Martin Phillipps, founder of New Zealand’s influential Chills, dies at 61

Martin Phillipps, whose band the Chills was a mainstay of the 1980s New Zealand indie-rock scene that served as a formative influence on the likes of R.E.M. The statement didn’t say when or where Phillipps died or specify a cause but noted that he’d died “unexpectedly.” A 2019 documentary about Phillipps and the Chills chronicled the musician’s struggles with hepatitis C; New Zealand’s Otago Daily Times reported that Phillipps had been admitted recently to Dunedin Hospital with liver problems. In a statement Sunday, Neil Finn of Crowded House — a fellow New Zealander whose early band Split Enz once enlisted the Chills as an opening act — called Phillipps “one of NZ’s greatest songwriters” and described him as having been “fascinated by and devoted to the magic and mystery of music.” After playing in a short-lived group called the Same, Phillipps formed the Chills in 1980 with a lineup that included his sister Rachel; in 1982, the band signed to Flying Nun — whose other other tightly connected acts were the Clean, the Bats and the Verlaines — and proceeded to make a string of scrappy yet tuneful singles including the stomping “I Love My Leather Jacket” and “Pink Frost,” which became perhaps the band’s best-known song. “I want to stop my crying / But she’s lying there dying,” Phillipps sang over an oddly buoyant bass line — a striking juxtaposition that led Spin magazine to advise readers to “imagine Paul McCartney attempting Joy Division.” Having already cycled through more than half a dozen lineups, the Chills dropped their first studio LP, “Brave Words,” in 1987; for their follow-up, 1990’s “Submarine Bells,” they signed in the U.S. to Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash Records, which helped drive the knowingly titled “Heavenly Pop Hit” to No. Phillipps spoke candidly about the challenges of surviving the music industry, as in a 1992 interview with The Times in which he admitted that the “single biggest problem so far has been just trying to keep bands together when we can’t afford to pay ourselves anything.” Yet the Chills’ music put across an abiding belief in the power of a great song.