17. The Pines - Miracles / High Street

from the In time for Christmas Day EP, self-released, 2000

Put down your Sufjan Stevens xmas box sets, lower that collection of carols by Low, stop the Ze Christmas record spinning, and laugh off the high concept of the Black Arts’ ‘Christmas number one’.  Pour yourself a glass of port and draw a chair up to the fire while I tell you a seasonal tale of the Pines.

From what I gather, Pam Berry and Joe Brooker’s meeting had a sinister quality to it, but from the beginning it was clear that the Pines were on the side of the angels.  An early scene in the duo’s life sees them sitting round another fireplace, this one in Greenwich, where Pam, the Ella Fitzgerald of American indie-pop, works up a set of songs with Joe, soon to reveal himself as the Irving Berlin of British indie-pop.  The songs are then played at parties in south east London living rooms, as well as at shows in church halls, the upstairs lounge bars of pubs, and on one memorable occasion, alongside the stellar line-up of Future Bible Heroes, the Clientele and Harvey Williams at the Black and White Ball at Bush Hall.

What you noticed first at these irregular appearances was Pam’s voice, as perfect as a cup of gently swirling café au lait on a mahogany table.  Then the sparky and erudite guitar playing of Joe, underpinning and punctuating the vocals in one man band style, like Billy Bragg if he predominantly played an acoustic and had more of the Marr about him.  Then you fell prey to the striking choruses with lyrical touches that stuck in the mind long before it was possible to hear them in recorded form and on repeat.

The Matinée compilation It’s been a while brought the best of those recordings together and proved that the Pines were consistently able to write songs that sound like standards – ‘Baby, you’ll do’, ‘Please don’t get married (without asking me)’, ‘A rainy day’, ‘I see stars’ – songs whose timeless air is only troubled, or given added charm, by the tinges of 21st century Thames estuary in Joe’s singing.

The songs are peppered with parting shots, one-liners and verbal slapstick, often as part of a sung conversational exchange between Joe and Pam, a device that few if any songwriters have better utilised.  Neither could many writers artfully and verisimilarly get ‘copy-editing’ into their lyrics, yet songs like ‘Marie Claire’ and ‘Seven clubs’ are literate rather than literary, wearing their learning (and their pop culture) lightly.

For all their wit, the songs never stray far from sorrow; the melancholy mists wreathing them suggest that at the end of the night and after a few too many, jokes will fall flat and the characters will have to face up to their lot.  They do so with vision that remains sharp.  ‘I always said that you put me in mind of a movie star; I never said which one.’

But before we have a collection of their songs, before they were released via a variety of record labels of mostly diminutive stature or smaller, what the Pines did first was give away an EP of Christmas songs, knowing – possibly from bitter experience – that melancholy is intensified over the festive season.  The EP is topped by the first of three originals, ‘Chalet’, and tailed by the American classic ‘Silver bells’ (which appeared on A Christmas gift from Fortuna Pop! that December).  Proving the standard of the Pines’ own standards, the tinselly glint of ‘Silver bells’ shares their company quite happily.  ‘Chalet’ is a lonesome Christmas blues, impossibly sad, while ‘Miracles’ has that particular pre-xmas melancholy generated by the wearying search for a token that says something – anything – to the one you love.  ‘Don’t listen to me, I can’t give you miracles / Just packets of tea and bars of soap’.

‘High Street’ sees things from a parental point of view.  The young adult to whom the song is addressed is either far away across the sea, or deliberately striking out for him or herself, spending Christmas with a boy or girlfriend for perhaps the first time, in a necessary rite of passage for both parent and progeny.  Mum and dad sing, ‘This time of year without you here, the table’s incomplete.’  Cue a weeping blues harp.  Torn paper crowns have long since been cast aside, and a couple of crackers remain unpulled.  The tree drops its needles to form a green carpet around the remaining few unopened presents.

These are tales worth telling and moods which merit their capture in song.  They bring a kind of comfort to those slugging their way through green bottles and a blue Christmas, and they stand as a deeply evocative reminder to others of Yules that were considerably less joyful than the one they are about to celebrate.

16. The Chills - Satin doll

from the Dunedin double EP, Flying Nun, 1982

If the music of the Creation is ‘red – with purple flashes’, then the music of the Chills is blue – with purple flashes.

