'Something Far Greater': Martin Phillips & a Southern Tradition

Scott Hamilton

SH: Recently we published a review of Richard Langston's superb book about The Clean. Martin Phillipps was a part of the story of that band, but he will be remembered mostly for the body of work he created as the singer and songwriter for The Chills. I wrote this tribute to Phillipps after his death two years ago. It was written for a member of his family, and hasn't been published before.

1. 'His Music Was From Here'

Martin Phillipps contained multitudes. He died last week, but he has left behind an oeuvre that is vast and varied, and that can be interpreted in various ways. I see him as someone who extended and updated a distinctively Pākehā cultural tradition.

Like the music of Douglas Lilburn, the poems of Ruth Dallas, Charles Brasch and Allen Curnow, and the paintings of Bill Sutton and Graham Sydney, many of Phillipps' best songs are powerful responses to the land and seascapes of southern New Zealand, or Murihiku.

I'm not arguing that Phillipps was necessarily directly influenced by the names I've mentioned. He didn't need to be. He responds to the same landscape, is part of the same history, and dealt with same dilemmas.

In an obituary for Phillipps Finlay Macdonald praised his 'sense of place'. 'Martin was from here, and his music was from here too' Macdonald wrote. The mountains, coasts, forests and plains of Murihiku inspire intense and often conflicting emotions in Phillipps' songs.

'Night of Chill Blue' might be Phillipps' greatest song. Released on The Chills' Brave Words album in 1987, it clocks in at less than three minutes but, in the words of Richard Langston, has 'an air of something far greater than its parts'.

In an interview with Auckland student radio station BFM in the mid-nineties, Phillipps named 'Night of Chill Blue' as one of his favourite Chills recordings, saying he felt it captured the feeling of a New Zealand landscape. The song has a spare, angular, repetitive sound that recalls Joy Division. Phillipps often used ascending melodies, but here The Chills circle the same territory again and again. Steep slopes of notes rise and fall and rise and fall, evoking a range of mountains. 

But Phillipps gives 'Night of Chill Blue' a plangent, unashamedly romantic guitar figure that Ian Curtis and his band might have scorned. Phillipps' voice might belong to an owl calling across dark peaks, or to a lost and frightened tramper pleading for help.

The first verse of 'Night of Chill Blue' could be a caption to one of Bill Sutton's paintings of Canterbury's void-like heavens:

Sitting watching clouds go by

falling across a very wide sky

The clouds are falling, and so is the song's protagonist. He is sharing the view with a lover, yet he feels strangely isolated from her. He wants to merge with her, to lose himself with her, but he cannot shed a sense of isolation:

So I think of you the only one

I wish it was just us two

But it's you and me and us that's three

The landscape in which the singer finds himself becomes a symbol of a loneliness that may be, he suspects, innate in all humans. Decades earlier Allen Curnow expressed the same chilling idea in his poems about the southern landscape. For both Phillipps and Curnow, language as well as landscape can make barriers between humans. These lines by Curnow would be at home in 'The Night of Chill Blue':

We speak not only

to each other but as if a third was present,

the thing we say.

Phillipps sings that he'd 'say how much I love you', but worries that 'it's all been said in other songs'. If he 'tries to say it new' then he might 'say it wrong'. Writing six decades before Phillipps, RAK Mason expressed the same sense of being the inheritor of a long, glorious, and oppressive tradition.

'Shakespeare Milton Keats are dead' Mason lamented in 'Song of Allegiance', before lamenting that his own voice sounded 'cracked and harsh' beside theirs. 'Stoutly in the rear I march' he claimed.

Martin Phillipps, of course, was immersed in English pop music, not English literature. He was preoccupied with bands like The Beatles and The Fall, not poets like Milton and Keats. But the sort of anxiety about tradition that he expresses in 'Night of Chill Blue' and other songs is a recurring feature of Pākehā literature, music, and art. Is it possible, many of our creatives have wondered, to describe our lives in these islands at the bottom of the world using forms and styles developed at the other end of the world? Are we producing mere pastiches? What should we keep and what should we shun from our cultural inheritance? What is creative and what is colonial?

2. Hallucinating

Towards the end of 'Night of Chill Blue' Phillipps throws us an exotic image that has no obvious relationship to the rest of his lyric:

Twinkling stars on a foreign land

Silent camel train on desert sand

A scene from the Sahara or from Arabia is superimposed on the song's southern landscape. Hallucinations like this recur obsessively in Pākehā literature and art. In Erewhon Samuel Butler imagined an entire nation into uninhabited valleys of the Southern Alps. Colin McCahon and Rita Angus saw angels against our bare hills and seas. One of the characters in Maurice Duggan's story 'Along Rideout Road that Summer' conjured Coleridge's opiate-induced city of Xanadu, with its 'stately pleasure dome' and 'walls and towers...girdled round', as he wandered a backblocks farm. Peter Jackson put a Biblical city in the West Coast bush in his faux-documentary Forgotten Silver.

