SXSWORLD

4 8 S X S W O R L D | M A R C H 7, 2 0 1 9 | SXSW.COM By Dev Sherlock "It would be hard now to under- stand just how isolated we were," says Martin Phillipps, who founded The Chills in 1980 in then-remote Dunedin, New Zealand, long before the internet made music videos, websites, and global radio streams instantly accessible. "We had so little contact with the reality of what our favorite bands from Britain and America were like that we were kind of basing it all on photos in magazines." Phillipps goes on to describe an environment in which individuality was ostracized and punk rock was scorned by the local cover bands and older musicians. Nevertheless, a fuse had been lit, and a flock of young Dunedin kids were hellbent on expressing their own interpretations of what they felt "punk" meant — Phillipps being one of them. "The flipside to that isolation," he adds, "is that once we did get to see some of these bands on TV [via a new one-hour Sunday night video program called Radio With Pictures], we started realizing that we'd actu- ally developed a much better, more terrifying idea of what a band such as The Cramps was like than they really were, because the pictures were so good." Driven by this force of imagina- tion, Martin Phillipps would guide The Chills through four decades of ups and downs. In the 1980s, they became cult legends in America, a favorite of John Peel in the U.K., and — at their peak — the biggest band in New Zealand. It also took them from indie import status to major label artist, signing to Warner Brothers imprint Slash later in the decade. In the 1990s, however, things fell apart. On the final date of its 1994 tour for the album Soft Bomb, the band played New York City. After the last song, Phillipps announced from the stage that it was the final Chills show because they were breaking up. The news shocked everyone in the venue that night, including the rest of the band. "It was very Bowie of me to do that," sighs Phillipps in hindsight. Though he would regroup with a different lineup in 1996 to record the album Sunburnt as Martin Phillipps and The Chills, the writing was on the wall. The band had already been dropped from its contract with Warner Brothers, and the ensuing tour was tumultuous at best. It was at this point that Phillipps retreated to Dunedin and quietly slipped into a long period of depression and drug use. "Everyone seems to agree that continued on p.50 Back From the Brink, The Chills Can Write Their Own History The Chills. Photo by Alex Lovell-Smith

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