I Guess We Are Angels

Songs by Martin Phillipps

Martin Phillipps, Hayley Theyers 2014

Some cut lines through the snow so the show could go on
Or slowed up for a while where the flowers grow wrong - but so strong

So the most courageous of guides - quietly died
We all were surprised the void felt so wide - down inside

”The Greatest of Guides” - Martin Phillipps

It was, as I remember it, a Winter’s night in 1982. I was living on the fringes of Otago harbour, and I didn’t know anyone in Dunedin. My last group, The And Band, had folded in chaos and disinterest, especially my own; the songs I was still writing weren’t working or added up to nothing consistent that I could feel enthusiastic about. Experiments left unfinished on all fronts. What was it all for?
Why was I listening to the radio? One didn’t expect much from the radio in 1982. But as it happened the dial was tuned to 4ZB at a time when George Kaye was allowed to play what he liked, one of those anomalies in the social order that people in the know, which I wasn’t, lived for in those days. The song coming out of the radio was a love song, but a curiously distant one, remembering a love that never was, or that wasn’t the way it’s remembered, as a moment of exoticism to set the mind wandering.

She was just my little satin doll
I met her down by the blossom tree

She has beauty like the moon far beyond my words
Like a sunset flock of firebirds

The whimsical Victorian Japonisme of the lyric is materialized by a pentatonic keyboard line, and the singer’s wistful deadpan is both intimate and distant, frosty and warm. There’s a muted strummed guitar melody in fifths, an inner voice that sounds like it’s played on two strings tuned to the same note, a sophisticated orchestral touch, and some impressively precise and colourful drumming (with a perfectly recorded cymbal).¹

Both the song and the singing remind me of a mutual influence that’s dear to me - “This sounds like Syd Barrett. And it’s being played on the radio. There’s hope for me yet!”

’Satin Doll’ was one of three Chills tracks on the famous Dunedin Double 12” EP, four “Dunedin sound” bands recorded over a weekend in Christchurch on Chris Knox’s TEAC 4-track reel-to-reel machine. The Stones do their usual chaotic fun, but the two other “serious” bands, The Verlaines and Sneaky Feelings, weren’t happy with the results and would re-record some songs later. Only The Chills songs jump out of the speakers fully formed, perfect as they are. They made a splash - another Chills track, ‘Kaleidoscope World’ was an instant classic, a hit in its own right however many copies that double 12” on an obscure new indie label from the Deep South actually sold. Again, it’s a fantasy, a description of something that didn’t happen, but should have, wouldn’t it be nice. But let’s go back to ‘Satin Doll’; because some basic, unaugmented rock group instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums and keys, probably a Yamaha organ) is being arranged like a chamber orchestra, and The Chills’ music will be organized like this, forever; ‘Caught in my Eye’ on the last Chills LP Scatterbrain has sections with a pentatonic melody, evoking a different folksiness from the melody of ‘Satin Doll’, pentatomic scales just one of many bits and pieces in Martin’s composer’s kit, the use of which he understood so well.

Looking back, the distinctive quality of this early Chills work, like all their work, is its intentionality. When The Clean did something miraculous, you were often unsure it was supposed to sound like that, or could ever sound like that played again. Any classic Clean EP is like a series of happy accidents that’s surprising its creators. You can hear the contrast on ‘Tally Ho’, where Martin’s supplying that joyfully specific keyboard riff that holds the band’s stream of consciousness in place (I’d steal it for a guitar solo on K3 a decade later). The Chills were intended to sound a certain way, and even if they didn’t, due to occasional unsympathetic production, the intention was still clear, they didn’t try to adapt by abandoning a perfectly good plan and embracing chaos, as the rest of us so often chose to do.
By the time I was going to gigs in Dunedin and, thanks to Ross Jackson and Peter Gutteridge, meeting the people involved, that lineup of The Chills was no more. I met Martyn and Kathy Bull shortly before Martyn’s death from leukemia, and I first met Terry Moore and Martin around that time.

By 1983 I’d spent a couple of years in Dunedin, no longer than I’d spent living previously in Christchurch and Wellington. I was on a brief trip to Auckland, and, looking at the jukebox in an eatery on K Road, saw The Chills’ ‘Rolling Moon’, an oddly structured single I’d been less impressed with in Dunedin. I played it and was hit with a wave of nostalgia, homesickness for Dunedin and the new sound of it.

