For some reason, I have always struggled to get to grips with poetry, which is perhaps somewhat strange considering the passion I have for music and a love of good lyrics.
I am not a good analyst of lyrical meanings and contexts, but all the same, I do enjoy the moods and impressions they provide - in fact, sometimes (think early Michael Stipe), the words themselves can be indecipherable, but yet the sound they make within the framing of the music can still evoke those feelings.
For some reason, I have found three (well, technically four, as there is a songwriting double act included) songwriters from 'down under' - all with their golden age emanating from the 1980s - whose lyrics are strong and evocative, which is making me consider whether good songwriting is the same thing as setting poetry to music?
The first subject is a person that I have discovered only recently and I am still learning his musical output, but he did produce poetry in addition to his song lyrics, and his reputation remains undimmed 25 years on from his tragically early death.
The second subject is the one I am most familiar with, having been listening to his records in awe for more than 35 years, and he is a master of deceptively simple lyrics which he magically weaves into the music he writes.
The last subject is a pair of writers, who, again I have come to in more recent years and whose contrasting styles and art aesthetic came together and made up for their lack of musical chops.
David McComb (The Triffids, The Blackeyed Susans):
Band mate Graham Lee, when talking about why David McComb took music so seriously, said that his mantra was -
"Music should be extraordinary, and if it isn't - what's the point?"
Perth born and bred, McComb studied journalism and literature at the Western Australia Institute of Technology (now Curtin University), where one of his teachers was Elizabeth Jolley, a renowned English born author. He loved the power of words, but wasn't afraid of throwing out the odd cliché too. Another band mate, Phil Kakulas, recalls, "If we were working on a song there'd be the lazy line, and he'd say 'No, we'll leave it like that because then it doesn't look like it's been worked over too much', or he would repeat a line that was in another song, just to give it that appearance of off-the-cuffness."
The Triffids were born while they were still in high school. They loved the DIY nature of British punk, but preferred the sonic nature of US post-punk like Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith.
Their path through the early 80s saw them first cross the vast expanse of Australia, before like several other Australian acts before them, the lure of London took them even further afield. They were driven by McComb's "intensity and charisma" and by 1985 had NME putting them on the front cover and asking, "Is This The Year Of The Triffids?"
So what of McComb and his writing?
McComb "grew up hemmed in by ocean and outback", largely isolated from mainstream Australian pop music, and in fact, more comfortable with the works of William Faulkner and Johnny Cash.
Cary Darling, writing in the Houston Chronicle in 2023 said that, "McComb channelled his isolation and madness into some of the most uniquely Australian and deeply eloquent pop music to come out of that country."
Jonathan Alley who directed the beautiful tribute documentary, Love In Bright Landscapes, says, "He draws you in so immediately, the imagery is remarkable and you can have this ever evolving instinctual relationship with the music that takes you deeper and deeper, and has you asking more and more questions all the time."
The Wide Open Road
One of several highly regarded albums, Born Sandy Devotional contains probably their best known song. Wide Open Road is one of those songs that does exactly what it says on the tin - the sparse arrangement reverberates with the huge space of Western Australian outback, so that you feel that you are travelling with the band along a long and dusty highway.
I lost track of my friends, I lost my kin,
I cut them off as limbs,
I drove out over the flatland, hunting you down and him.
Wide Open Road - here
(Official Music Video)
McComb would recall in 1990, "[the song] seemed to naturally evoke a particular landscape, namely the stretch of highway in between Caiguna and Norseman, where The Triffids Hi-Ace [van] monotonously came to grief with kangaroos."
Noted journalist Wilson Neate dips further into this imagery when discussing the album - "McComb's lyrics suggest local imagery and many of the tracks have an atmospheric openness and expansiveness that some critics have identified as essentially Australian." However, Lee says the songs should not be seen as "quintessentially Australian, but as quintessentially David McComb," as he felt they could be set anywhere."
