PLANTS IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE
Lynden Barber, wearing a hat with corks on, investigates Australia’s THE TRIFFIDS
As the Daily Telegraph says …
Holidaying in a southerly outpost of the Empire last year I chanced upon a local bar from which the sound of music was emanating.
Entering gingerly, I discovered hordes of natives engaged in a curious ritual celebration in which receptacles full of strange yellow fluid were poured down throats while a group of entertainers performed in the background. And - oh fortuna! - what a splendid musical combo they were.
Playing in the "rock" style with influences gleaned from such notable American performers as Thomas Verlaine, Robert Dylan and James Morrison, they clearly exhibited a talent that deserved exposure upon stages all across the globe, I was entranced.
OR as the MM says …
Holidaying down under I saw a bunch of blokes that sent the syrup fair spinning. Or something.
LB says: The Triffids are another great band from Australia …
Currently over here stealing our jobs, money, women and homes, The Triffids exhibit the sort of originality of vision and utter vim that has all but become extinct in the home country. Not that the newcomer will necessarily be aware of this upon hearing their LP "Treeless Plain" and mini-album "Raining Pleasure". As distinguished as much of their songwriting is, their recorded output fails to even hint at the level of charisma and burnished power the group project live. The week before last at the Brixton Academy they were no less than A.W.E.S.O.M.E., winning over the thronging Bunnymen crowd and giving the Scousers something to worry about.
Reasons to get an earful Part Two: "My Baby Thinks She’s A Train" (a title stolen from Carlene Carter) boasts a guitar hook that deserves a place alongside Roxy’s "Mother of Pearl" and the Beatles’ "Day Tripper" in a list of the Greatest Riffs Of All Time".
Part Three: they wear fantastic shirts. (But only sometimes).
***
A schizophrenic group, are The Triffids, one moment all sweetness and bounce with country violin a-humming, the next veering into dark corners with a blues guitar in hand for a solid brood. The two sides "don’t necessarily exist harmoniously, and the group will always be productive, philosophically and musically, if it never does resolve itself", according to drummer Alan "Alsy" MacDonald.
Apart from the occasional exception, rock music is pretty much dead in Britain - an endless circus of witless Gothic horrorshow or heavy metal ham. The best Australian groups still have a freshness about them, sound as if they have just discovered their natural affinity with American cultures.
Starting as a punk group when they were about 14/15 years old in Perth - one of the most isolated towns in the world, at the edge of the Western Australian desert and therefore at least three days’ drive to the nearest cities - The Triffids heard things differently to us.
"There was probably distortions of the idea of punk here, and by the time it got to Perth they’d become mammoth," says singer/composer/guitarist David McComb, (pronounced as in hairdressing implement). "Our interpretation was completely coloured by everything from New York rather than things from England, and tended to look at some of the British versions of it as sloganeering little Toytown models or something. Verlaine and Hall and Patti Smith were all harder to pin down, there seemed to be more depth and room for exploration."
In 1982 they moved across to Sydney on the other side of the continent, "but were just completely ignored; it only changed in the year before we left."
"We went through all those club years and got slagged off most mercilessly by whoever was into the club scene, which was the only trendy refuge. You just hang around for long enough then eventually some journalist will say "Hang on, they’re okay", then it all changes. We didn’t actually change."
There’s a quality many of the Antipodean groups possess which is unmistakable but hard to put a finger on. During that infuriating period when the NME - still influential then - declared its love of insipid pop, Australian journalist acquaintances were some of the few people who shared my disgust and could see where it was all leading to.
"We do share a certain mistrust of style," says McComb. "It comes back to things like Oscar Wilde. I don’t like Oscar Wilde very much at all, I think he was very clever but he seems to have set some precedent for British dandyism. His legacy is that people have just become more and more stupid in their interpretation of it. It probably has deep sexual connotations and Australians are afraid of that."
"We’re annoyed with that blind allegiance to a style or packaging. We made the mistake of trying to appear as faceless as possible, as ordinary, straightforward and unpretentious as possible in the way we presented ourselves in the hope it wouldn’t be misinterpreted, but it was."
"If you don’t make a demand on an audience to act intelligently in the first place then you’ll just be whinging about how your audience are dumb for the rest of your life. You might as well start by treating them with the utmost respect."
There’s a lot of attitude - as the Americans say - in The Triffids. An empathy with the underdog and feeling for the downbeat is found in their choice of covers - a radically altered version of Dylan’s ‘I Am A Lonesome Hobo’ and the old blues standard ‘St James Infirmary’. McComb The Younger (his elder brother Robert is the group’s violinist and other guitar player) is a person who isn’t afraid to talk of moral concerns.
"People assume that morality is something separate from the songs, whereas it’s actually part of it very often. In pop music people pass on an unearned mortality, like an unearned liberty. They haven’t fought for it, they’ve inherited it lazily.
"When you get out of school you read ‘The Outsider’ by Camus or something, it’s a real schoolboy thing to say that you’re an existentialist, to be a fake atheist - you don’t think about it, it’s assumed, adapted.
"The classic ‘I’m so heavy, I’m so wasted’ image, for example, is enjoying a renaissance but it’s hollow, it’s repugnant. I don’t object to someone living a destructive lifestyle, it’s just that I’d rather they were honest with themselves about it."
On the same subject, I'd had a theory that their song ‘Property Is Condemned’ - "alcohol, heroin, it’s all water under the bridge/left to your won devices I know you’re going to sink like a ship" - was about Nick Cave. "It’s not, but I can see why you thought that."
The corruption of innocence is one of the Triffids’ grand recurring themes, says McComb. "It feels quite a real thing for us to sing about because we’re in the midst of it - we don’t have to maintain the names of any recording executives. The entertainment business brings about the very worst in people."
But are the Triffids above corruption?
"I’m sure we’re corrupted by it. We know corruption
Reproduced from the Melody Maker of ? November 1984.
SORRY I'VE MISLAID THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW WHILST MOVING HOUSE! I WILL FIND IT AGAIN!