated satirist” image for “Disney-soundtrack kingpin.”) The 1996 Sunburnt was a sign of life, but Phillipps seemed to drop out of sight, as far as the rest of the world could tell. 

The full story came out in the powerful 2019 documentary, The Chills: The Triumph and the Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, a harrowing portrait of his disastrous years lost to drug addiction, and his struggle with hepatitis C. He returned in the 2010s for two worthy albums, Silver Bullets and Snow Bound. Seeing him back onstage in 2019, in Brooklyn, looking hale, in front of adoring fans who’d waited years for this gig — it was a jubilant experience. “I stand and the sound goes straight through my body,” Martin sang, in “Heavenly Pop Hit,” a tune from his youth that now felt like a hard-earned victory shout. “I’m growing in stages and have been for ages/Just singing and floating and freeeee!”

A poignant moment, after all his tribulations over the years. Yet he sang every line with his boyish smile. I never once saw him sing “Heavenly Pop Hit” without that smile on his face. Or on mine. Moments like that, songs like that, were his gift to the world, and they’re the reason the world is mourning for him now. Thanks, Martin Phillipps — your songs are leather jackets that will be worn for years to come.