Martin Phillipps, The Chills, Laneway Auckland 2017. Photo by Stella Gardiner

Read: Martin Phillipps interview, June 2024 – part one

Read: Martin Phillipps interview, June 2024 – part two

In June 2024 when Martin and I talked, The Chills had recently finished recording an album called Springboard: Early Unrecorded Songs, songs Martin Phillipps wrote in his late teens and early twenties. Martin invited a number of luminaries of New Zealand music to contribute instrumental parts and vocals and he was delighted when they agreed. But as with most projects undertaken by Martin, it turned out to be more taxing than he thought. Not that he was unhappy, in fact he thought it was a wonderfully achieved album. He spoke to me about the album’s evolution, in the final of three interviews conducted in the weeks before he died at home in Dunedin on 28 July 2024.

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Martin Phillipps: We’ve done these 20 old unrecorded songs. Oh god, yeah, this is the weird thing Richard – if you’ve followed our recent history, you’d know that in 2011 we played at a guy’s 50th birthday party/New Year’s Eve party, who turns out to be a millionaire art dealer, it’s a great twist in the story. And we recorded a double live album [Somewhere Beautiful], then three really good albums [Silver Bullets, 2015; Snow Bound, 2018; Scatterbrain, 2021], a bunch of side projects, even a cassette [Single-Burger, 2016], and we’ve established that we’re still going as a force. So let’s step back and have some fun and record some earlier songs that we’ll just bash out, learned from a cassette. And then I discover, of course, a 60-year-old man cannot sing the lyrics of a 20-year-old man, especially now that songs are streamed without the back-up information that these are old songs. People might assume they’re new songs.

So basically it turned out to be no different from a normal album. We had rough demos and worked with them, and I also realised, look I’ve got a band now, and four out of five of us can do string arrangements to some extent. We’ve got a violin prodigy in the band, Erica [Scally], who can also use her pedals and drop that down and play the cello part. She quite often does a whole string section part, and we’ve got Callum [Hampton] who can play horns. I’m thinking like, okay, if we’re going to do his we’ve got to maintain integrity with the original intent but also make use of what we’ve got now, especially with Tom Healey, the producer. He’s worked on our last album Scatterbrain, and he knows me well and he’s worked so hard on this.

You told me late last year you were originally going to try and get the old members of the band back together to record those songs. So obviously it developed into something else ...

Yeah, I did. I thought let’s listen to the cassette recordings and bash them out, but I thought no, that’s a 20-year-old’s perspective. For a start I want some women’s voices on it and some of the lyrics weren’t inappropriate, they weren’t things I wanted to sing anymore. Yet strangely there were a few that were so right on for the times when we have that protest in Parliament grounds that I just needed to change a few words. 

We started recording down here in Dunedin, and it’s been a hard project because we’re basically recording two albums at once. You’ve got the basic riff for the song but then every song needs developing and we want to keep true to the original intent. Also the fact that I’ve got this extraordinary band now, there’s four people in it who can do arrangements, everyone can sing, so utilise that. It has been one of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on, everyone’s been sick with Covid and I got admitted to hospital with the worse case of jaundice they’d ever seen. I looked like Homer Simpson. (laughs)

There’s been two murders, if you’ve heard about the woman who stabbed her husband to death 22 times in the bathtub, that’s my neighbours who I knew and used to check in with. Another where a guy killed his mother, an 18-year-old on his way out of the city, and the only house with a light on was that of Callum our bass player. This guy decides to turn himself in rather than run away and the house gets covered by a SWAT team for two hours. 

There’s been at least seven suicides with people we all know. It’s just life but during the process of this record it’s been ... they didn’t think I was going to make it and neither did I. When I finished my key parts the producer Tom Healey said, we have The Chills record; now we start having the guests. It’s mastered, and it’s sounding great. It’s just been a massive project. 

I guess it’s what’s you do, it’s what you’re meant to do …

It’s a big step. We did those three albums and then we’ve had the pleasure of stepping back and completing the Brave Words and Kaleidoscope World remixes. With that first album there was a lot of budget restraints, lots of pressure to get it out. There are hardly any actual remixes, it’s a lot of remasters. I’ve been carrying that on my shoulders for 40 years, and I feel lucky. How many bands get to go back and revisit their past, [and] just tidy up. Some bands are only there for one album; we’ve now got more than a hundred good songs out there.

Who are some of the guests on Springboard?

