Clubland journalist who became an environmental campaigner
DOM PHILLIPS, who was shot dead in the Amazonian jungle earlier this month aged 57, was a freelance journalist who pursued two very different interests – as chronicler-in-chief of the 1990s British clubbing and rave scene, then, after moving to São Paulo in Brazil as a foreign correspondent and environmentalist.
One of three children, Dominic Mark Phillips was born in Bebington, Cheshire, on July 23 1964. He dropped out of college in Liverpool to travel the world.
Back in Liverpool in 1983 he and a friend set up The Subterranean, a short-lived fanzine named after Phillips’s favourite Jack Kerouac book, in which, under a variety of noms de plume, he chronicled the city’s jazz, pop and underground scene.
In 1991 he joined Mixmag which, despite billing itself as “the world’s biggest clubbing and dance music magazine”, was then a small publication based on an industrial estate in Slough.
Phillips recalled that as far as the national media was concerned, by the 1990s dance music had died: “Yet under the radar, clubs were opening across the UK, while innovative producers proliferated.” Phillips edited the magazine from 1993 to 1998, as the club scene exploded – along with Mixmag’s circulation, which rose from 11,000 a month in 1991 to 90,000 by 1997.
He was credited with coining the term “progressive house” (which he described as “a new breed of hard but tuneful, banging but thoughtful, uplifting and trancey British house”), and he contributed considered articles to the mainstream press about the clubber’s drug of choice, Ecstasy, “a nice little pill, easy to take, and you can still go to work on Monday”, but one which carried “obvious health risks”.
In The Guardian in 1998, Phillips criticised the Blair government’s drugs strategy for paying scant attention to Ecstasy, which, he said, had fuelled “perhaps the biggest single explosion of drugs use the UK has seen this century”, and for its lack of interest in research into its potentially devastating long-term effects.
As rave culture calmed down in the Noughties, Phillips developed a new line as “Mr Cool”, writing style pieces for The Independent on Sunday, and settled down to write Superstar DJS Here We Go! (2009) a front-line account of the drug-fuelled hedonism of the 1990s clubbing scene.
In 2007 he moved to São Paulo to finish the book, and developed a new interest in the politics and culture of Brazil, writing for newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian and Washington Post.
After moving to Rio de Janeiro in 2012 he covered preparations for the 2014 Fifa World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics before shifting his attention to the environment.
Always a keen outdoorsman, in 2019 he led an investigation by The Guardian into large-scale cattle ranching on land cleared from the rain forest, and in 2020 he embarked on a book about sustainable development.
The project took him on expeditions to the heart of the Amazon jungle with Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on indigenous peoples. These became more hazardous after the 2019 election of Brazil’s Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro (of whom Phillips was an outspoken critic), well known for his support for miners and farmers against the interests of indigenous tribes. Both men received death threats.
On June 5 the pair went missing in the remote Javari Valley in the western Amazon, an area plagued by illegal logging, mining and fishing. On June 15 Amarildo da Costa da Oliveira, a fisherman, confessed to killing both men. Human remains were subsequently discovered and on June 17 some were identified as belonging to Phillips.
As well as campaigning on the environment, Phillips volunteered to teach English in the Rio favelas, and after moving to Salvador, north-east Brazil, founded an educational NGO, Jovens Inovadores.
He is survived by his wife, Alessandra Sampaio. Dom Phillips, born July 12 1964, died June 2022