Thanks to Tim Cornwall

Snipe (fanzine) No. 1 May 1985

Tthe Triffids (by Mike Ticher)

Of all the places in the world, there is nowhere where the word 'culture' gets such a big laugh as in Australia. Australia, as everyone knows, consists solely of kangeroos, cricket, Foster's, Clive James, Barry Humphries and the Sydney Opera House. Call that culture?! But, as even some people in Britain are beginning to realise, something rather surprising, and something pretty special is going on down in that so-called cultural wilderness. Suddenly we're getting music that is not only unconnected to any glaringly obvious Anglo-American influence, but is also actually better than the vast majority of material, both mainstream and 'alternative', which is coming from those two complacent countries. One of the best of all the fine bands that are gradually getting some recognition over here, are The Triffids, all but one of whom come from Perth, an isolated town, even by Australian standards.

Although they are being treated more or less as a new band over here, The Triffids have actually been going since 1978, and have released one full-length album, 'Treeless Plain' and one shorter one 'Raining Pleasure', as well as the recent twelve-inch, 'Field of Glass'. Like their counterparts from the other side of the continent, The Go-Betweens, they have become firm favourites with John Peel, and rightly so, because they're definitely doing something new and worthwhile at a time when so few others are. A new Peel session has been recorded for transmission in the near future. I met the band while they were on a brief visit to London between some European dates and saw them play two brilliant sets.

Despite a slightly gloomy image, they are in fact very friendly and cheerful, in spite of having spent the last three years playing live more or less every week, in all parts of the world. Each member of the band seems to have a different opinion on everything, so direct quotes can be a bit misleading, but most of the discussion was with David McComb, who writes virtually all the words and music and is clearly the mainspring of the band. He writes some extraordinary lyrics, often desolate and depressive, with images of death and bitter failure, decline and corruption, but without ever slipping into any fake Goth doom-and-gloom:

"Please don't send me back to Rosevel,
In between your knuckle bed.
I turned my back on life itself / I couldn't tell it wasn't dead.
I left, what was left of you / what was left of you could not be kept,
And I warned you I would have to cut off dead wood."           ('Rosevel')

- How much are your songs based on actual personal experience, and how much is imagination, or fantasy?

*"It's real hard to say, in those terms, but everything in our songs has some basis in personal experience, I think we have the authority to talk about those sort of things, our lives have been like that over the past few years."

- Like 'Bright Lights, Big City' for example?

*"Well, partly like that, it's been, like, going from a small town to a bigger town, even leaving Perth to go to Sydney was as much as a break as going to a completely different country, I don't mean we've been living it up at parties and so on all the time since then, but when you've been brought up in a smalltown environment you are innocent of all that, and that's what it's been like. I think our lives have been like all our records to some extent, I mean, I would never write a 'political' song, if you like, about Britain, or any sort of social comment, because I wouldn't have the authority to do so, but I think our songs are 'social realism', for want of a better word, about a certain way of life in Australia."

Going by that they must have had some pretty traumatic times, forever breaking pure hearts and saying the wrong thing. And just what did happen behind the Hanging Shed? But The Triffids are not a band to be too flippant about. McComb has simply got the priceless ability to portray feelings through physical images (e.g. 'Treeless Plain' itself) and it's true that they are images that could not have come out of, say, urban Britain. It would be going too far to say that it could only be an Australian world he's describing, but certainly the words easily conjure up a vision of dry, deserted streets in an out-of-the-way place with the countryside, or maybe the outback, always threatening to encroach on the town, and the relationships he sings about have a similar, almost desperate quality:

"I once told someone I truly loved them
They laughed at me and they spat in my face
But I woke up to a brand-new morning:
I destroyed compassion without a trace."
('Branded')

It's hard to pin down exactly why his words strike such a different chord to everyone else's, but he tries to explain it in terms of Australia's effect:

