The Triffids
The Triffids were the great contenders of 1980s Australian Rock.
After the mid 1980s (by which time the band had set up base in
London) they were established as a cult attraction in Australia
and Europe alike. But this wasn't enough - The Triffids always had
what leader David McComb described as "wide screen
ambitions".
That the band was invited to play on the overblown 'Australian
Made' series of showcase concerts in 1986 alongside INXS
and Jimmy Barnes was a measure of the
potential even the mainstream industry could see. Ironically
though, the quality that was one of The Triffids' hooks - their
precocity - was perhaps also their undoing.
By the time they finally clinched the elusive major label deal
in 1986, although still a relatively young band, they were all
played out. Neither as obtuse musically or lyrically as fellow
exiles The Go-Betweens, The Triffids were essentially post-punk
folky-rock balladeers.
Singer/Songwriter McComb was barely out of his teens when The
Triffids arrived on the east coast of Australia for the first time
in 1982 (where I first met them, took them to a party at Ashfield
and ended up waking up in my car outside their Surry Hills house
the next morning, covered in vomit . . . but that's a different
story for another time).
When they finally settled in Sydney in 1984 they became
involved with fledgling indie label, Hot Records. Hot released
their debut album Treeless Plain at the end of the year,
complete with modest string arrangements. In 1985 - almost on a
whim - the band went to London, but even though they almost
immediately scored an NME cover, they couldn't raise a
major deal. Out of desperation they paid for themselves to go into
the studio and recorded the multi-layered and sophisticated Born
Sandy Devotional (1986).
Released in England through Rough Trade, the album was hailed
as a classic and even managed to crack the mainstream Top
30. Island was thus finally convinced to sign The Triffids.
But it was too late - the band was already showing the strain of
being too long on the road.
The band made three albums for Island; In The Pines (1986)
- recorded in a woodshed three days' drive from the
nearest settlement in remote Western Australia, and yet
probably the best Australian country and western album ever
made, Calenture (1987) and The Black Swan
(1989), before they finally imploded. The band members embraced
middle-class professional life, aside from David McComb and
bassist Martyn Casey, who joined Nick Cave's Bad Seeds.
McComb spent the next two years with lawyers in London getting
out of the contract The Triffids had so keenly sought to get into.
He also lived (and drank) as hard as the characters he wrote
and sang about. He died in 1999, aged 36, from "heroin
toxicity and mild acute rejection of his 1996 heart
transplant".
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