The Chills
A 1990 story about the release of Submarine Bells, the album that may stand as this New Zealand bands’ masterpiece and is one of the defining albums of the Dunedin sound.
Editor’s Note: The Chills’ founder Martin Phillipps died in July 2024, at 61. He’d just taken his band on tour, too, coming to Portland where I live. I had tickets but gave them to a friend. To celebrate Phillipps’ life of music, here is a piece from the July 1990 issue of Option magazine.
Now, 44 years after the band’s formation, when you read author Jason Cohen’s line that “one suspects that the Chills will be a band to be rediscovered and properly appreciated after their career is over, a la the Velvet Underground,” you know he’s right. Some folks are doing that right now, and they’ll continue to. I hope this story helps.
From his debut as guest organ play on The Clean’s first sing, “Tally Ho,” to the current Chills album, Submarine Bells, Martin Phillipps has produced some of the best, most breathtaking music of our time. As a songwriter and bandleader, he has largely done it by himself, going through ten different lineups of fellow Chills, counting as members Peter Gutteridge (The Great Unwashed, Snapper), Jane Dodd (the Verlaines), and David Kilgour (the Clean). The current group, Chills Phase Eleven, is now the longest lasting, and looks to stay that way. With a stable lineup and the support of a very larger record company (Slash/Warner), 1990 looks to be the year the rest of the world finds out about the Chills, and what they’ve been missing the last ten years.
In a way it’s quite remarkable that The Chills have been such an ever-changing outfit in the past yet have made such incredible music since they began recording in 1982. That, of course, is a testament to founder Martin Phillipps’ talent and vision. Phillipps’ songwriting is nearly perfect. His song structures build castles and playgrounds and dark caverns of imagery and melody. He doesn’t rely on repetition to achieve memorable melodies, though there are some hypnotic riffs, they twist and curl and jump at you, daring you to follow.
Through it all, the key ingredient in the Chills’ songs, the spell that sets free the magic Phillipps casts, is in the arrangements. Unadorned, on an acoustic guitar or a piano, the songs would still be plaintive and wonderful. Yet the Chills have woven tuns that reach across layers of harmony and melody, that are like three or four different songs within a song, a result that might be par for the course for a group of free jazz improvisors. But unlike improvised music (which it most definitely is not), the Chills’ multi-faceted arrangements fit together perfectly and accessibly. The Chills invite you to nestle between the different levels of the song, and slide you back and forth between them. Phillipps did this on the “Pink Front” (1984) and “The Great Escape” (1986) singles, on The Lost EP (1985), all with bands that didn’t play together for more than a year. He has virtually done it by himself.
Believe it or not, their breakthrough was supposed to happen a few years ago. In 1987, Chills Phase Ten—Phillipps, bassist Justin Harwood, keyboardist Andrew Todd, and drummer Caroline Easther—went into the studio to record the first Chills album, Brave Words. Three days after the sessions ended, the Chills were in New York, playing to fans and A&R types at the New Music Seminar. The jet-lagged band had to play three shows in three nights literally hours after getting off the plane, but they nonetheless dazzled the crowds who came to see them, so much so that another show was set up as a showcase for record company people who weren’t smart enough to catch them the first time. The word at the New Music Schmoozefest was that the band were sure to sign with a big American Label.
They didn’t. Brave Words came out on Homestead, as did reissues of The Lost EP and a collection of singles, Kaleidoscope World. The band toured America in late 1988 with, yes, another new member: the youthful Jimmy Stephenson had replaced Easther, who was stricken with tinnitus. Eventually, after eight months of negotiations, the Chills signed with Slash Records.
Part of the reason why things did not happen so quickly for the Chills with Brave Words is that Phillipps wasn’t terribly happy with the way the “long awaited first album” had turned out. Fans who had the chance to hear the songs live generally agreed, and the pointed their finger at former Pere Ubu/Red Crayola stalwart Mayo Thompson, who produced the record. Phillipps says it had more to do with exhaustion and inexperience.
“The main thing,” he explains, “was the budget. We’re not a spontaneous band, we need to do things carefully and meticulously, and to achieve the things we’re trying to do, and with the budget, we were putting things down as fast as we could. We only just made it in two weeks. Mayo Thompson really loved the music, he understood what we were trying to do. But he really couldn’t contribute very much, so the decisions about the quality of sound and the direction the actually final product would take were made by Danny Hyde, the engineer, who was really good to work with, but was more inclined towards sort of 12-inch club remixes. So he was going for a purity of sound, which really wasn’t what we were after.”
Besides the fast pace, which had the band leaving the studio each morning during London’s rush hour, only to return during evening rush hour for the all-night recording sessions, the band was ill-prepared with the material, having only been together a few months at that time. Pre-production rehearsals were not an option.
“The material was very new to them,” Phillipps says, “and we barely got past the stage of being able to play it without having to sort of think about what comes next, let alone really interpreting it. So it was actually like playing cover versions of Chills material which they knew had reached heights before, and it was very hard for them. Then, to top it all off, something went wrong with the mastering process. The copies all ended up being drastically cut in volume and presence, so it’s a very quiet, sort of lushy sounding record.” Phillipps has put Brave Words behind him, but not completely so—“we know we are still intending to remix it and release it as Braver Words.”
