Martin Phillipps next to Chills street art, Dunedin. - Photo by Chris Sullivan
Read: Martin Phillipps interview, June 2024 – part one
We began this session talking about where Martin felt more comfortable singing – in the studio or live. The discussion was sparked by a conversation I’d had with Shayne Carter, one of Martin’s fellow songwriters. Shayne said he much preferred to sing live rather than in the studio where he doesn’t feel so at home. The subject opened part two of the three interviews I did with Martin in the months before his death.
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I was talking to Shayne and he was describing how, on the new album he was recording, they pieced together parts of the best takes of his vocals in the studio to make the vocal tracks.
Martin Phillipps: That’s pretty standard practice now, that’s what we do too, especially working with [producer] Tom Healy, he can tell after a few takes when my voice starts warming up, it’s taking off, “Let’s get three takes now and move onto the next song.” Compositing them is a good way of doing things, I’m not averse to studio technology at all anymore. I believe you are producing a work of art, an album, and you do the best you can. Sometimes happy accidents happen. The whole New Zealand alternative scene was based on happy accidents, I’ve certainly been part of them and seen them. But at the same time, no: some of those things grate now. What I say to producers these days is, if it enhances, leave it in, if it distracts, take it out. If you are in the flow of a song and suddenly there’s a disharmony that makes you stop and think for a moment “that’s a disharmony” you miss the next bar or so of the music and you’re questioning and starting to think of the process of recording when you just shouldn’t be.
You’ve always been more comfortable in the studio, going right back to The Lost EP in the 80s, you showed a desire to utilise the studio which shows on a song like ‘Dream by Dream’ ...
That was me exploring my “Brian Wilson” at the time (laughs). “Let’s throw down bits of songs.” It was quite successful, there’s some beautiful moments in it. I’m almost the reverse to Shayne in that sense, I’m more nervous about going out and singing live. I’ve seen enough photos and videos of what we look like live. I’m not the most charismatic person and I can sing badly but at the same time you can’t do The Chills without me. (laughs)
You’ve played an awful lot live though.
Now I’m comfortable, I can walk out in front of those people. I was a shy performer when I was young, I didn’t know what to do. But now it is different, I’m 60 years old and becoming aware that most of my musical heroes are aware of my music now or have been, the ones that are still alive. Just quietly, The Chills music has been seeping around the edges, it’s never a huge seller, but the right people have got to hear us and that’s good.
You’re continuing the legacy of what got you excited about music, you’re part of that chain now with your heroes.
Yeah, it’s funny when you and I were younger you weren’t allowed to be in a band over 21, then it was 25 and then it was 30. The Rolling Stones set the pace and still are to some extent, it’s remarkable. They’re still putting on great shows but one of the things that is still not often done is a band as old as us, which is 45 years now, coming back with three strong albums in a row at this point [Silver Bullets, 2015; Snow Bound, 2018; Scatterbrain, 2021]. I can think of a few other bands that have done it. Wire has come back with some strong material, and there are various others who realise you can go back into the studio and there is still an audience. In some ways because our age group [is] retiring, having made their money, and they want to buy back their past.
When fans go and see you live too they want you to be good, they want your performance to be a lightning rod.
Exactly. A woman at Warner Brothers circa 1990 who was backstage with us and a couple came back and said they’d finally gotten to see The Chills and they really loved it and I went into this spiel, Oh dang you caught us on a not-so-great night; a shame you didn’t come last night. After they left this woman said to me, “Please don’t say that to people, it might be the only time they ever get to see you live and they’ve had a wonderful experience, all you need to say is thank you.” She was right and that’s what I’ve done since.
It was kinda sad during Covid when we couldn’t go out to the merch desk. Prior to that, meeting fans – balding men of my own age who were in tears because they finally got to meet me – and they’d wanted to tell me for 35 years that seeing us opened their minds, or they met their wife there, and both of them will come up and say we met at one of your gigs. Just these great stories have become assimilated with my music. It is something to be humble about but you also have to maintain your dignity, it’s a learned skill it is.