Neate picks this point back up - "By way of a compromise, then, 'quintessentially David McComb' might be best understood as an ability to create a lyrical and musical link between Western Australia's stark, isolated terrain and universal feelings of desolation and loneliness."
"Are you drinking to get maudlin, or drinking to get numb." (The Seabirds)
"Well the rim of her mouth was golden,
Her eyes were just desert sands,
But that's not her!
That's just the light,
It's only an image of her,
It's just a trick of the light." (Trick Of The Light)
A Trick Of The Light - here
(Official music video)
Calenture
Following that, 1987s Calenture showed that, "a sense of alienation, betrayal, insanity and solitude still permeates his writing." It contains the song, Save What You Can, one of his most heart-breaking numbers.
"Time is against us, even love conspires to disgrace us,
And with things being what they are... Yes and things being what they are.
.....
If you cannot run then crawl,
If you can leave, then leave it all,
If you don't get caught, then steal it all."
Save What You Can - here
(Music video)
The Black Swan and Beautiful Waste
The final album by The Triffids, showed McComb trying to introduce more flavours into the music, including elements of synth pop and even rap.
With the sky a warm blanket, and our backs to the rain,
We thought that our pleasure would always remain." (Fairytale Love)
McComb was often compared with one of the other great Australian song smiths, Nick Cave. And while they shared a Southern Gothic influence, McComb's writing is probably more autobiographical.
Both emotional and physical pain was taking its toll on McComb as the 1990s progressed. He suffered from a partially collapsed lung, slight scoliosis and then later, cardiomyopathy, which would ultimately result in his needing a heart transplant (in 1996). Then there was the issues with drugs and alcohol (which probably played a part in his cardiomyopathy) - and when a minor car crash in 1999 saw him quickly discharged from hospital, it came as a shock a few days later he died at home. It was February 1999, he was just shy of his 37th birthday.
Beautiful Waste was a collection of McComb's poems that was released posthumously and showed the range and depth of his writing - although many of them would feature the dark clouds that all that pain was creating.
"Beautiful waste, stupid feeling,
Why do you feel it? When will it stop?
Beautiful waste, wonderful feeling,
Ready to die now, ready to drop.
River of waste, mountain of feeling,
Bigger than love, bigger than us,
Beautiful waste, terrible fever of love,
Stupid feeling making fools out of us."
Beautiful Waste - here
(Official music video)
Forster on McComb
We are fortunate here, that one of our other stars of this episode, Robert Forster, discussed McComb's legacy, when reviewing his poetry collection.
"This is fine art poetry that, even before consideration of content begins, forces an admiration of shape, the fine use of punctuation, the skilful slicing and phrasing of the lines."
Prayer For One, the opener, is prophetic - "Find warmth in the mornings without me."
Grace Descends - "pitch perfect, don't change a word wonder of Grace Descends; any need for further convincing of the merits of McComb the poet ends here. A 20-line poem, with one strategically placed semi-colon, it could be about death, the moment of dying, or about sleep."
Denouement - "is sad and the most conventionally autobiographical poem in the collection, 'I sang long and loud into the night / of my broken bleeding heart'."
In conclusion, Forster says, "McComb's lyrics operated on one level: the poems sink mineshafts and go down further."
Neil Finn (Split Enz, Crowded House, Finn Brothers, Pajama Club):
Neil Finn was just 21 when he wrote I Got You, probably the most perfect of all the new wave pop songs. Lyrically, it was never going to win any awards, but it amply demonstrated the power of matching words and catchy hooks. Things would progress over the years, to the point where Radiohead's Ed O' Brien would call Finn pops "most prolific writer of great songs."
When asked about his writing process, Finn said "For me, sense of place is a common starting point." He adds, "I normally allow the subconscious to dish up something, then I have a look and see what the hell it's describing."
Barnaby Smith in the Quietus talked about his development, "Finn's lyrics, particularly from the first four Crowded House albums have grown more profound with time, with his turn of phrase in exploring the dynamics, mysteries and nightmares of all relationships unlike any other." He added, "Finn's poetry has always combined the surreal with the often surprisingly direct and heartfelt."
