Almost everything about the Triffids makes me think of Johnny Thunder's line: "Baby, we were born to lose." Organisationally and personally, the Triffids exude an air of defeat. Their every act makes them seem more and more directionless, lost, vague and out of time.
They never know which city they want to live in, which label they want to record for, whether or not they should have a manager and/or who it should be, and seem to have a half-arsed idea of how things work and an inability to act on the little they do know.
It's almost despite themselves that the Triffids make such great music. After a tidy pile of cassettes, singles and EPs, the band has got around to releasing Treeless Plain - one of the most exciting and invigorating records made by a young Australian band in recent years.
For the Triffids to have made a record this good must be an accident, or an act of divine intervention. It's on the Hot label, and in what's almost become the norm with good Australian indies, it's also distributed by them.
Treeless Plain is the culmination of five years meandering around the rock'n'roll wilderness. Even the band's own press release describes the story of those years as "a torrid saga".
Briefly, it all started in Perth in 1977, with the fourteen-year-old David McComb and Alsy MacDonald, who'd been around a year longer. Apparently Triffids Mk 1 played a lot of extremely bourgeois pool parties and had things thrown at them. This inspired them to foist the first of six cassettes on an unsuspecting public.
The band's first live appearance in a pub was in April of 1979 at Hernando's Hideaway supporting the Flamin' Groovies-style incarnation of the Scientists.
Along with Perth bands like the Scientists, the Victims, the Mannikins and countless others around the country, the Triffids were inspired by the first burst of punk rock'n'roll from England, and also by its more arty American version.
"We did a lot of punk songs at the start," David McComb says. "But that was only because they were easy songs. We would have preferred to do Television songs even then, but Stooges songs were easier to learn. What we did had a lot to do with the first time we saw an interview with Johnny Rotten on Weekend Magazine in late '76.
"Everything about Rotten and the Pistols was a great spur for people like us, who couldn't play their instruments. It helped us realise that you shouldn't have an inferiority complex because of that, because at that stage rock'n'roll had developed to the stage where technical and financial prowess was supposedly the most important thing."
The Triffids' version of punk earnt them labels like "The Jackson Five Of Perth" (uuugghh??) and "Perth's premier existentialist wimp dance band". An ersatz bubblegum single Stand Up/Farmers Never Visit Nightclubs, was the Triffids' first vinyl outing, having been financed by victory in a song competition run by a local radio station.
January 6th, 1982 is an important date in the Triffids' saga. This unlikely bunch arrived in Sydney intent on discovering a fortune, and maybe some fame as well. They've never looked up since. Two years of travelling, residence in both Sydney and Melbourne and never being accepted in either city.
Times have been tough for the Triffids, and I mean TOUGH. During their ten-month affair with the 'independent' White label, they spent a couple of months living in the former offices of VOX magazine - six (at least) in one room - with no money. These days I regularly pass Robert McComb on the way to his cleaning job. Aaaaah, the rock'n'roll dream.
Anyway, the Triffids released two more records - Spanish Blue and an EP, Bad Timing. They'd recorded Spanish Blue when the spectre of the Gudinski organisation loomed, and they were summoned to the Mushroom/White citadel.
Gudinski liked Spanish Blue. "It was just that he wanted us to re-write it, and re-mix it," McComb laughs.
"We ended up putting it out ourselves immediately they started dilly dallying because we said we wouldn't re-mix it. We thought that we couldn't just wait for people to decide what they wanted to do."
A few months later White were still interested. The Triffids autographed the contracts and Spanish Blue was re-released.
The Bad Timing EP was produced by Robert Ash, who was in Australia working with the Runners. Ash had previously worked with the Only Ones, a band who'd had a big influence on the Triffids. The results were disappointing.
"It was good in one way because it made us realise that the band could produce itself by that stage, and that we'd learnt enough after making four records," David says. "In fact we probably should have started producing ourselves earlier. In our case, as long as we've got the right engineer, we can make all the right decisions."
All the right decisions were certainly made on Treeless Plain, which was recorded in twelve midnight-to-dawn sessions at Emerald City Studios during August and September. The total cost? Less that $3,000.
With the exception of Dylan's I Am A Lonesome Hobo, all the songs are originals. A highlight is My Baby Thinks She's A Train, a live version of which appears on JJJ's Live At The Wireless album.
The future? Treeless Plain will no doubt get stacks of critical acclaim and sell about 17 copies. Such a life for a band like the Triffids - never quite hip enough for the inner city, never quite basic enough for the suburbs. Immediate plans involve a possible tour of Melbourne, a possible tour of Adelaide, possibly staying in Perth for a few months, possibly coming back, possibly doing none of those things.
"I think we're a slow working band and we don't have very much respect for the way people think you should structure your particular rock'n'roll career," says David. "We don't let ourselves be daunted by the precedents that other bands set - there's no point in that at all.
"We're not like bands like the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls who obviously worked on this high energy thing and then burnt themselves out."
The Triffids are the epitome of 'the casual' band. As such, Treeless Plain is a fine endorsement of casualness.
STUART COUPE
RAM, January 5, 1984.