Mid-October, thousands of items once belonging to Martin Phillipps were auctioned off in his hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand. Phillipps founded the indie rock group The Chills in 1980, quickly found critical respect but sustained commercial indifference, and was the only constant presence in a band that was frequently and bitterly reconstituting itself.
In July 2024, Phillipps died suddenly from undisclosed causes. He was 61.
A pop-culture nut, the obsessiveness of Phillipps’ collecting – though “hoarding” might be the better word – was evident in the 2019 documentary The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps. The camera spends much time in Phillipps’ modest but busy home, stuffed as it is with figurines, comics, pulp fiction, old movie posters and vintage music gear.
There are boxes and boxes stuffed with tacky toys, the type of stuff you might find in a McDonald’s Happy Meal, and as we watch him sort through it all he seems newly astonished at his own compulsions – as if he’s woken from a long dream.
Inexplicably, there’s a whole drawer stuffed with filthy troll dolls; an ex-heroin addict, he displays his old fit bag stuffed with the drug’s paraphernalia and which he has been unwilling or incapable of disposing.
Phillipps was prompted into this sorting and culling – and incidental pilgrimage to his past – via a suggestion from the Tūhura Otago Museum: they would love to create a Chills exhibition, and might he loan them a selection of pertinent items?
It’s an intimate documentary, of which the preparation for the exhibition is only a part. There’s the telling of the sad, fractious history of the band – and a legion of ex-members to help tell it – all of which is intercut with Phillipps’ current-day trips to the specialist who’s treating his advanced hepatitis C. Likely contracted when he pricked his finger on a contaminated syringe, the virus combined with his alcoholism to render his liver dangerously dysfunctional. “If you do keep drinking, Martin, you will die,” his doctor tells him.
This strange man – plump, dour and softly spoken, a sort of middle-aged Charlie Brown – gives no indication of being the cultish rock star whose song “Pink Frost” Iggy Pop once called fine art.
The first Chills song I ever heard was “Rolling Moon”, a diamond of jangle pop. It was their first single, released in 1982, and my entry to the simultaneously melodic and melancholy songwriting of Martin Phillipps. This would become the signature of early Chills songs: a distinctive meeting of shimmering pop-craft with atmospheric despair. Their second single, the beloved “Pink Frost”, was about a man who accidentally kills his partner in his sleep. Phillipps’ antecedents seemed to be Syd Barrett, Ray Davies and Nick Drake – two of whom were fatally doomed souls.
“Wet Blanket” from their first studio album Brave Words (1987) is a song of remarkable simplicity but awesome power. Submarine Bells (1990) is a cult classic, and the unfairly derided follow-up, Soft Bomb (1992), contains treasures like “Double Summer”, “Sleeping Giants” and “Male Monster from the Id”.
But Phillipps was an aloof perfectionist and intolerant of his bandmates’ songs or suggestions. His self-absorption was impervious and his jealously guarded visions made for an exceptionally unstable band that experienced more than 20 different line-ups.
There was bitterness, exhaustion, addiction. Their signing in 1990 to US label Slash Records came at a time when the complementary college rock sound of R.E.M., say, or The Vulgar Boatmen, was being replaced in popularity with grunge, and the grand promise of breaking into the American market was quickly met with tumbleweeds. It probably didn’t help that Phillipps’ writing talent was not matched with charisma.
Soft Bomb found favourable reviews in the States, notably from The New York Times and The Village Voice’s influential Robert Christgau, but it sold sweet fuck-all and their tour was met with public apathy.
The label’s optimism was not rewarded. Slash never came close recouping its massive promotional expenditure, and it cut the band loose. Once more, The Chills disintegrated, and Phillipps returned to New Zealand to lick his wounds and find refuge in the end of a needle. A forgettable album was released in 1996 and then nothing for almost 20 years.
2015’s Silver Bullets had no right being as good as it was. Outside New Zealand, the world had forgotten Martin Phillipps, and perhaps Martin Phillipps had forgotten his own talents in the long funk of addiction and self-pity. Brightly produced, Silver Bullets was politically earnest, structurally ambitious and Phillipps’ melodic genius was recovered. I saw them play in January 2016, and it was magnificent.
Two albums followed, inferior to Bullets but containing their own gems, and The Chills also found its most stable composition – the line-up was unchanged, I think, for at least the last five years of the band. Phillipps had rediscovered his talents, energy, equanimity. He was making amends and making records.
If the 2019 documentary opens with a grim prognosis, it closes optimistically: Phillipps is told that the hep C treatment has been successful – there’s no meaningful measure of the virus. If he maintains a healthy lifestyle, he’s told, there’s no reason why he can’t live ’til 90.
So the announcement of his sudden death stunned me. I thought he might’ve been out of the woods.
I listened to the auction online and had my laptop’s cursor poised upon the bid button. I was paddle number 1065. How strange to be trying to claim material pieces of Phillipps’ life. And how strange to be competitively engaged with other fans, unknown and unseen, for these pieces.
In the weeks before, I’d studied the lots and made my initial bids. I had no interest in the cartons of old Phantom comics or the bundles of James Bond novels. Nor the plastic aliens, Austin Powers posters or the “plastic mannequin’s head with real human hair”.
The acoustic guitar used in the film clip to “Kaleidoscope World”, its body still bearing the stripes made from green electrical tape that Phillipps had applied, was desirable but personally too expensive (it was the item that sold for the most money, a modest NZ$3800).
No, what I had my eye on were several lots comprised of Chills tour posters. I wanted only one, but they were typically sold in bundles, thus lifting the price beyond what was comfortable.
But I was determined to claim something, my vague sense of parasitism conveniently cushioned by the knowledge that the money raised would all be donated to charity. And so I successfully engaged in a brief bidding war with one other for a “vintage yellow metal sign” which reads “MP Grotto” in black type. NZ$120, plus a shipping cost I’m anxious to say is still unknown. Nor do I know the sign’s dimensions. Presumably this wasn’t custom-made, and the coincidence of the initials compelled Phillipps to purchase it. But I don’t know. Maybe one day I will.
Martin Phillipps didn’t make 90. He didn’t come close. He left no widow or grieving partner. He left no children. He lived alone and drove a shitty car. He made art in his backyard from the mummified bodies of long dead cats, rats and birds, which he spraypainted with day-glo colours.
But I, mere fan, had surmised his health from superficial or incomplete data. And the music. “Bad Sugar”, the opening track of 2018’s Snow Bound, might fit into a list of the best 20 songs he ever wrote.
So now I own, but don’t yet possess, a tin sign that once belonged to him. The most significant cull of his collection occurred in death. When the sign arrives, I’ll cherish it: it’ll feature here in my loft alongside the painting of Roy Ayers and the framed Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald album cover. Among the framed Nixon campaign poster and counterfeit Baggy Green and my daughter’s painting of cheerful butterflies. It will fit in somewhere among my stuff. The stuff that will surround me until my own death, the value of which may, or may not, transfer to others. Of course, Phillipps’ greatest public bequeathment is the music and we need no souvenirs to enjoy it.
“I was irritated from early in my career by pop music being written off as superficial, when some of the most moving experiences I had were listening to beautiful melodies and finely honed lyrics,” he told KCRW in 2022. “And they stay forever. It doesn’t matter what we do now as The Chills. The stuff that really moves people is related to memories and the general feeling of being younger. You can never change that.”
No, you can’t – not when you’ve penned several imperishable tunes. Songs that will long shuttle me to ecstasy and old memories, and, when I’m shuttled there, I might look at that “yellow vintage sign” and smile.