'The Dunedin sound' architects The Chills play first UK dates in six years, including The Wedgewood Rooms | Interview

The Guide is talking over Zoom with Martin Phillipps, founder and main man of cult indie band The Chills.

‘It's been an odd week,’ says Martin with remarkable understatement. ‘The woman next door stabbed her husband to death and the street was cordoned off for three days. I didn't know them that well, but I knew the previous homeowners really well, so I know the house and it's weird going past it now with its new history.’

However, the musician was still able to find levity among the tragedy: ‘But there have been some lighthearted moments. There's a cat which sits on their porch and everyone in their neighbourhood had assumed it was their cat and has been feeding it. Finally the owners who actually live around the corner have said: “Please stop feeding our cat!” And this cat has now been turning up at my place – 50 grammes of chicken and I've got a friend for life...’

Martin has been the sole constant in the band which formed in Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand in 1980. The band, along with the output of their legendary record label, Flying Nun Records, helped spread ‘the Dunedin sound’ globally – winning them followers in future heavy-hitters with bands like REM, Pavement and Mudhoney citing them as an influence.

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The band are currently on their first UK tour in six years – and a lot has happened in that time.

However, for a band once notorious for its rapidly shifting lineup – their Wikipedia page lists 32 members aside from Martin – things have been stable on that front for some time now.

‘The only change has been Callum [Hampton] coming in on bass and he was actually part of our roadcrew before that – he's got his own band Left or Right – they're phenomenal, and he's a great vocalist so he's lifted our whole vocal game.

‘Todd [Knudson] on drums has been with me 24 years now, and the others were only three or four years later than that. It's by far the longest running Chills lineup.’

It’s a stark contrast to those early years, isn’t it?

‘Obviously the question comes up: “Who's in the band these days?” And I have to say that it's mostly been the same people for the last quarter of a century! And it really shows.’

Praising his band he adds a note about the realities of touring in 2023: ‘It's not easy for them – three of them have got families, and trying to get anywhere from the southern hemisphere is instantly throwing another $25,000 of airfares on top of a tour.

‘Plus with Brexit with now, this tour has been really difficult to organise. For the first time since the ’80s we've had to get visas and carnets, so it's become really problematic. It’s been another $30,000 on visas in the past year, it's crazy, and we don't get it back through record sales any more. Everyone says get out there and sell some merchandise, but we've got to pay to get the merchandise made in the first place!’

Martin may be in decent health now, but during the ’90s he was laid low with hepatitis C, caught during his years of drug addiction.

Years later, while being followed by a team of film-makers for a documentary about the band, doctors tell Martin he has ‘a 31 per cent chance’ of dying within a year due to hepatitis and the liver damage it has left him with. Thankfully the doctors were wrong and as a result we have the extraordinary and acclaimed 2019 film The Chills: The Triumph and Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, charting the musician’s attempts to make sense of it all.

‘It's been interesting,’ says Martin in his typically dry manner. ‘There was kind of a prototype documentary done before that with Rob Curry in England, called The Curse of The Chills, and he was co-director on this one as well.

‘There are others before that that you can probably find on YouTube, but The Triumph and Tragedy is definitely the best. I've seen a lot of rockumentaries and I think it stands up well against a lot of the ones I've seen – it's a powerful and beautifully made movie.’

Has it helped raise their profile?

‘Air New Zealand were screening it on their international flights as one of the options, and I know a lot of people have seen it, and it's moved a lot of people, but I don't know if that really amounts to record sales, or a higher profile, but I'm glad we did it and it caught a moment in time that was quite bizarre and I seriously thought I might not be alive much longer.

‘All that happened unexpectedly in front of the cameras, those moments, they weren't staged. It was an intriguing time.’

With regards to his health now, he adds: ‘I'm nearly 100 per cent. I've got a lot of liver damage, but I'm doing pretty well, I just have to be careful.’

While there have been two albums released since their last visit to these shores, Snow Bound and Scatterbrain, it has just been announced that their debut album, 1987’s Brave Words, and the compilation Kaleidoscope World, which rounded up their early singles are to get the full ‘expanded and remastered’ treatment through their current label, Fire Records.

This is a project Martin has been wanting to bring to fruition for a long time.

‘Kaleidoscope World came out as a double-album a few years back but it's being reissued which is good. Initially it was an eight-track compilation, and then it was 18, and now it's a proper double-album with all sorts of out-takes.‘Brave Words, our first album after seven years together, has always been problematic because something went wrong with the amount of time we had to do mastering and mixing for it back then.

‘I worked with Greg Haver on our second-to-last album, Snow Bound, and he's done all that work with Manic Street Preachers and all that sort of stuff. He was the perfect person to take on the actual remix – not just remastering it – we tracked down all the multi-tracks for all but one song and it just sounds, finally…

‘I knew we'd played it well at the time, but it was described in one review as sounding like you were listening to somebody in the next room. We've stripped away a lot of the awful ’80s reverb and it was so fortuitous that Greg had worked in The Point Studio where we had recorded it, so he could picture the room, he knew the microphones we would have used, and he put a lot of effort into working out what we had intended to do at the time and what went wrong.’

How did they track down those tapes after all this time?

‘It took a wee bit of doing. Some had been sent back from the UK to Flying Nun headquarters in Auckland, a lot of that stuff has now gone to one of the national archives, The Alexander Turnbull Library, with the condition that the bands themselves have access to them.

‘The only track we couldn't find was on the third reel and it's just disappeared – Dark Carnival. Luckily it was the only one done with a drum machine and had quite a different sound, so of all the tracks to go missing that was probably the least problematic – we just gave it a good remaster to bring it up to scratch.’

‘I've been trying to get this done for at least 20 years, it's just been difficult. I'm doing some new artwork for it, we just want to make it as good as possible.’

It’s easy to assume that most recent album, 2021’s Scatterbrain, is a product of the pandemic, but Martin reveals: ‘Strangely enough it predated that – the pandemic shut the project down for about eight months.

‘We were about two days off of finishing recording then all of a sudden our producer had to run for the last seat on the last plane back to Auckland from Dunedin. The flipside was that we were able to start sending each other mixes and really tighten it up before we got back to complete it.

‘There were some references on the record which sound like they’re from the pandemic, but it was more about the movie and mortality and the death of my mother. When I was writing it, I wasn't sure if it was going to be the last album – it was still when I wasn't sure about my health. There was quite a bit of self-doubt and questioning going on.’

There’s good new for Chills fans, with more music, both old and new pending.

As well as the rereleases, the band are planning to properly record their really early material for the first time – and he’s been writing for the next album too.

‘It was seven years before we released the first Chills album, so there's a lot of material from those early years that was the stuff which got us famous, but was never recorded. We've been demoing that, so we've got about 15 demos so far, we're probably going to make a double album out of it and finally release stuff from the early ’80s.

I thought if I stop writing new stuff while I'm doing that, but I can't – it keeps happening! So new songs are building up towards the next album.’

He also promises that the band are on fine form for this tour.

‘One of our big problems has always been that we have these pop melodies, but we play like a rock band, so we've really seldom caught on record what it's actually like. I guess this goes for a lot of bands, but producers will automatically assume that you're trying to make pop music, but we're way more influenced by The Velvet Underground and The Stooges and stuff like that.’

The Chills play The Wedgewood Rooms on Monday, June 19, doors 7.30pm. Tickets £18.50. Go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.