Ian Wedde has noted how Pākehā colonists often found the landscapes of Aotearoa—the  bush, the smoking, colourless peat swamps, the bare, apparently endless mountains—both overwhelming and inscrutable. Lacking the intricate network of meanings and feeling of belonging that a deep history and tradition have given tangata whenua, we have used adjectives like 'bleak' and 'remote' to describe many of Aotearoa's wilder landscapes. For Charles Brasch, the mountains and plains of the southern countryside issued a 'cry for meaning'. 

When they are locked up in solitary confinement, prisoners often hallucinate; their minds compensate for the lack of meaning and stimulation in their bare cells. The weird fantasies that Pākehā artists and writers have wrung out of Aotearoa's wild landscapes can be seen as the same sort of compensatory visions. Alone inside alien landscapes that cry for meaning, minds reach back in time and grasp images from the other side of the world. 

These artistic fantasies can be connected to the mythical beasts that have pursued Pākehā across Aotearoa for nearly two centuries. Today Youtubers attract large audiences with reports on monsters like the 'Canterbury panther', the sasquatch-like 'Moehau man' of the Coromandel, and the 'goat man' who supposedly haunts Desert Road on dark nights. These cryptids are the descendants of the 'Saurian monster' that terrified soldier-settlers on the Waikato frontier in the late nineteenth century. 

The Waikato’s monster sometimes resembled a huge lizard, and at other times had long, black, shaggy hair. It always boasted huge jaws and jagged teeth. Newspapers blamed the monster for attacking sheep and upsetting canoes; bands of settlers hunted it, carrying the guns they had recently aimed at Māori. Some papers blamed the Waikato’s indigenous people for the exotic creature: they talked of parties of Māori travelling to Australia, returning with alligator eggs, and leaving those eggs on the banks of the Waikato to hatch. The fact that there are no alligators in Australia only heightened the surrealism of the ‘monster scare’.

3. Without personae

Phillipps' desert image might seem hackneyed, a scene from a postcard or tourist's painting, another piece of Pākehā exotica, as pathetic as the imaginary monsters of frightened settlers. But it is rescued by one of his great virtues: sincerity. He sings 'Night of Chill Blue' with an honesty and vulnerability that make his anxieties about language and his flight of fantasy credible rather than self-indulgent.

Many post-punk singers used personae or elaborate mannerisms to distance themselves from the emotions in their songs. Phillipps has no time for such artifice. The overwhelming majority of his songs are written in the first person, and there is seldom any ironic distance between his vocal and his lyrics. When he sings about sadness or gladness he sounds sad or glad.

Phillipps' early songs offered a model of masculinity that was decades ahead of its time. He sings about feelings many Pākehā men felt they shouldn't have, let alone share. 'Pink Frost' is the sound of a panic attack; 'Doledrums' carefully documents depression; 'The Male Monster from the Id' is, in Phillips' own words, 'an apology for being such a lumbering male'.

Phillipps' emotional frankness and rejection of male chauvinism distinguishes him from many male Pākehā creatives of previous generations. As Kai Jensen showed in his incendiary book Whole Men: The Masculine Tradition in New Zealand Literature, New Zealand's bohemian blokes have been quite capable of combining avant-garde attitudes towards the arts and antediluvian attitudes to gender. 

Jensen shows how widely read, creative men could treat their wives like domestic servants and their children like encumbrances. They may have sneered at mainstream male society's obsession with 'rugby, racing, and beer', but they often followed the masculinist pattern by escaping from their families to drink heavily with their mates. Too many of them treated literature as an exclusively male domain. Few of them could talk about their emotions, either on the page or over the dinner table. They found it much easier to write about landscapes than love. Francis Pound documents the same masculinism in his book about our mid-century painters and sculptors, The Invention of New Zealand.

The music world suffered from the same patriarchal culture. When I interviewed Bill Direen, another great songwriter from Murihiku and the Flying Nun label, he talked about the 'macho' attitude of the pub rock bands that dominated New Zealand cities before punk and the rise of Flying Nun. Despite their pathetically modest audiences and income, these bands aped the attitudes and behaviour of northern hemisphere superstars like Mick Jagger and Robert Plant. They preened and strutted on their tiny stages; their songs were shrill mating calls. In this context the honesty and vulnerability of songwriters like Phillipps and Direen was revolutionary.