*"We did have to leave Australia to progress. It's difficult to understand that you have any identity at all as a person in Australia, it's somewhere like, maybe West Germany, just an imposed, post-war, Western capitalist culture. At least here in Britain there are certain threads you can hang on to, which are essentially British, it's much harder to find them in Australia. Australia is, kind of, empty, not only in a physical sense, but empty of words, whereas if you talk of European places, they've been described in books twenty million times, but Australia has never been described in that way. There's no vocabulary to describe it and that's a great hardship if you're a writer, you inherit a vocabulary, a vernacular which is just pan-American. Also, being young, you rebel against a lot of things, and in Australia you try to look outside for excitement. Now we're grand old men of 23 or so, and after leaving our hometown we're learning, not learning to love it or anything, but learning to realise what was there, in what seemed an emptiness. And I guess that's some sort of challange, because although it's a big handicap, there being no vernacular to inherit, it's an incentive to try and write something for the first time, or what seems like the first time, to describe it."

A lot of the recent interest in Australia has come about through the compilation L.P. 'Beyond the Southern Cross', which features some really great bands, including the Triffids themselves. How did they feel about their involvement in that?

*"We haven't actually heard it, at all, just seen the cover, I'm not even sure exactly who's on it. I think a lot of that stuff is really old. We agreed to do it about two years ago, but by the time it came out we had doubts about the whole thing."

- so who are the best Australian bands now?

*" I like the Go-Betweens, The Hoodoo Gurus and so on, but it's hard to say, because they're friends as well."

- Have the Go-Betweens been a big influence on other bands that are just coming up?

*"No, not really. They've been going for years and years, just like we have. There's quite a lot of rivalling factions, a lot of people really dislike The Go-Betweens in Australia, because they're considered a bit wimpy, basically. Australia, and especially Sydney, has always had a really strong tradition of hard rock, and it's never faltered like it did here for a bit, it's just big all the time and always will be."

- Are other sorts of bands starting to make any impression on all that now?

*"Not really, bands like ourselves and The Go-Betweens just keep plugging away, touring and so on, and eventually people begin to take a bit of notice, even in your own country. It has got a bit easier now, which is good, but we're still denied access to any really major TV show, pop music shows and so on."

The sense of emptiness which McComb talks about is reflected in The Triffid's music as well as the lyrics, with his powerful voice often left to fill the void alone, at other times being submerged beneath the guitars. Although you could make comparisons with other bands, it's a pretty distinctive sound, and if you tried to guess their influences, you'd probably be wrong. As most Australian bands now being brought to our attention started up in the late seventies, you might expect them to list punk and new wave as their inspiration, but for The Triffids at least, black American music of varying types seems to be more relevant. They are shortly going to release a cover of 'You don't miss your water' previously done by, among others, Otis Redding, and a track on the 'Raining Pleasure' L.P. 'St. James' Infirmary', is an incredibly depressing old blues song, which David McComb's singing does full justice to. On their records at least, you do get a sense of the desperation of the blues, but live there's a much fuller sound, more aggresive even, and certainly less gloomy:

*"If you look at our whole set as making some kind of sense, as a 'story' if you like, it obviously has its more anguished moments, but it always has a slightly more cheerful, more emotional ending. To a certain extent you tend to dislocate things, disrupt things by having a song like, say, 'Monkey on my back', which I've got some reservations about, but which does throw everthing into a sort of turmoil, but really the heart of the set ends up with something (like last night it was 'Stolen Property'), which isn't at all anguished or psychotic in any way."

Don't you just love a happy ending? I could go on and on analysing and intellectualizing The Triffids (their songs lend themselves easily to that), but you really have to hear them for yourself. I'm sure everyone gets something different out of the ambiguity of their music. The lasting image of the band, though, is one of corrupted beauty, something clean and whole that's been poisoned somehow:

"Every word of kindness tastes like bile"
"Even people in love get hit by bullets."
"The moon is full and fat and white and sick to the core."

Most of all, 'Beautiful Waste', a song of crescendos of trumpets and violins, galloping drums and simple, but brilliant words, which stands out even from other Triffids songs just by it's perfect clarity. The Triffids are the sort of band you want to lock up in your bedroom and keep as your own private jewel, too precious for anyone else, too pure to be ruined by public exposure. They've got the quality to be really big on merit alone, and who knows, they still might be, even if only as a cult (which would probably be worse). Meanwhile, they'll be back in Britain in June for a series of dates, so whatever you do, don't miss them. It could be a Hell of a Summer.