THE TRIFFIDS - "Bay of the Triffids" NME Front Cover 15/4/89
BEACH TO THEIR OWN (Part 1of 2)
It's taken a while, but the soon-come TRIFFIDS album ('The Black Swan'), their sixth) will finally force the unwashed masses to recognise them as an Australian export to match Fosters. to match Fosters, XXXX and Dame Edna Everidge! Back in their native Perth sun-trap DAVID McCOMB and company are involved in an amazingly complex web of extra-Triff activities. GAVIN MARTIN packs the industrial fly-spray and attempts to make sense of it all.
Winding its way down the Swan River to the Indian Ocean, Perth is the sort of paradise most of us only get to dream of. The Western Australia state capital has the mixed blessing of being the most remote city in the world, but it brims with images of the good life, an easy going land of plenty that’s unblemished and unbothered by the problems that beset most modern metropoli.
The visiting journalist is happily splashing his jet lag away in the azure surf, feasting on ice creams made of real fruit, chomping on fat, fresh prawns and generally soaking up the relaxed, sun baked ambience. He’s trying to figure out a mystery.
The mystery is why on earth did his hosts, The Triffids, and a large number of Perth natives forsake their homeland and the rights to daddy’s car keys to travel to our frosty climes and miserable country?
Is this not the promised land? Was this not the place that his parents used to make idle plans to escape to when he was a kid? In Australia it is Christmas dinner on the lawn, you can swim all day, barbecue all night, tend a garden of beautiful wild flowers and wholesome vegetables and on the weekend take yourself off to the bush to watch exotic animals in their natural habitat. What more could you want?
David McComb, Triffid founder member, major songwriter and reluctant leader appreciates these local attractions but he insists they’re superficial, masking the neurosis thriving beneath the surface.
"I went to an engagement party barbecue at a young couple’s place who’d just bought a plot of land. The first person I talked to was gay, we were sitting there shooting the breeze saying ‘what’s wrong with us, why aren’t we doing this, getting some land and settling down?’ It’s the big issue in Perth at the moment.
He said that he and his gay friends get invited to newly-wed dos all the time because they find their life so boring that they need the token eccentric to come in and liven things up. An alcoholic, a drug addict - get ‘em in, get them to go through their act, anything to liven things up. That’s really happening here."
There’s a very definite perverse streak to David McComb, it runs through his music and pervades his personality but his view of Perth is shared by many of those that live or have left there. At a club the night before I was taken aside and told that everyone may look happy and relaxed but really they’re all on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
"You don’t have to be here long to see that. This summer has been a particularly rich harvest. Since I got back here it has just not stopped. Even the most well balanced people. I’ve spent the whole summer going out with people, suiting them down, buying them drinks and they’ve burst into tears for three or four hours.
I’m actually thinking of getting a job as a counsellor or confidante. I figure that even when this music business lark has fallen through, there still has to be someone to talk to people. Because no-one can do that these days, too many people are sitting in front of VDU machines.
The problem is exacerbated here because there’s more access to 24 hour video stores, there’s better roads, quarter acre blocks where you’re not shoulder to shoulder with each other. So the problems are the opposite to the overcrowding in Handsworth or Brixton."
It doesn’t take long for the lucky traveller to see another picture of Perth taking shape in his mind’s eye. Naturally, McComb’s writing and The Triffids’ music combining doubt, remorse and often verging on full blown insanity had given him a clue, personal investigation merely bears it out.
Like another West Coast settlement of the New World, Los Angeles, Perth suffers from a general soulessness and cultural inertia. It’s a breeding ground for decadence and self destruction - junkies anorexics and all manner of modern flotsam.
All of which may go some way towards explaining why the Triffids have not become Laureates of A Leisure Age, celebrating sun, sand and surf( Brian Wilson did that and look what happened to him)> And yet the narcotic pull of beach culture, the artistry of the surfers, the curve of the bodies - surely a soul as sensitive as Mr McComb could not help but be enchanted by these delights?
"I don’t like suntanned bodies very much, so it’s very easy for me to be turned off by it. I always hated bikinis and suntanned bodies because I grew up with it. So when I see Wendy James with blonde hair, more blonde than her brown skin and her unnaturally dark eyebrows, I find that repellent.
If you’re talking from a purely lecherous point of view I look out for the most moontanned bodies, anyone with white porcelain flesh becomes immediately thrilling."
To drive from Perth to the next major Australian settlement takes three days. Unlike America, internal flights are prohibitively expensive (it’s cheaper to get to South East Asian than it is to fly to Sydney!) The idyllic remoteness soon becomes unsettling, whatever frictions and injustices are bubbling beneath the surface aren’t reflected on TV in the media or music. Perth can seem like an end of the earth pleasure dome nestling on falsity.