Back in Dunedin, I finally caught The Chills live, and the high-energy, punk edge to their sound was something the psychedelic, often deliberately twee recordings hadn’t prepared me for. This was exhilarating music, a rush. When Marty presented his mixtape selection for RNZ in 2016, two of the six selections were by the Sex Pistols and kiwi punks Proud Scum; he came of age, and saw The Enemy, the greatest local practitioners of punk, at the exact right time to have punk’s energy fixed in his psyche. Again, this was inspiring, the pace The Chills set, the intensity of their performance was something for The Puddle to aspire to. Young as I was, Martin was about five years younger than me, and it was humbling to be learning so much from him. He wasn’t arrogant, though he always came across as aloof, but it was understood that this attitude came from living in his mind amongst those songs. The Chills were so great that even their perceived failures were inspiring, leaving as they did a little slack for others to pick up; so, I didn’t like ‘Doledrums’ and eventually wrote ‘Thursday’ to replace it, nor did I like, at the time, ‘Male Monster from the Id’, and who knows what I eventually did about that.

By mid-1984 The Chills had released ‘Pink Frost’, a magical record, wonderful in the feeling with which it teases out its tunes, and baffling in how its darkness, its theme of death and guilt, has been woven into a pure pop classic. In Future Rock (1975) David Downing writes about the “undertow of terror” in Syd Barrett’s work with Pink Floyd, and within its charm ‘Pink Frost’ makes terror explicit; Martin had a talent for saying things that lesser songwriters would have suppressed. There’s a paradox here, because Marty’s persona was one of diffidence, politeness, cautiousness and a fragile naivety, but he crafted his music so it could stand outside these defenses, and served his muse as if aware that it was greater than him or any other purely personal considerations. An attitude which led to a succession of lineups and a back catalogue of hurt colleagues throughout those early years. In Martin’s defense, his gift must have felt overwhelming, especially coming as he did from the wrong place, and having to deliver his tributes to the Pop Gods from the far side of their world.

When Kiran Dass listed her 10 favourite Chills songs for The Guardian, she told this story about meeting Martin:

”Years ago I used to work nights in a beautiful secondhand bookshop where I used to play the Kaleidoscope World compilation, sometimes on repeat. One evening Martin Phillipps strolled in and when he came up to the counter I said, “you probably get this all the time but you’re one of my favourite songwriters.” He looked genuinely surprised, maybe a little bewildered, shook his head and said, “no, no I don’t … Do you have any books on the occult?”

Martin Phillipps, as far as I know, lacked the discipline to become a practicing occultist, but he was definitely a fan. His favourite author in the time I knew him best was Arthur Machen (1863-1947), the Welsh writer of weird tales.

”Working in this gruesome tradition, Machen uses horror to express the Victorian fear of science, and the even greater fear of what might lie beyond the veil of materiality. Machen’s The Great God Pan is more generally a text of Decadent uncertainties as the Victorian age entered its transition into the twentieth century. Like Marsh, Stoker and Stevenson, Machen’s writing is emblematic of the collapse of certainties and the blurring of identities to create an epistemological confusion. The effects are destructive and unsettling.”

It’s worth thinking about how many Chills songs can be read as ghost stories, include the sense of a spirit world, or are otherwise supernatural in some way. ‘Satin Doll’, ‘Pink Frost’, ‘House with a Hundred Rooms’, ‘I Love my Leather Jacket’, ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’, in fact maybe there are more Chills songs like this than not. The first track on the last Chills album Scatterbrain (2021) ‘Monolith’, has a lyric that harks back to Machen’s view of a world overlaid with the supernatural energies of the ancients, and a video created by Jonny Sanders from what could well be Martin’s collection of Fortean literature.²

We have gathered our wisdom
Whatever's at hand
We have weathered the ages
And still we stand

Give me the power of ancient stones
Honour the monolith
Give me the power of ancient stones
Honour the monolith

We were blessed by blood
And we were rinsed with rain
We've been bleached by sun
Yet we still remain

Give me the power of ancient stones
Honour the monolith
Give me the power of ancient stones
Honour the monolith

Machen and the other weird writers and occultists were one influence Martin and I had in common; another was the work of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson on puppet shows like the wonderful Stingray. The planning and detail in these works, destined for a popular audience, simultaneously childish and sophisticated, seems like a metaphor for how he arranged his own songs, once extracted from his head. Marty’s huge collection, of books, records, DVDs, toys, and God knows what else was his imagination, externalized. The documentary The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps tells the band’s story well, but its finest moments are when Marty introduces us, deadpan, to something unexpectedly dark, like his mummified cats, with a quiet sense of humour that’s just noticed its own oddness, and waits for our response.

