KANGAROO COURTING
Is rock dead? Morality players THE TRIFFIDS don’t seem to think so. Lynden Barber considers their rise and rise. Marjorie Mackintosh photographs.
Late afternoon, the wind’s beginning to whip up a little. Two Triffids sit on the balcony of an Italian cappuccino bar taking in the passing life and trying hard to ignore the fumes and all-pervading racket from the freeway a couple of yards below.
Miserable rainclouds are threatening to dump their load over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the left, but it’s the street right across the freeway, beneath the Coca Cola hoarding that’s holding the interest of David McComb. This is the entrance to King’s Cross, the city’s red light district, and centre of the booming drugs trade. McComb has one word for the people who inhabit it. Sickening. The seedy characters, the low-life, the crime, the corruption ….
"I find it a bit disturbing that people find that incredibly romantic. I mean, I can see why it happens."
If mentions of alternative Australian music brings to mind Nick Cave’s middle class fascination for dirt, the Triffids have painted themselves another picture. Even to mention a word like "morals" in the music industry is to court ridicule, though it worries McComb not a jot.
"I’d say we were a pretty moral group," he affirms. "I wouldn’t say I’m particularly moral, although I may be aware of that, whereas some people don’t think it’s important at all."
Which doesn’t discount an interest in the grotesque. Ever since seeing "Wise Blood", John Huston’s bizarre film based on the Flannery O’Connor novel about a Deep South preacher from the Church of Jesus Christ Without Christ, McComb has cultivated an interest in the author, allowed his songwriting to become influenced by her books (the number of songwriters claiming O’Connor as an influence is getting bigger every day - Violent Fammes, Bruce Springsteen and Jim Foetus are all members of the fan club.)
"You can see quite a few parallels between her life in Georgia and certain things in West Australia too - both being very big states, the red earth …" notes McComb, like the rest of the Triffids a native of the isolated city of Perth.
"I think she’s also the victim of misrepresentation, because for a start people don’t realise she’s a Christian, often, when they first read her books, because they’re so full of terrible things happening that they can’t work out why she should possibly be anything other than an atheist. But she’s quite a conventional Roman Catholic…
"She certainly had a very , very strong discipline, which I don’t have. I don’t think any people in pop music have any discipline comparable to that at all, as far as writing, and that’s something you can only aspire to."
Though as drummer Alsy Macdonald points out, "if they did have that discipline they probably couldn’t succeed in what they were doing in terms of pop music, because there’s a necessary amount of abandon needed to create music."
IT takes a day-and-a-half to get from Perth, in the far west of Australia, to the nearest city of Adelaide, a relentless drive across the flat aridity of the Nullabor Plain - nothing but red desert and a highway as unbending as Thatcherism as far as the eye can see. It’s a journey the Triffids know only too well. They know it so well they called their first album "Treeless Plain".
"One day we went straight into a roo and I thought ‘This is it, we’ve had it’," recalled Alsy Macdonald one day when the group are sitting around in a backroom in the HQ of their record company, the independent Hot records. "Cos when you hit a ‘roo at full speed you tend to go completely out of control."
OPPOSITES vie for supremacy in the figure of David McComb. Though his teeth show the whiteness of paper and his eyes sparkle with the azure of good health, he never really manages to avoid looking permanently as if he’s crawled out of bed only moments before. He’s a raggedy man. Jet hair sprawls shapelessly. Untutored, uncared for (not the lovingly teased mess of a Mac or a Cave, here, we’re talking a motorway pile-up with 1,000 fatalities involved.) His shirt has a five inch rip below the shoulder, which kind of completes the effect.
