If I could only count on one hand the people who knew Creation Records in 1988 -- and most of those people went on to form bands, some of which you've heard of -- I didn't know anyone who knew Flying Nun in 1988. I went from reading a review in Option magazine to buying Brave Words on cassette since Homestead Records did a pretty good job of getting that Chills record into stores in the U.S. It took me another year or so before I found people who knew this stuff.
By early 1990, it seemed as if The Chills were finally going to break big; I heard "Heavenly Pop Hit" on an advance cassette from Sire and told everyone in the record store that the band was going to be huge. Not quite. R.E.M.-levels of U.S. fame did not come their way any more than it came for The House Of Love; "I Don't Know Why I Love You" did indeed get played on DC101 in D.C. but that was about it. I was almost right on that one.
This is from a 1988 Peel Session and the tune is -- for me -- one of the standouts on 1990's Submarine Bells from New Zealand's The Chills.
Smart but not pretentious, the band is up there with the greats for me. If anything they -- like The Go-Betweens -- seem even better to me now than they did when I was 22.