For an under-rated classic Chills album check out Sunburn (credited to “Martin Phillipps and the Chills”), recorded in the UK with session musicians after a tough time, the collapse of the US Chills line-up, financial hardship, a period when Martin didn’t know whether the industry would allow him to realise his vision ever again. A return to New Zealand and its landscape resulting in an album with more of the pastoral and personal about it; the title track is an essay in New Zealand pastoral writing with roots in our modest classical tradition, and wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Humphries and Keen’s masterpiece of NZ landscape pop, The Overflow.

Back in 1985 The Chills played a weekend at the Captain Cook (both matinees and evening shows), and Martin invited The Puddle to not only support but, if we could produce a blank tape, use the 4-track tape recorder that the Chills Saturday performances were being recorded on. At the end of our evening set, a female audience member, drunk and distressed (by our music?) threw a jug of beer over the mixing desk, and eventually what was left of its functionality allowed the Chills to perform, but not to record their set. From these tapes, after some studio overdubs, The Puddle made our first 12” vinyl release, Pop. Lib. The Chills got nothing they’d use, as far as I know, but there was a perfect version of one of their greatest songs on that reel, ‘Night of Chill Blue’, a '“less is more” one-riff song where the performance is everything.

Martin’s heroes and mine, Toy Love, had recorded in Australia, for their first LP, a muted, polite version of their live set, underdelivery which the band didn’t survive. This was always a risk for any punk band entering a studio dominated by its engineers in those days. That something similar happened to the Chills debut, Brave Words, was my fault. Back in Christchurch, in 1981, I’d received a copy of an album called God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It from my brother Ian in the UK. On a first listen, this record, recorded by Mayo Thompson after he’d been hanging out with Joe Byrd and Nico, was impenetrable, but I happened to play it again after a datura experience (no kids, don’t) that left my mind wiped clean, and it impressed me mightily. Some years later, feeling the need to impress Martin, I leant him my copy, and it did the trick. When The Chills arrived in London and signed with Rough Trade, the label offered them their house producer - Mayo Thompson. By this stage Thompson had recorded with Pere Ubu, and The Red Crayola had made the standout Kangaroo (1981) with Art & Language. Seems legit, but The Chills weren’t impressed by Thompson’s mixing, done in a hurry in a cloud of skunk smoke while the band were elsewhere, no correspondence to be entered into, and a remixed and remastered version of the album was eventually produced, decades later.

Today, I live in West Auckland, in a landscape Marty would have appreciated. The nearest supermarket is the Countdown at Lynnmall, New Zealand’s earliest shopping mall (1963). The mixtape that plays there is the usual compilation of lesser, but often memorably annoying, American “pop” songs from the past decade. With one exception - The Chills’ ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’ makes a regular appearance, brightening the shop every time. To write a great song is one thing. To write a great song with a title that points to it needing to be great is another. But to record that song perfectly, and play it well live often enough for it to become an actual hit that can be legitimately heard at the mall decades later, that’s a unique accomplishment.

Once we were damned, now I guess we are angels
For we passed through the dark and eluded the dangers
Then awoke with a start to startling changes
All the tension is ended, the sentence suspended
And darkness now sparkles and gleams.

Algorithmic recurrence - Clicks (Anna Coddington and Dick Johnson) ‘Pink Frost’

1. After writing this, I learned that Andrew Long had asked Martin about the guitar on Satin Doll, and received this detailed explanation:

“Hi Andrew. It's been over 30 years since I've used that tuning but I think I have found it. The low E goes down to A for which I bought a 56 gauge string. A stays the same but I may have used a thicker string. D goes up to E. G goes up to A. B goes up to E. High E stays where it is. In all cases I bought the heaviest gauge string I could use for that note. If it's not an open barre chord then it's playing the first (high E) string, 2nd and 4th strings up and down the neck while leaving the other strings open to drone. Thanks for forcing me to finally rediscover that tuning. Now I remember why that song had its own guitar which became impractical when touring overseas. Cheers.”

2. See also the Video for ‘Complex’. One feels that these are films Martin always wanted to make, and eventually said “why the hell not?”