Pip Brown from Ladyhawke, Holly Fullbrook [Tiny Ruins], Tami Neilson, Dianne Swann and Shona Laing. It turned out that Lorde is a huge Chills fan, but she was just too busy. I approached Aldous Harding but she was in the middle of something. Julia Deans from Fur Patrol, Neil Finn, Liam couldn’t because he was on tour but Elroy did some really good percussion, Holly Fullbrook did some beautiful vocals and plays some great cello. Tami Neilson came onboard straight away. She and I have quite different genres of music but we just clicked right from the start, and I’d say of Aldous Harding, you just recognise in each other the individual spirits who are just determined to do their own thing and that rises above whatever the genre is. You’re not so genre-specific when you’re older.

We’re not so tribal as we get older ...

Yeah ... “I only listen to hardcore!”

Getting Shona Laing to sing – how did that come about?

One of the first people that inspired me besides David Bowie was Shona Laing on television doing ‘1905’ and being made aware that was her song, that she had written that. Then there was some weird competition on TV and I tried to write my first song, it was about ecology and I still remember something about, “Timber!” The sound of the trees being chopped down in the forest or something crappy like that, but it was seeing people like that making music – and it was theirs – that made me look inside myself and ask, could I do that? And realising yes, that what was inside of me, music. That was inspirational.

I’d only meet Shona two or three times many years ago, but you instantly recognise people who you’re going to click with. We just got along straight away. Everyone had said she doesn’t do music anymore but straight away she was in. I need to be there for those people, strumming away on my guitar while they’re singing, giving them the vibe.

It is a bit of a gathering of the old guard but there are some young people with Clementine Valentine/Purple Pilgrims who somehow recognise something in our music that they connect to. But for a lot of people it’s just let’s have some fun and make something special. With Troy Kingi I’d heard through a mutual friend that when he was doing his 10-album project [that] when he was doing the pop-rock one he wanted to contact me but I was overseas. That’s why I thought this might be the opportunity to work with him. I get a text back from him, two words, “I’m in.” (laughs)

It’s an honour, it really is, these people turning up. I wanted to be in the studio with them, I didn’t want to be sitting on a screen watching them, I wanted to be there welcoming them.

And what songs have you done?

It’s pretty historic, the nature of it is the early Chills songs that were dropped because we formed the band in 1980 but didn’t record our first full album for seven years. A lot of the material we played live and got us noticed was dropped by the way. There’s at least two albums worth of Chills material that never got recorded. 

If you saw us in the old days, you’ll certainly know some of them. There’s things like ‘I Saw Your Silhouette’ which is one of the first songs that got The Chills noticed, it was our closing song for a while, rock things like ‘Jellyhead’, ‘Juicy Creaming Soda’. There was a song we only did a couple of times, there was a song ‘Jetty’ that we played at the Rumba Bar, soon after that it started getting lyrics but they were never recorded and now they have been with Clementine Valentine singing it. It’s now called ‘Meet My Eyes’ and it’s just beautiful.

Are a lot of them on the three-CD collection of your early work, Secret Box?

A considerable amount of them yes, but in weird forms. Like I said, I want to honour the original intention, but we’ve got this great band now. Fourteen people agreed to help as well, and it’s become a very different project.

I know that your Secret Box CD set was important to you, you’ve always wanted to get your past work released going right back to the late 70s ... you’re a natural-born archivist!

Something I’ve said before about us and the Flying Nun bands: if only there’d been someone like the producer of some of the early Who recordings who moved out to New Zealand. If someone like that had got here a couple of years earlier, some of what was happening here would be astounding records; the lost early Clean record would’ve been a powerful document. They were wonderful songs. David [Kilgour] was very quick to brush off songs, we did a whole album together, and he says, “Oh yeah there are a couple of good things.” Every single one of those things can be worked into something wonderful. This is about 15 years ago, we got together in a wee shack out on the Otago Peninsula and started working. We’ve got proper tapes and cassettes, there’s a good album there that I would love to finish with David. We talk about it occasionally, about what would be required.

Getting back to Springboard for a moment, how much did you have to change the lyrics on those old songs?

It turned out only slight changes needed to be made and there were a couple of instrumentals that, even back then, I’d started formulating lyrics for but had never gone back to it. That was a nice clear canvas to start with: here’s a rough lyric and a beautiful song, go for it, say what you want to say. I tried to relate it to things that happened around that period, but I know in a couple of years I look back at it and realise I’m talking about now. (laughs) We got them all to a level where they can be sung by a grown up but still true to the original post-punk intent.

When will the album be released?

A lot will depend on whether we’re able to tour it or not, to play festivals and get the funding to go overseas in the first place. That was what the band meeting was about last night, the band trying to quietly ascertain whether I’m going to be alive in a few months or not. I think we generally agreed that I probably will be.

You sound in good heart ...

It’s very day to day. 

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