Chills
Chills fans have had to put up with almost 20 years of excuses. If only Martin Phillipps had been able to keep a band together, instead of going through 14 configurations in the group’s first 12 years. If only drummer Martyn Bull hadn’t died of leukemia in 1983, just as things were starting to take off. If only the mix of their first album, 1988’s delicate Brave Words, hadn’t sounded so odd. If only their major-label records had been better promoted. If only visa troubles hadn’t forced Phillipps to make the Chills’ 1996 attempted comeback album, Sunburnt, with a pickup band. If only two of his tape recorders hadn’t malfunctioned at the same time a few years later, plunging him into deep depression and addiction to “opiates” (his word). If only he hadn’t got hepatitis C from the aforementioned addiction. If only, if only, if only.
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But the real problem is that Phillipps, a remarkably talented songwriter, has gradually come to believe that he’s an important songwriter. When he formed the Chills in 1980, his native Dunedin, New Zealand, was in the middle of an unlikely music boom, and he became one of its brightest lights. His songs were grounded in the sweet, chiming concision of 60s pop. He was a melodist and a romantic, unmacho and self-aware, sometimes almost prayerful: “I’d like to say how I love you / But it’s all been said in other songs / And if I try to say it new, then I’ll say it wrong,” he sang in “Night of Chill Blue.” Between 1982 and 1989, the Chills released a handful of singles, two EPs, and Brave Words through the New Zealand label Flying Nun–not much to show for nine years. But in the liner notes to the band’s new three-disc retrospective, Secret Box: The Chills’ Rarities, 1980-2000, Phillipps notes that “there would have been two (maybe three) albums prior to Brave Words if things had worked out better.” Then he suggests their track listings.
Fortunately Phillipps was proud enough of what he and the Chills did accomplish that he was willing to suppress his perfectionist tendencies and release Secret Box. The BBC radio sessions that occupy half of the second disc are decent but most are “unreleased” only in the sense that they’re slightly different arrangements of familiar material; the B sides and wanna-B sides of the third disc document the band’s late-80s peak and subsequent slow decline. But the first disc and the first third of the second disc are the real deal, featuring 30 lost songs drawn from raw, roaring live tapes and sequenced for aesthetics rather than chronology. The earliest is a cover of Jody Reynolds’s rockabilly hit “Endless Sleep,” recorded the day before their first gig; the latest are four from an October 1985 show.