The Triffids have made some attempt to evoke the majesty and menace of the landscape that separates their home town from the outside world, most explicitly on the single ‘Wide Open Road’. A flight from Perth to Sydney on a clear day with a window seat brings to life what maps can only suggest - that the land is desolate and unconquered, endless miles of awesome and eerie flatlands like the scorched earth after some unspecified attack.
For McComb it still inspires a "mixture of fear, incomprehension and maybe a slight understanding. But people haven’t really come to terms with it, I certainly haven’t. I’m completely awestruck by it."
In recent years there has been a rush to establish a Western Australian national identity. The land of opportunity is best represented by Alan Bond who came out from England 20 years ago with nothing and now owns the Swan brewery and a media empire to challenge that other Australian communications mogul Rupert Murdoch.
David McComb describes the quest to define the national character as a non-issue, " something to write about in coffee table books", but it is understandable. Even now the yoke of colonial influence weighs heavily on any attempts to define the native experience with American satellite news broadcast throughout the night and bad British sitcom, well past the sell-by date, given peak viewing prominence. After years of such dominance Neighbours must be our bad karma.
The music scene is no less moribund. On a visit to the local shopping mall you see pre-teen kids dressed in the self same punky rags that were de rigeur over here about 12 years back. Local radio and TV is virtually non-existent, cover bands fill out the bars. I tell someone the place seems to be a cultural third or fourth world. "Don’t say that; we still have to live here!"
The Triffids may be loathe to assume the mantle of Perthian frontierspeople but 10 years after David McComb and his merry band of drifting minstrels set off looking for fun, fame and new horizons in the land of their ancestors they are still the city’s prime contenders. And their home town - variously despised, pined for and set alight in Triffids songs - has a lot to do with their musical growth.
From squeamish, petulantly gothic beginnings they have flowered into a dextrous and adventurous outfit. |Where their earlier work was often an outright reaction against their hedonistic environs, their new LP seems and attempt to find a place for themselves and the maverick characters that are inevitable products of the West Australian lifestyle.
At the very least their recorded output suggests a group who have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
With ‘The Black Swan’ their second album for Island recorded with Stephen Street in Somerset last Autumn, The Triffids are taking a break before the start of their European tour. Martyn P Casey, bass player, Van Morrison fan and hip-hop collector is back with the Poms, he’s the Triffid that took root overseas and now lives with his wife in Kilburn. Veteran pedal steel player ‘Evil’ Graham Lee, whose version of the lush’s lament ‘Once A Day’ is a showstopper-cum-albatross on the Triffids live set, is out on the east coast near Sydney scouting for session work.
Near to Lee is David McComb’s elder brother, Rob, described to me as an easygoing type, completely the opposite of his occasionally dark sibling. Singer, writer and keyboard player Jill Birt is in Perth. She, however, recently came into some money and is tending the garden and settling into her newly acquired bungalow whilst trying to work on the sequencing tapes and programmes that will be an important part of the group’s new show.
Birt’s partner, Triffid drummer and lifelong McComb chum Alsy MacDonald is spending his holiday working as a Black-Eyed Susan. The Black Eyed Susans are a David McComb holiday band, put together because "life’s directionless enough as it is without waking up in the morning and not having anything to put your mind to. I’d get really depressed if I lived in Perth and had nothing to do. Not having a 9-5 job is a blessing but it’s horrifying too, that’s why all these people in LA end up going to the Betty Ford clinic, they don’t have a ritual. I’d be self destructive in that position too."
The Susans chosen ritual proves to be a rewarding one. The band comprises Ross Bolleter, an avant garde organ grinder, Phil Kakulas, an early Triffids member who after years of exploring exotic and bizarre musics makes a return to the fold as a songwriting collaborator and stand up bassist on ‘The Black Swan’, and Rob Snarski - a shy guy blessed with a honey-dripping sexual vocal tease who’s been hiding in a left field Australian conglomerate called Chad’s Tree for too many years.
The band plays a couple of Triffids songs, two new David McComb compositions, but it is by their cover versions that they make their mark - ranging from Hot Chocolate to The Velvet Underground, from Elvis Pressley to Bob Dylan and from Smokey Robinson to Prince.
Supporting the Susans on one of their shows are the Self Righteous Brothers, an outfit specialising in heart broken honky tonk toons. The group is fronted by a character known locally as Willy The Torch who gives his name to the David McComb/Adam Peters cartoon rap single which precedes the release of ‘The Black Swan’.
The Torch got his nickname because of his habit of dozing off, often in mid conversation, with a lit cigarette between his fingers. A founder member of the Triffids, one of the first people to encourage McComb with his songwriting as a teenager, he’s still a close friend and influence who’s suffered years of illness.
Reproduced (without permission) from the NME 15th April 1989
TO BE CONTINUED