His conversation maintains an evenly unhurried pace, so that if you’re not listening properly it’s unlikely that anything will leap out and grab you. He’s a thoughtful character, much given to ruminating, not the type to inform you how great his talents are as a songwriter, and if anything a little too modest. That’s the funny thing about the Triffids. They always give the impression that any critic who waxes hyperbolic over their live shows must be off their box. Listen to Alsy …
"If someone in the press says something about you that’s a big accolade then you ask yourself ‘What would I say if someone asked me if I agreed with that?’ and the only I can feel is that it’s bloody embarrassing. I don’t think any of us want to answer."
Adds McComb, " as far as how you get on with your friends back in Perth, it is a slight source of embarrassment."
During their three month stay in Britain last year the Triffids drew praise like pools winners attract long-lost friends. This brand of Dylan meets Doors meets Verlaine meets … er, Flannery O’Connor burned up like firelighters, blew the Bunnymen off stage at Brixton.
"We got back to our hometown and it was like nothing had changed," says Alsy Macdonald. "We got smaller crowds than before we left, which is in complete contradiction to what’s supposed to happen," says David McComb.
It’s been said that The Triffids don’t realise just how powerful they sound on stage these days.
"Yeah .. but there’s a difference between what you admit to someone and what you know in your heart. I think we know we’re good, and that’s why I have no qualms about taking advantage of everything that comes our way. We deserve it. When it comes to sitting around with people, you don’t admit that so much. It’s just human nature, it’s embarrassing to talk about it. It’s not Liberace’s way, but for better or worse it’s our way."
SATURDAY morning, people reading papers, drinking cappuccino in a Sydney bagel house. Station 2JJJ plays the Triffids’ latest, an obsessive song called "Field of Glass" from a three track EP. Record ends. Assistant turns to colleague. "Wow, that was The Triffids. I never knew they sounded as good as that."
The Triffids in their home country are part of the scenery, like an old chair that people like sitting in but take for granted.
"Especially in Perth," says Alsy. "You come back and see people scratching their heads saying either "This can’t be for real, it’s not on, they’re still the same fellas we always knew’, or people are genuinely perplexed - ‘Oh I didn’t know you were like that, I thought you were the kids down the road’.
"We’ve done a lot of growing up in public - we started this band when we were 15 or 16 - so especially in Perth people have a lot of memories, their perception of you is never the latest incarnation, the whole history of The Triffids arises before their eyes every time they see us on stage. They never see what’s happening now."
What is happening now is that The Triffids have returned to England for a brief period, this time with a pedal steel guitar player in tow, Graham Lee.
"We don’t want to be like country trappings, some stylisation or appendage or something like that," declares McComb. "I don’t think we’re using it in a particularly challenging way at the moment, but there’s no real reason why you should lapse into country cliches just because you’ve got a pedal steel guitarist."
"Didn’t King Sunny Ade have a pedal steel? It’s just an incredibly neglected instrument outside of country music, and I don’t see why it should be, really. I suddenly got really excited about the idea of a band with a violin, an organ and a pedal steel."
The group won’t be spending too much time in London - this time it’s just a stop-off on an itinerary that includes Europe and the States. Like typical Aussies, they’re natural travellers, something that "gives you greater understanding of what you’re writing about," according to McComb.
"As a group we have a vision that’s peculiar to us, and I wasn’t quire aware of its capabilities or where it was heading until I saw it in isolation. I mean we see ourselves as a completely different coloured fish to all the other fishes in London, for instance.
"There’s heaps of guitar bands around at the moment, and I don’t think we have any allegiance to the guitar as some sort of icon to which people seem to be returning. I can’t understand the way an instrument can be ‘in’ one year and ‘out’ the next, that whole idea is foreign to me. I’ve always felt close to the guitar as my first line of communication."
Yup, confessions of a "rock guitarist". The word "rock" used to refer to anything from Joni Mitchell to country tinged music to European music with an avant-garde bent like Can. Of course, rock in this sense is not only dead but well and truly buried, though The Triffids fit into it very well as an afterword.
The rock group as post-rock phenomenon? Now there’s a thought.
Reproduced from Melody Maker, 18th May 1985.