Despite that unusual move, the focus now is on Submarine Bells. Whether Brave Words turned out right or not, Submarine Bells is the Chills’ first proper album. “It’s the first cohesive whole album that we’ve done, it’s the first Chills record in a long time that hasn’t been a retrospective look at things that had sort of been shelved, waiting. It establishes us in some sense as a contemporary band. Andrew and Justin have been with me now three years, so they’ve sort of really come to grips with what I’m trying to do, and Jim has been with the group since ’88, so that’s quite a long time now.”
It is clear that with a tight group of musicians finally working with him, Phillipps’ possibilities have become even greater. “It has become sort of a more analytical lineup,” Phillipps says. “We’ve never really been a spontaneous sort of outfit, which was a problem for me for a little while because some of our peers, like the Clean, Toy Love, and so forth, were very spontaneous bands. I tried to live up to those sort of ideals for a long time before I had to admit to myself that that’s not the way I do things. I have to do things more carefully.”
“When this lineup formed, or Chills Ten with Caroline,” he continues, “none of those people had been in particularly spontaneous bands either, so that whole element of music really did go once and for all out the door. Since then, it’s been very much working out exactly what does create those sort of weird atmospheres—which in the long run has worked out very well, because it means you can get more consistent in achieving these things, and knowing how to achieve them. Andrew in particular is a severely training classical musician, and studied jazz for a while, and Justin’s played a lot of stuff. They really knew their music, so their input has been really strong in that sense. They’ve sort of educated me, in terms of what I have created and why. So far, it really hasn’t been to the detriment of the music at all, it’s helped. I’m still sort of a bit worried about learning too much.”
The Chills make the transition from the studio to the stage effortlessly, losing none of the grandiosity (and gaining more power) that their meticulous studio approach brings them. When they are raw, as on the punk “The Oncoming Day” (and old, old song that has long been a live favorite), they slash and soar without losing their otherworldly transcendence. And on slower songs which rely purely on delivery and atmosphere, they are so majestic that it is impossible for the band or audience to taper off or “rest,” as often happens with the inevitable slow song at a live rock show.
The band refers to “the fifth Chill” onstage, a reference to their various tricks and different approaches with live sound that result in the band sounding so full and so multi-faceted that it is almost like another member is up there with them. “The fifth Chill couldn’t really appear on Submarine Bells due to contractual obligations, musician’s union stipulations,” Phillipps jokes. “We’ve always put a lot of the instruments in the same sort of frequency range, get two instruments to play the same part, one hand of the keyboard playing the same party the guitar is doing, or the bass just creating a wash of frequency and harmonics. We’ve always gone for sounds as a whole, as opposed to the separate musicians trying to win favor. It’s something we’re able to do live when things really go well. With getting this record deal, we’ve finally got the money to upgrade our equipment, and the sound improved overnight. We finally sound like we’ve always imagined ourselves sounding.”
The recording of Submarine Bells also enabled the Chills to sound like they imagined themselves on record, which was very important to Phillipps. “The recordings have taken more importance because that’s the long-term thing you’ve got to live with,” he says. The band flew Boston-based produced Gary Smith to London to work on Submarine Bells. It was a good match. The Chills, unlike some other bands making the jump from indie to major, are very well suited for “production.” A few songs that Phillipps didn’t feel were up to snuff wound up as B-sides. These are “Water Wolves,” “Waves Watching,” and “While Lot of Non,” available on the English “Heavenly Pop Hit” single. He also says of “Oncoming Day”—which they tried to record for Brave Words—that “we finally got a version which is not perfect but more than adequate for people who may never see the band. It’s by far the oldest song on the record.
Naturally, Phillipps has much higher standards for how he wants his band to sound than his audience does. To these ears, all of the record sounds fine, “Oncoming Day” included. Whereas on earlier records, it was easier to hear traces of influences—Syd Barrett and the third Velvets record are the ones most mentioned—the new record is pretty unprecedented. “Heavenly Pop Hit” is just that, the fluffiest concoction on the record, but it is the subtleties on the album that are most impressive. Little percussive touches and delicate guitar lines float above the intricate, beautiful melodies of the title track and “I Soar,” like dolphins in the Dead Sea. The song entitled “Effloresce and Deliquese” describes some of the Chills sound perfectly.
Keyboardist Andrew Todd is probably the band’s secret weapon. His parts tend to both anchor the songs and expand them. Todd’s playing is the punchy riff on “Dead Web,” and the way he comes in with a quick, quiet piano line amid Phillipps’ crackling, distorted guitars on “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” gives the raucousness resonance. Submarine Bells is a whole album, where other records were collections of old things, and it is memorable as a whole album, as an experience, not as a bunch of catchy songs.
Submarine Bells is a new step for Martin Phillipps lyrically, too. With a few exceptions, the songs are among the newest he has written—Brave Words material was as old as ten years in some cases. He remains and impressionistic and literate songwriter, but in his view, he has shed the immaturity of some of his past songs. Phillipps has always taken the most flak for his escapist tendencies. All the Chills songs offer some kind of escape in the big, comfortable aura they offer, but they uplift and inspire questions and desire more than anything else. Older Chill songs not only invited escape in their music, but were very much a product of Martin’s own escapist tendences.
