Martin Phillipps - Give It A Whirl Interview

Interview – 2025

‘Dunedin Sound’ stalwart Martin Phillipps was the driving force behind Flying Nun group The Chills. Prominent in New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s, The Chills went on to deliver their distinctive take on psychedelic pop to a global audience, gathering international record deals and performing to 60,000 at the 1987 Glastonbury Festival along the way. Phillipps passed away in July 2024.

In this interview for 2003 television series Give It A Whirl, Phillipps covers many topics, including:

How early Chills singles were received, and how Martin's father reacted to his music (1 minute in)
The advantages of Dunedin as a location for shooting music videos (3 minutes in)
Touring the United Kingdom 1985, and the popularity of Flying Nun artists offshore (8 minutes)
The toll that relentless touring took on personal relationships (10 minutes)
Playing in East Berlin before the wall came down (11 minutes)
Feeling out of step with the wider New Zealand music industry (15 minutes)
The "honest" quality of New Zealand music ( 17 minutes)
The difficulty of capturing The Chills sound in a recording (19 minutes)
His regard for fellow Dunedin musicians — and the impact of Chris Knox (22 minutes)
Capturing the NZ environment in a three minute pop song (27 minutes)

Read more about Martin Phillipps and The Chills, on AudioCulture (NZ On Screen's sister website)

This interview was recorded for the 2003 season of TV series Give it a Whirl. All audiovisual content is copyright to Visionary Film & TV, and may not be reproduced.

Things just kept growing. Every tour we did, there were bigger crowds. We were very quickly breaking attendance records at some of these key venues like The Gladstone in Christchurch, The Gluepot in Auckland . . . the fact that it [New Zealand art] was still not accepted by the mainstream made it more attractive to the student audience and the alternative market.
– Martin Phillipps on touring New Zealand in the 1980s