Why make a Chills Documentary?

INTRODUCTION
One of the greatest bands to come out of New Zealand ? and arguably the leading exponents of what came to be known as ?the Dunedin Sound? ? The Chills never quite broke through to achieve the international mainstream success many expected.

Hailed as a musical genius in the UK music press, songwriter and Chills main man Martin Phillipps seemed almost cursed ? brought low by a combination of stubbornness (or as Martin would have it, ?ill informed
determination?), bad luck and worse timing.
His failure to keep a stable lineup was part of it (The Chills have famously gone through twenty incarnations and 31 personnel over the past two decades, with Phillipps the only constant), but the distance of
New Zealand from the established centers of the international industry certainly didn?t help.

So were the expectations upon him simply too lofty to fulfill? Or were The Chills emblematic of a bigger story: the immense difficulties faced by New Zealand artists in gaining anything more than a tenuous foothold in the fiercely contested international music market?

Cut to: 2009, and The Chills, a relatively obscure band from New Zealand, are being deservedly reappraised:
?I didn?t get into the Chills until long after I released Kaleidoscope World on Creation in 1985. That record, and in particular the song Pink Frost, keeps giving and grows in iconic status as each year passes, sounding
ever fresher than fresh and more relevant?. Alan McGee (manager of Oasis and founder of Creation Records) Phillipps was recently acclaimed in Britain?s The Guardian Newspaper as one of the most important songwriters of his generation. The band are today hailed as spiritual godfathers by a new generation of alternative artists, from US top-10 groups like The Shins, The New Pornographers to New Jersey's lo-fi underground heroes Yo La Tengo. Martin Phillipps is routinely cited as one of the great, lost craftsmen of pop music.

TODAY
After years of public silence, Martin Phillipps is preparing to release some of the wealth of songs he?s accumulated since the last Chills album ' Sunburnt' released in 1996. Confounding the mythical ?curse of The Chills?, he has kept a stable line-up of the band together for several years. Tours for later in the year (OZ, UK and Europe) are being hatched, with US tour dates a possibility.

WHY THE CHILLS?
To look back at the ?bubble? of the early 1980s is to see all the truisms that still define the Kiwi psyche (modesty, iconoclasm, a dry, selfdeprecating wit) writ large, and worn heart-on-sleeve. The Dunedin music scene exhibited these inherent qualities.

The 1980s was a defining decade in New Zealand in more ways than one. Both politically and socially it saw massive shifts in hitherto entrenched attitudes ? in particular, in the areas of race relations and anti-nuclear policies ? and this tumult resounded clearly through the
arts scene.

Ironically, as befitted the angst, ennui, and avoidance of the mainstream manifest in their music and lyrics, New Zealand's biggest cultural export at this time, The Chills and the other exponents of the Dunedin Sound were decidedly apolitical. Nevertheless, their music expressed a bubbling dissatisfaction with the limitations of ordinary society, and a yearning for transcendance. The means by which they manifested their artistic aims was testament to a peculiarly local DIY aesthetic - and an attitude which fused both energy and commitment.

SO FAR
Dunedin: nearly the last bus stop on earth. Clinging tenaciously to the side of a mountain by the sea: a quaint small university town of sour weather and typically dour Scottish Presbyterian ancestry. Yet from this seemingly barren soil grew a music scene that would go forth to
(almost) conquer the world.

Nevertheless, its sheer isolation can hardly be understated. This was, after all, the beginning of the 1980s. Long before the arrival of the internet, of Google , Amazon and eBay, prior to cheap air travel, round-the-world tickets, cheap phone calls, emails, Skype ? even fax machines were not yet widely available.

As an inhabitant of Dunedin, you felt the distance keenly. Records, books, movies ? all could take years to find their way to New Zealand ? assuming they found their way at all. And such hardships turned the most casual fan into a dedicated aficionado. First you had to know what it was you wanted. Then came the other questions: where
to find it, how to get it ?

This was, of course, the situation the world over: outside of the major cities, the established cultural centers, a kind of wilderness mentality ruled. But it was especially pronounced in places like the far antipodes. Each week, long months after publication, the English music papers, the New Musical Express and Melody Maker, were
studied and dissected by New Zealand fans entranced by the energy of the new music emanating from glamorous, seemingly unattainable capitals of cool: LA, London, Berlin and New York.

The arrival of 1970s punk had democratized music; suddenly, it was no longer about craftsmanship, or musicology. You had something to say? Form a band. Bored with your life? Shout about it. But this revolution
was going on somewhere far away, over the horizon ? in Britain, the US and Europe. In New Zealand, you could only make out the faintest smell of gunpowder and see the dim, distant flash of the big guns.

Consequently, in Dunedin, a small group of like-minded amateur musicians ? Chris Knox, brothers David and Hamish Kilgour, Robert Scott, Shayne Carter, Martin Phillipps ? came to interpret this new music through the jangling guitars of sounds from before punk?s Year
Zero: The Beatles, The Byrds, David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Love.

They began with basic lo-fi recording sessions, with borrowed equipment and primitive mixing desks, and set about recontextualising the music reaching them from overseas. Before long a mini-movement formed.

...YET SO NEAR
In many ways, the ?Dunedin scene was just like other small town music movements ? in Athens, Georgia (home of R.E.M., Pylon, Indigo Girls and the B-52s); or Boston, Massachusetts (Pixies, Mission of Burma, Dumptruck); or Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Dbs,
Superchunk, Bend Folds Five). Or Manchester, in England (Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Magazine, et al); and Cologne in Germany (Kraftwerk, Neu!).

Invariably, these mini-revolutions were led by one or two bands, with other groups forming around them inspired by their sound and energy. But Dunedin represented a paradox: the very things that inspired and created the sound were the same factors (distance, isolation, the prevailing conservatism of NZ culture at the time) that
kept the bands from commercial and critical success.

Local critics and media were initially dubious about this new music, and audiences were certainly on the thin side at first, comprised mostly of fellow band-members, girlfriends and friends. That said, while small they were never indifferent - as Phillipps says ?we never played to those crowds who talked to each other and ignored the
band?. And so, little by little, things began to take off. The charts had to open up; local TV and college radio took notice. Audiences began to grow.

Finally, sensing that they were at a tipping-point in their careers, The Chills hoisted the flag, and set sail for London ? paving the way for a number of New Zealand bands to follow.! Initially the momentum was maintained by strong audiences and many favourable reviews, with the Chills touring successfully throughout Europe and North America; but ultimately, the experience proved disappointing, even cataclysmic.

Phillipps and his bandmates found themselves in a world far bigger and harsher than they'd ever imagined. For a moment, The Chills were not just the flavour-of-the-month, but the envoys of an entire musical subculture.
Daunted by these expectations, the pressure cooker and time pressures they were put under, all began to take a toll on band members at a time when the music industry was undergoing massive changes and the initial interest in the band had peaked.!