Goodbye, boy genius

Russell Brown, a close observer of Martin Phillipps and his band The Chills across decades, looks back at his musical life and times.

For most purposes, Martin Phillipps was announced to the world in June 1982. Three months earlier, his band The Chills had travelled from Dunedin to Christchurch to make their first real recording, playing some shows to cover their costs, taking another band, The Stones, with them. Two weeks later, two more groups, The Verlaines and Sneaky Feelings, did the same thing. All four had practice rooms in Dunedin's Regent Theatre, and none were long out of school.

The record released by Flying Nun that June, the so-called Dunedin Double EP, featured all four bands and came to embody a good deal of the label's founding mythology. It held the essence of a cultural flowering in the southern city, in which a crowd of kids - some there to study, some born and bred - picked up guitars and found themselves in a movement.

The three Chills songs that made up one side of the EP are not entirely successful recordings. The band's ambition exceeded its skills and, to an extent, the equipment (Chris Knox's legendary TEAC four-track recorder) the songs were captured on. But they offered a glimpse inside the magic mind of Martin Phillipps.

"The stars and planets just glide on by," he sings on Kaleidoscope World, an invitation to dream, "cold and patient like white gods' eyes". In Frantic Drift, he begs an interlocutor to "tell me a story, let me drift - make me think I'm not really in this place". For neither the first nor the last time, Martin longed to escape into space.

By the end of the year, The Chills had their own single, Rolling Moon, about revellers who "dance until we start to cry". Its closing refrain pleads, "Please oh god, don't take us home." Martin wrote it when he was 16. He was, recalled Shayne Carter in his awardwinning memoir Dead People I Have Known, "a stoned boy genius, out of it on comics, garage rock and full moons over water".