The last time I interviewed Martin Phillipps, he was meant to be dead. This was in 2019. A couple of years before, Phillipps, the creative force behind cult New Zealand band The Chills, visited his doctor for a regular check-up.
He had been living with Hepatitis C for over two decades after long battles with drug addiction and alcoholism. He expected to be given the usual slap on the wrist and a warning that he should cut down his drinking. Instead, the doctor told him he had lost 80 percent of his liver function, and there was a 30 percent chance of him dying in the next six to 12 months. If he kept drinking, he’d be gone quicker than that. Even the alcohol in certain mouthwashes could kill him.
We know exactly what went down in that doctor’s appointment, because it was captured on film for a remarkably frank and candid documentary called The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy Of Martin Phillipps.
The Chills perform during the Levitation Showcase as part of the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Hotel Vegas on March 14, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for SXSW)
“There aren’t too many people who are told they are going to die while they have a camera pointed at their face,” Phillipps told me. “That scene was not staged. It put an incredible amount of pressure on what I wanted to achieve in the time I had left and also the degree of honesty I was prepared to put into the film because of the circumstances.
“It also meant that I had to sign off on two outcomes – the good ending and the not-so-good ending if I didn’t live to see the completion of the movie so they’d be allowed to go ahead and finish it.”
Due to a radical change in his lifestyle, and being treated with the drug Epclusa, he became free of Hepatitis C, although his liver would never recover its lost function. He held off the grim reaper for a while longer but died last year at the age of 61.
“I don’t want to live forever,” he sings. “I’m going to die alive.”
He left behind a musical legacy that includes songs such as the sublime Heavenly Pop Hit, the haunting Pink Frost, and the driving I Love My Leather Jacket, which Phillipps wrote in memory of early Chills’ drummer Martyn Bull, who died from leukemia at the age of 22, leaving Phillipps his leather jacket in his will.
Up to the end, Phillipps played and recorded with the umpteenth line-up of The Chills. More than 30 musicians had passed through the ranks over the years, and in the documentary many of them were interviewed, most of them getting emotional while discussing their time in the band. Many spoke of Phillipps’ brilliance and how being in The Chills was the creative highlight of their lives, but they were also bruised and battered by his single-mindedness, hard-headedness and tendency to put the work ahead of personal feelings.
I remember when I asked him if he ran into any ex-members of The Chills at the 2019 premiere of the documentary in his hometown of Dunedin, he replied in his typically wry manner: “I think it’s hard for me to go anywhere in New Zealand where there’s not a former Chill.”
And now there’s a posthumous album called Spring Board: The Early Unrecorded Songs. It’s not a mere cleaning out of the archives. Before his death, Phillipps was feverishly recording songs he wrote as a young man but never got around to committing to tape properly. It contains many revelations, not the least of which is that Phillipps seemingly arrived fully formed as an individual, idiosyncratic and impressive songwriter.
There’s a generous 20 tracks here, and any number of them are strong enough to earn a place on a Chills’ album from the past. What’s also remarkable is what an old soul he was, even in his early twenties. There are lyrics here that seem to predict where he would end up decades later, facing a shortened lifespan and trying to make the most of the time left to him.
“It’s time to sort things out, set things straight, clear the air,” he states in Declaration.
The most goosebump-inducing moment comes in the closing track, I Don’t Want To Live Forever. Over joyous, calliope-like keyboards, he leads a jaunty singalong about living in the moment, even when you’re crushingly aware of your own mortality.
“I don’t want to live forever,” he sings. “I’m going to die alive.”
The last time I saw Martin Phillips was in late 2022 at City Winery, a somewhat tony venue in Manhattan, with patrons seated politely at tables. The Chills were playing two separate shows in one night, and I watched them both, seeing him briefly between sets when we crossed paths, and chatting about music and our shared love of collecting breakfast cereal toys from our childhoods, plastic trinkets imbued with memories and nostalgia.
Phillipps was an eclectic and obsessive collector – some would say hoarder – and had extensive troves of comics, records, DVDs, toys and pop culture ephemera. He didn’t seem to throw anything away. He infamously held onto the Star Wars bag that contained his old drug paraphernalia from when he was addicted to heroin – a tourniquet, needles and, most strikingly, a towel spotted with his blood from trying to find new veins to inject.
“It’s weird, I know,” he said when I asked why he kept that towel all these years. “They become something like a trophy or an in-your-face flag and a record of a trying process. I understand why people keep them and don’t wash them. Those stains all mean something. They might mean a session that could have been a three-hour nightmare of finding a vein and finally you win through. It’s twisted logic, but that’s where you’re at with that kind of stuff.”
The second show at City Winery that night in New York in 2022 was sparsely attended, but he played as if his life depended on it. Maybe it did.
During a triumphant version of Heavenly Pop Hit, I sang along with the other strangers in the room.
“And so I stand and the sound goes straight through my body, I’m so bloated up, happy, I can throw things around me, and I’m growing in stages, and have been for ages, just singing and floating and free.”
That’s how I like to think of Martin Phillipps now. Singing and floating and free.
Barry Divola is an author, musician and journalist who writes regularly for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. His latest book is the novel Driving Stevie Fracasso. Follow his writing at: authory.com/BarryDivola
Main image: The Chills perform during the Levitation Showcase as part of the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Hotel Vegas on March 14, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for SXSW)