4. The Deep Black Sea

There are parallels between Phillips' songs about place and the soundscapes of Douglas Lilburn and other Aotearoan composers. 'I SOAR', which comes from The Chills' 1990 album Submarine Bells, has the dreaminess of Lilburn's electro-acoustic sound-poem 'The Return'. Flying over southern hills at dusk, the singer—a pilot? a bird? a departing soul?—hyperfocuses on one scene then another. The melody spirals gently, like a thermal on a summer day.

Phillipps loved the Otago Peninsula, which separates the huge green waves of the Southern Ocean from lake-like Otago harbour. The western coast of the peninsula has sheltered bays and cosy villages; its east coast is blasted by wind and water, and sparsely inhabited. McCahon famously said that New Zealand has a domesticated side and a 'wild side': the peninsula offers both. Perhaps that's what appealed to Phillipps. In songs like 'Ocean' and 'Hawea' he makes water inviting, even comradely; in others, like the epic 'Water Wolves', waves rage against humanity.

'The deep black sea/ She yearns for me/ She says with her I will stay' sings the dying mariner of 'Water Wolves'. The archaic inversion in that last line reminds us of the sea shanties and elegies for sea-dead that nineteenth century crews and settlers brought to these islands. (I remember a bootleg Chills tape that included a recording of the band performing 'Drunken Sailor' in the eighties.)

In Phillipps' oeuvre and in the work of New Zealand writers like Curnow, Robin Hyde, James K Baxter, and Denis Glover, the sea's storms and wrecks punish the hubris of humans. 'Never turn your back on the sea' Curnow warned in one poem. The ocean reminds humans of their dependence on nature and their mortality.

This sense of the sea as a moral arbiter is common, too, in the indigenous cultures of the South Pacific. Listening to 'Water Wolves' now, I think of Sekatoa, a creature said to patrol the waters of Tonga's far north. Sekatoa can appear as a shoal of fish, as a shark, as a massive ray, or as a monster far larger than a whale. He can be a blessing or a curse to fishermen lost at sea, guiding the good back to port and dragging the bad deep under the waves. Sekatoa has counterparts across Oceania.

5. The Empire Strikes Back

'Come Home' is not one of Phillipps' best songs, but it makes his affinity with the Pakeha modernists of an earlier generation clear. By the time it was released in 1997, on the album Sunburnt, successive governments had pushed through neo-liberal economic policies that ruthlessly globalised New Zealand's economy, removing much of its industrial sector and creating a new precariat. International travel was cheaper, and many young people had gone abroad, fleeing the debris of the old economy. The internet was spreading across the world. But Phillipps' song accepts the dichotomy between home and away that cultural nationalists like Curnow and Brasch insisted on, and makes the case for home. When he sings 'The future's here, it's not out there' Phillips recalls Dennis Glover's famous lines:

I do not dream of Sussex downs

or quaint old England's quaint old towns

I think of what may be seen

In Johnsonville or Geraldine

'Come Home' appeared at a time Phillipps was struggling to recover his focus and his equilibrium. At the beginning of the decade many commentators had predicted that The Chills would 'make it big' in America and Europe. The band had already won a cult following in those countries. Phillipps had influenced acts like REM and Pavement.

But The Chills were dropped by their American label after the commercial failure of their 1992 album Soft Bomb. The band's leader returned to Dunedin and gave several disconsolate interviews, saying he had been 'found wanting' in the northern hemisphere. Depression, drugs, and disease would almost end his career.

Decades earlier Pākehā writers and artists like Brasch, Lilburn, and Angus had struggled with the question of how to relate to the northern hemisphere. Many Pākehā suffered then, and still suffer today, from a 'cultural cringe'—from a feeling that whatever is made here must be inferior to the productions of the north. Brasch writes in his journals of working to purge himself of feelings of inferiority and to commit to a local audience, even if that audience was tiny. How, he asks, can he write well about his country with critics from an alien, distant land sitting on his shoulders?

For a time Phillips seems to have blamed himself, and not the vagaries of taste and limitations of popular audiences, for the commercial failure of his music in the north. He is far from the only local musician to be damaged by a failure to 'make it big' on the other side of the world. Brasch's warning against the cultural cringe is as valid today as ever. So is the way that he consciously purged himself of feelings of inferiority and of the desire for the approval of northern hemisphere critics.

Phillipps overcame many of his problems, and released a series of new albums in the last decade of his life. Julia Parnell's documentary film The Chills: the triumph and tragedy of Martin Phillips shows how he worked his way to sobriety and found better ways of relating to the people he made music with.

But Phillips' later albums and those of the eighties and nineties only hint at the amount of music he made. CK Stead has talked about the enormous 'treasure trove' of unpublished writing that Katherine Mansfield left behind when she died too soon. For decades one posthumous book after another delighted Mansfield fans. Phillips has left behind what may be an even larger body of unreleased work. There will surely be many new songs to explore.

_