Shikoku baby (Side B)

Layer an organ on top of the noise the Stones made, give it a Martin Phillipps tune, a cantering rhythm and a Japanese feel, and you have ‘Satin doll’.  The satin, the blossom and the keyboard melody’s gentle to and fro are as stereotyping of Japan as hanging Hiroshige wood-block prints in your bedroom, but the song transcends this and becomes memorable because Martin Phillipps’ NZ-accented singing – so soft and quiet on the Dunedin double that the song was remixed for reissue on the Kaleidoscope world compilation – betrays no trace of irony, while the line of his guitar ascends beautifully, scything its way like a samurai through any number of competing warrior songs to stand alone and undefeated at the end of the fight; the second of many of his songs to do so.

Salvaging boyhood

Martin Phillipps has a gift for songs which might be taken as themes for the Chills’ entire body of work.  ‘Kaleidoscope world’ is one such, lyrically portraying the bright-eyed wonder of late boyhood and first girlfriends but also capturing in the music the melancholy those lost days generate.  Floating with his girl in a space capsule, Martin declares that ‘we’ll never die in our kaleidoscope world’.  The organ meanders like the shifting patterns of a suitably psychedelic optical toy, and an electric guitar purrs out its riffs low in the mix, turning the occupants of the capsule into outsize feline astronauts of Bagpuss colouring.

Sonic beauty

‘Flame-thrower’ – the flipside of debut single ‘Rolling moon’ – set the tone for the Chills’ uncanny ability to meld the theme of their songs with their sound.  Recorded live, it captures the group at full force.   At first the flame is powered down, barely visible, but then as Martin urges ‘Talk with me – it’s not too late’, the handle is depressed, and all within range are scorched.  Martyn Bull’s brilliantly dynamic drumming and the Morse code beeps of Rachel Phillipps’ keyboards are the fluid that this flame-thrower burns.

If the Chills had only ever recorded ‘Pink frost’, then they would have stood a very good chance of being remembered for all time.  The essential pink frostiness of ‘Pink frost’, the evocation of deeply iced ground tinged with shepherd’s warning sunrise redness, is remarkable.  It’s one of few songs of which I never tire, and yet I try not to listen to it arbitrarily or routinely, for fear of it finally losing its power over me.

As I recall the Chills were able to reconstitute the studio brilliance of ‘Pink frost’ live in London in the late eighties.  Even the sight of Martin Phillipps’ curly-toed jester-minstrel boots could not detract from its emotional force.  The Secret box collection gives a sense of how they developed that fire and ice sound through live performance – the seven minute instrumental, ‘Balancing’ provides the best evidence.

Under ‘Sonic beauty’, we might also file another theme song, ‘Night of Chill blue’, whose crystalline guitar is as clear as the scene in which Martin sets ‘Twinkling stars over a foreign land / Silent camel train on desert sands’, and ‘Effloresce and deliquesce’ which shows a Cocteau Twins-like delicacy in creating other-worldly sound-worlds.  Aquamarine is also the colour of the title song of the album on which ‘Effloresce’ appears, Submarine bells.  Once again, Martin makes a perfect match of lyric and sound, conjuring up a submersible sibling for the space capsule of ‘Kaleidoscope world’.

The contemporaneous ‘Wave-watching’ didn’t make it onto Submarine bells, but its sonic attempt to depict rollers crashing are notable, even if ultimately they are as unsuccessful as any painter’s endeavour to capture the motion of water on canvas.  Another song, ‘Water wolves’, which first surfaced along with ‘Wave-watching’ as a skeletal B side, conclusively proves that Martin’s cap was at that time set at a jaunty nautical angle.  It later reappeared on Soft bomb with a typically sumptuous string arrangement by Van Dyke Parks.  We can only imagine what a record that would have been if, like Joanna Newsom, Martin Phillipps had had funds enough for a whole album of VDP arrangements.  The music on Soft bomb was no longer quite so chilly, yet aside from the love at first sight of ‘Double summer’, the Californian sun seems to have failed to warm Martin right through to the core.

Soliloquizing bogles

There’ll surely be a lot of footfall on Martin Phillipps’ grave when he’s gone, if all the involuntary shivers captured in his music are totted up.

‘Pink frost’ may have been the first of his songs to face up to death, but it was far from being the last, and soon spirits – chills – were teeming through them.  ‘I love my leather jacket’ is the most celebrated of these, setting lines as weighted with insight about surviving the loss of a friend (drummer Martyn Bull) as those penned by the best poets to music which takes its lead from the archetypal rock’n’roll article of clothing of the title.  Then there’s ‘Ghosts’, ‘’Sixteen heart-throbs’, Dark carnival’, ‘Creep’, ‘Dead web’, the haunted music of ‘House with a hundred rooms’ and ‘Whole weird world’ from the Lost EP – the Chills have written the songbook of the Lost, and lure you into believing that the spirit world is a place you’d like to be trapped in, like the mother and her children in Alejandro Amenábar’s super-creepy film The Others.  For if nothing else, ghosts have longevity.

