Meeting Martin Phillipps of The Chills
I was excited to be introduced to Martin Phillipps when The Chills came to play at the Norwich Arts Centre. This was the chance to sit down with a writer of an unimaginable number of songs, (many more than the 500 oft-suggested), while he was passing through Norwich. We sat in the beer garden of The Plough, soaking up the late-afternoon heat and talked about song writing, playing in a band, the history and geography of New Zealand, where Martin, founder and leader of The Chills, resides. Spin a globe round until you find South Island. To locate Dunedin, look pretty much as far south as you can go on the east coast. It’s a fair way. Dunedin’s remoteness, (or is it we who are remote?), seems such that people have to make their own entertainment. And thus it was, in the late-1960s when Martin and his two sisters were corralled by their mother into piano lessons at a young age. One of their mother’s friends had announced she was setting up as a piano teacher and Mrs. Phillipps offer...