The fan relationship with the musician or writer is an interesting one. It’s a strange meeting between someone who feels they know you yet is a complete stranger ...
Some of them know more about my music than I do! And they think that they have already met me at some sort of level and that can be difficult, because then they are dealing with the real person, and sometimes we’re not what they expected. They’ve thought about this encounter for years, and what they would like to say to you, but they’ve never considered what you might say back and it can really catch them off guard. If you start chatting away with them they can go blank, I was not prepared for this. (laughs)
It’s a funny business for fans meeting their heroes ...
By and large I don’t agree with the phrase “never meet your heroes”, because they have more than lived up to expectations. I was talking about this with someone the other day: who would you still be daunted by? Because they all used to freak me out. Now I realise I’m kind of accepted as one of them, a “rock legend”. Well, Bob Dylan would still freak me out, you’d be crazy not to be freaked out by Bob Dylan. I’d be shy around Barack Obama ...
He’d be easier than Dylan, I can’t think of anyone who’d be as formidable as him.
Yeah, I can’t think of any others that I would be watching every single word and knowing it’s going to fail anyway. (laughs).
Lou Reed would’ve been like that too, I think ...
I dunno, I’m not sure about that anymore because it’s all come out about him that he was actually friendly and kind to his friends. We never met but he glared at me from four feet away. When we played with Lou Reed in ’85 in Auckland at the Logan Campbell Centre. Normally the support band does the last soundcheck so they’re set up ready to go, but they were coming back on to do their one after us, and he wanted us gone. I turned around and there’s Lou Reed staring at me daggers and the stage manager runs across the stage, “Lou, it’s not their fault, we had problems with the PA,” and he kinda calms down a bit. But then I heard from his crew that he’d listened to ‘Pink Frost’ on the plane on the way over and was talking about producing us which is really unusual because in my head I thought it was John Cale who had said that. But I found in the diary the other day that it was Lou Reed. I don’t recall him producing anybody.
You were ambitious right from the outset, Martin, as were your contemporaries. You believed in the rock’n’roll dream, as a means of realising your creativity and of escaping into that world ...
Looking back it’s hard to separate what was [youthful] exuberance from determined ambition. You’re so tightly wound when you’re that young anyway, “Nothing’s going to stop me, this is what I’m doing.” I’d say in particular for me, perhaps more than some others, because I’d already done some restaurant work and worked in a flower shop and I just could not stand the nine-to-five, and I suddenly had my way out. I’m clinging to this, this is what I’m about and I’ve finally discovered it, and maybe that’s why I was more determined about it than some of the others.
There were a lot of bands from that time, the sad thing to watch – I think of Bird Nest Roys and Able Tasmans and Goblin Mix – just world class, great bands, and after a while people have to give up and they start raising families and it’s no longer practical, it’s the saddest thing. In some way I had always expected that I would be raising a family at this age, but it never happened, and I don’t think you can have everything.
I was asked by another interview recently about regrets, and I do regret that the substances stole many years of creativity from me. I never stopped writing songs but I lost the faith of people that had helped me to make them real, to realise the projects. I can never recover that, but at the same time it was a different life path and I met different people and that’s coloured the way I think about the world and how I write my music. So it’s my own path and I accept it.
The careers of some of the musicians in Dunedin are so woven together, and none more so than you and David Kilgour. You toured with The Clean as their soundman at 17, you were in Pop Art Toasters together, April Fools, the Tuesday Band, and before that Time Flies ...
Yes, I rang David yesterday and talked about this, we were both surprised at seeing the list of how many times we have worked together. There was Time Flies in ’83, it was essentially a re-naming of The Chills and there are recordings of two rehearsals at the Roslyn Woollen Mills building in Kaikorai Valley. Stage one, where we just jammed, is one of the most exciting cassettes I’ve got. David is testing Martyn Bull and Terry Moore, and I’m throwing in some good hooks and it works. The next day Terry brought down some mics and a 2-track recorder. It took so long to set-up we lost the vibe and we became more self-conscious. It’ll be better recorded but it won’t have the fervour. There’s five songs, one of them ended up on a Great Unwashed record, one on a Chills record and the others are just great noise. I’d love to find the earliest copy of that cassette and get it mastered properly, it would be a famous bootleg by now.