And that’s before we mention the ghosts of those still living, close at hand but out of reach, or on the far side of the world.  The homesickness of ‘Part past part fiction’ and ‘Come home’ and the separation of ‘Don’t be – memory’ fall into this camp.

Swirling breeze

There’s a lot of weather in the Chills’ oeuvre.  Rain is never far away, and it’s often very cold, if not frosty.

Their first Peel session in 1985 presented a couple of meteorological moods, and ‘Wet blanket’, itself more than a little rain-sodden.  All are of equal brilliance, or chilliness.  Alongside the aforementioned ‘Night of chill blue’, there was a re-recording of ‘Rolling moon’, the tune of which I like to think is a whistling staple of such milkos as still float the delivery of milk round early morning Dunedin.  Milkos of independent and psychedelic leaning, obviously.

Sharing its punning theme with the La’s ‘Doledrum’, ‘Doledrums’ made a lot of sense to a student on the other side of the world, with a commitment of eight timetabled hours a week.  Sense perfected when the student graduated virtually unemployable and started signing on at the Medina Road social security office in Finsbury Park.  ‘The benefits arrive and life goes on and on and on.’

‘Wet blanket’ also shared a lyrical conceit, this time with Smiths’ ‘I want the one I can’t have’, music being no different from science or fiction when it comes to people in different parts of the world reaching the same experimental or artistic conclusions at the same time.  While Morrissey marries it to tough-knock Mancunian upbringing, Phillipps makes you think of camping – the one with whom you want to be sharing a tent is sharing it with someone else.  ‘’Cause you’re so so so beautiful – why aren’t you mine?’

The Brave words LP brought a wet front with it in the form of ‘Rain’, a typically lovely Chills song which made you suspect that Martin was the sort who likes a good soaking.  But by 1996, the Chills were experiencing the effects of global warming, and titled that year’s album Sunburnt (though there was still occasion to tell of ‘Swimming in the rain’).  Temporary Chills of the calibre of XTC’s Dave Gregory and Fairport Convention’s Dave Mattacks were drafted in for Sunburnt, recorded over the previous English summer on the banks of the Thames.  By and large it maintains the consistency and avoidance of filler that had been the strength of previous Chills albums.

Sunburnt isn’t the last record Martin Phillipps has made – another phase of the Chills is up and running, the Stand by EP was released in 2004, and a new LP due in the near future – but it leaves the listener feeling that he had come to terms with his lot.

Songwriter’s blues

Despite the strength of the Chills’ identity, despite the fit between the group’s name and their music, despite all the brave words, there is a questioning ache at the core of Martin Phillipps’ song writing.  On ‘Bee bah bee bah bee boe’ he sang ‘You’d think that self-discovery / is really rather easy / I mean I’m standing right here / but the real real me is never very clear’ but to his credit he kept up his search throughout.

The sleeve notes to Heavenly pop hits: the best of the Chills say that ‘the perfect line-up was never secured’.  There had been fourteen phases of the group by October 1992, making Phillips seem only marginally less inclined to hire and fire than Mark E. Smith, but in fact the majority of the changes were forced on Martin rather than being at his behest.  So many changes spoiled the chance to develop the ‘Pink frost’ sound.

As it became more ‘Martin Phillipps and the Chills’, the sonic quality of ‘Pink frost’, ‘Hidden bay’ and ‘Flame-thrower’ was set aside, with minstrelsy (in the medieval sense) taking its place; the songs were more artful, but the overall sound was a shade less exciting and unique.  And yet, when Martin posed perplexed questions in songs like ‘Brave words’, ‘Singing in my sleep’, and ‘Song for Randy Newman etc’, you couldn’t mourn the fact that he had moved on.  As a meditation on his chosen trade and some of its most celebrated practitioners (‘Wilson, Barrett, Walker, Drake’) ‘Randy Newman’ is hard to beat.

Sweet benediction

Finally, in ‘Heavenly pop hit’, there was a trace of irony Martin usually so assiduously avoided, but as it came encased in a confection so angelically light – despite the church organ wheezing for breath as it tried to keep up with the happy-go-lucky pace – that you barely noticed it as you sang along to the chorus.  But after all the fretting, how good it was to hear Martin sing ‘I’m growing in stages and have been for ages / Just singing, and floating – and free’.