Every festive season, people ask what we’re doing for Christmas. Staying home, I always say, because the streets are serene for those two weeks when everyone else leaves Auckland, and besides, there’s a beach around the corner.
It was a little different this year. We acquired no fewer than three sets of discounted cube shelving to bring some order to the clutter of years. On one set we placed the elements of something I had been promising myself for a long time: a proper music listening station, including a new belt-drive turntable. I have two turntables and a mixer in our home office, but I step over boxes just to get to them. In the sunny, airy living area, by contrast, two tiny new satellite speakers and the squat little cube of a subwoofer almost disappear when you look at them.
On the first night, after a lot of fiddling with wires and one expensive mishap, I achieved the desired state of mind and progressed through all four sides of Dimmer’s Live at the Hollywood. For two minutes at the conclusion of I Believe You Are a Star, the interplay of Shayne Carter and Louisa Nicklin’s guitars, beautifully recorded by Andre Upston, seemed to hover before me. I gazed lightly at the room and felt an unfamiliar fondness for minimalism.
The following day, I approached the reissue of the Chills’ Brave Words, which is rather more than a reissue. The original 1987 album was and is beloved by Chills fans, but the truth is it reached the world in compromised form. Its producer, Mayo Thompson, came to the project with proper indie cred – he’d produced early records by The Fall and Cabaret Voltaire and been a member of Pere Ubu – but reportedly impressed more with his capacity for smoking weed than musical guidance. The final mixes of the songs – completed before Thompson caught a plane from London to Germany – were muddy and muffled.
“Lots of serious little faults I can’t live with,” Chills founder Martin Phillipps wrote in his diary the day after Thompson flew out, as he listened to the mixes in the band’s van on the way to support the Hoodoo Gurus. “Why why why. We’ve worked so hard on it and I’ve waited so long.”
Phillipps would have to wait 36 years to present the world with a better account of what the Chills sounded like in 1987, but it’s been worth the time that he and another producer, Greg Haver, put into fixing and remixing. The new mixes are revelatory, in that they sound like the young band did at the time. “On their best nights,” I have written in my corner of the sleeve notes, “they were the sound of a band breathing in unison, inhaling and exhaling in great swoops, or whispering, or breathless and urgent.”
I had collected my copy from Phillipps himself, who was in Auckland working on another make-good project: the recording of some of the many dozens of yet-uncaptured Chills songs the band played in the early 80s, some with an array of guest vocalists. “I know this song,” I said, as a chorus burst from the monitors at the recording studio in Mt Eden. It was one the band had played only twice, but somehow it had lived in my head.
I returned to the sleeve notes. Caroline Easther, the Chills’ drummer, remembered things I’d forgotten about the Brixton squat she and I worked to set up, only to have it broken into and burgled while we waited for the electricity to go on. She also recalled that half my records had gone, but I can advise that this wasn’t true. Half my comic collection was nicked, which was bad enough. The records? Now, that would have been serious.