The main thing from that weekend was Martyn Bull saying I’m going to beat this disease [leukaemia] but you saw him tire during the performance, and my gut instinct was that it was then he realised “I can’t do this anymore, I can’t play music anymore”. He kind of lost heart; it’s a poignant moment. He died quite soon after that, once he realised he couldn’t go back to his music because he didn’t have the physical strength, that was a huge thing. It’s easy to look back now and say we know that both bands continued, The Clean and The Chills, but we didn’t know that at the time. It looked like both had done their run in a few short years. We’d seen enough bands reform, regroup and do different line-ups. We were in touch with the Auckland scene by then and we’d seen the amount of bands David Mitchell would go through. (laughs) So it didn’t seem unusual to be trying out a new thing.
But in retrospect it’s just a chapter of The Chills history more than anything else. It was that period when David had got sick of playing that “incendiary guitar” when it was the early Clean and you think you’re hearing three guitars going at once at full volume, and he went almost more country and western in a strange move, which was an interesting move. We do a punk rock version of ‘What You Should Be Now’, a Great Unwashed song which is just great. I think we also did an early Chills songs which we were trying to reinvigorate.
You and David have a love of much of the same music but you have had differing approaches to making it and writing songs ...
With The Clean you’re talking about an alchemical approach. With The Chills it’s seldom been like that. We rely on my songwriting and my bringing ideas to the band. We’ve been through phases where we’d start every rehearsal just having a jam but for certain members of this current band that’s not the way they’ve been brought up and they don’t know how to do it. I do love exercising that side of myself, where it is more spur of the moment and spontaneous.
David and I also had the Tuesday band which is where April Fools came from. We had Alan Haig on drums, and a bass player who was playing these death metal runs, and David couldn’t stand that. There was one gig where we played an entirely different bunch of songs that we hadn’t played before or since and that was at Echo Records but that was without David as he phoned in “sick” so to speak. But the Tuesday band went for a while, just jamming. It got named as it became quite a regular thing. Alan recorded a bit of that. We had so many side project as we didn’t know what the future held.
And you and David had a lot of involvement with Peter Gutteridge of course ...
David and I both played in Snapper at various times, and some time later at The Crown I went to see them when it was Chris Heazlewood and Celia [Mancini]. On paper you’d think that’s going to work but it [didn’t], Chris is too much of his own person to just hold down power chords and Peter saw me in the audience and said, “Martin come here you’re playing keyboards.” (laughs) “Like fuck, what!!??” So I cranked them up and honestly I saved the day, I knew what he wanted, just pop those chords down ... baa-aaaa-mmmm that’s right for Snapper. He was grateful for that, it must’ve been in the late 90s. I loved playing with Snapper, those power chords with slight tonal changes, one of the joys of my life that I got to play with them. People were surprised, they’d say, you played with Snapper but you’re such a popmeister. But there’s another side to me ... you could tell Snapper meant it, it had integrity, it was played with heart.
I know that you and David have some different approaches to making music, but what is it that unites you? What is it that you share in common?
We’ve known each other long and well enough to know that we both respond strongly to the same powerful music. We needed to know there was someone out there we could hang onto. The common connection, and this goes back to Chris Knox as well, what we saw with The Enemy was a band playing formidable punk rock but with 60s melodies, and it was about the quality of songwriting and that’s one of the things that lifted the Dunedin scene above some of other scenes around the world.
Frankly, and with respect to the LA punk bands, there aren’t a lot of memorable songs. I mean those gigs must’ve been great, but there aren’t a lot of records there that you’d want to listen to a lot. It’s a good bit of fury. But the Dunedin scene because there was this more melodic base behind it all – it may have been caught wrong but it was caught. There’s a huge catalogue. You list the good songs that have come out of Dunedin and it starts to become ridiculous for this population [size].
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