“I was basically a kid, and having a good time with my newfound talent of throwing together songs and lyrics with colorful imagery, which was great,” Phillipps says, referring to the early singles “Rolling Moon” and “Kaleidoscope World.” “I think [escapism’s] a bad thing, really. Right up until I was about ten or eleven, I seriously thought if anyone was going to get picked up and taken away by the spaceships, it was going to be me. That manifested itself in the way I did stuff—I didn’t bother learning how to tell the time, because I didn’t think I would need to. I must have been really quite out there in a lot of ways when I was younger. [Now] I’ve been very much tackling the qualities of life, experiencing the joys of actual life, the good side of it and the bad side of it. I wrote ‘The Great Escape’ in like 1984, and it was a farewell to escapism. Since then, I’ve been very much stuck here on planet Earth with the rest of you.”
One place on planet Earth that Phillipps found himself was at the concentration camp in Dachau, which inspired “Tied Up in Chains.” “That’s basically about skinheads, specifically, people who were living out a fashion, a very dark one, where they are generally not aware of why they’re doing it, what the roots of it are. Going to Dachau was such a moving, powerful experience you wish you could take every skinhead in the world to Dachau.”
Songs like “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” and “Dead Web” aim for universal truths about fear, alienation, and death. There is a sense of political and philosophical awareness to some of the songs, though Phillipps does not get specific. (He says that for the sleeve, which includes information about French nuclear weapons testing, U.S. deployment of missiles overseas, and the killing of dolphins by tuna fisherman.) He leaves the slogans to the sleeve because “it ca really date your music,” but also, he says, “I see my role as more to sing about the issues which I see as the root cause of all our problems, all the problems facing the world. Greed and apathy would be the two biggest, really. I sort of want to inspire people to think that they can actually do more with their lives, they don’t have to feel like a cog in the machine.”
Then there is “Heavenly Pop Hit,” which, in its way, encapsulates the very feelings the Chills, and all good pop music, can engender in a listener. “And so I stand and the sound goes straight through my body / I’m so bloated up happy I could throw things around me / And I’m growing in stages and have been for ages / Just singing and floating—and free” he sings. He also gets in, self-referentially (And there are a lot of abstract references to Phillipps’ own position as a songwriter, and as a person people look to, on the record), “It’s a heavenly pop hit, if anyone wants it…”
“The whole ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’ thing is basically, I’ve taken a different sort of route into contemporary music than some of my peers,” he says. “Sort of based on some aspects of the past, trying an alternative contemporary sound and showing people you can still make pop music of substance that can actually deal with genuine human responses as opposed to that small range of human emotions which you are allowed to talk about in pop music. There are like five or six subjects you’re allowed to sing about, and there’s just so much more that could be done. It should be the folk music of the times, it should be dealing with people’s real day-to-day sort of problems and thrills, that’s what it’s about.”
“It all seems larger than life to me / I find it rather hard to believe,” Phillipps sings on “Heavenly Pop Hit,” and while he is commenting on the wonder of being moved by music, he could just as easily be talking about what is happening to his bands.
“We can’t say, ‘Hey, we’re the latest thing, the Chills are the new happening band,’” Phillipps says. “Most people are discovering us for the first time, [but we haven’t even] got a major new direction.”
Whether or not the Chills become “the new happening band,” one suspects that the Chills will be a band to be rediscovered and properly appreciated after their career is over, a la the Velvet Underground. That would be unfortunate in a way—but wouldn’t be surprising. And while the Velvet Underground is an overworked comparison to lay on a band as unique as the Chills, it is a fitting one. The Chills are that good, potentially as important, and nothing if not undaunted. Still full of wonder after over a decade of work, an unjaded Martin Phillipps notes, “The power of rock music is still one of the best things in the world.”
Note: Republished with author Jason Cohen’s permission, this story originally appeared in the July 1990 issue of Option magazine, under the title “Where? Why? Here? Why Now? Why Not? New Zealand’s Hottest Export: Rock Bands.” Published by Scott Becker, Option ran from 1985 to 1998 and was edited by a series of folks, including Richie Unterberger, Mark Kemp, Jason Fine, Steve Appleford, Erik Pedersen, Barbara Jordan, and Scott Becker. Kristin Bell was Option’s art director. This is the first time this story has appeared online. Read the Option story about Cornershop here. To read more of Option’s back catalogue, buy the anthology We Rock So You Don’t Have To: The Option Reader #1, edited by Scott Becker, or browse Rock’s Back Pages.
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Excellent article! I’ll have to check out Jason’s Texas Monthly stuff. I was a reader of OPTION and learned of many artists I’d otherwise never have heard of, like Jandek, from my native Houston. I’m not a Jandek enthusiast but do really admire some of his early work and certainly his self marketing worked in those pre-internet days better than most bands do today by pummeling folks on social media. I’m sure I read this article way back when. Again, great Job! Hope to see Aaron soon as well!!!!