Nick Bollinger, writing in the New Zealand Review of Books about Love This Life (a collection of Finn's lyrics), discussed the way Finn can use music to distract with the real meaning of his lyrics. "Sometimes the print reveals dark undercurrents normally disguised by the chirpiness of the music. Something So Strong, for instance, I had always heard as a mantra of optimism... To my surprise, the text revealed a seething bed of unease - 'Turning in my sleep / love can leave you cold / the taste of jealousy / is like a lust for gold'..... Finn's almost naively innocent melody in a sense, resists the fears and terrors of the lyric."
Crowded House: Something So Strong - here
(Official music video)
He goes on, "Removed from the music, Finn's words can seem incomplete, yet studying them on their own does not detract from the music..... they can offer a new window onto the work. It has deepened my appreciation of the subtlety and mischievousness of which Finn pits his words and music against each other."
When You Come is an example of the unconscious art of the stream of consciousness lyric. Finn recalls how that song came about. "Images just fell out one on top of another. I didn't, at the time, think it was all that connected but actually, now, it seems like quite a coherent statement. I was juxtaposing the natural world with a personal... pledge, really, I suppose."
Finn did get a song writing block after second Crowded House album, Temple Of Low Men, but while working on album number three, he started collaborating with older brother Tim. Suddenly they had two pots of songs - the Crowded House ones and the ones being worked on by the brothers. Tim joined the band, the songs merged into one body of work, which would become Woodface, the result being seen by many as the bands "most cohesive, unforced set of songs."
Ben Cuzzupe said (in The Guardian) that "no-one has the ability to waltz around their own subconscious quite like Neil Finn and Fall At Your Feet is a tender example of his pop craftmanship at its finest." But lyrically and musically, this song was not particularly straightforward to construct, with Nick Seymour saying it was like a jigsaw. Producer, Mitchell Froom, told Neil to take the chorus from one song and add it to the verses of another - neither of which had been working up to that point. Finn's frustrations come tumbling out in the middle eight...
"The finger of blame has turned upon itself,
And I'm more than willing to offer myself.
Do you want my presence or need my help.
Who knows where that might lead?"
Crowded House: Fall At Your Feet - here
(Official music video)
Finn explained the song, "It was really that moment post a conflict or struggle, when you sense a great sadness in the person your with.... where you want to offer yourself as some kind of sounding board or weeping wall. You want to take all their sadness, especially if you've been responsible for some of it."
Solo stuff
Astro on his debut solo album Try Whistling This was inspired by catchphrases being used by his backing band and children, with song questioning an obsession with cool and resisting the whole Warhol fifteen minutes of fame type thing. As Lori Gava notes in XS Noise, "He points out the danger of letting this desire imprison the soul , which in turn keeps a person shallow instead of developing into a better version of one's self, 'All your best one liners are borrowed from a film... The thing that gets to me / is how you're never free / and how the spirit yearns your body is a prison.'"
Neil Finn: Astro - here
(Audio only)
"Seal my fate,
I get your tongue in the mail,
No-one is wise,
Until they see how it lies,
Love this life,
Don't wait till the next one comes." (Love This Life)
"No fire where I lit my spark,
I am not afraid of the dark,
Where your words devour my heart,
And put me to shame, put me to shame." (Distant Sun)
Crowded House: Distant Sun - here
(Live on the Tonight Show)
"Imagine the light
On your blue transparent face,
Through coloured glass,
It filters down to warmest red.
Faded, I'm the one who reads your mind,
See my life in your design,
True companion at your side." (Wherever You Are)
Robert Forster & Grant McLennan (The Go-Betweens):
"The band's albums were more like great little novels, with Forster and McLennan their tandem authors, talked about and taught to a self selecting pool but far from beach reads." (Joshua Klein, Pitchfork, 2007)
One of the greatest bands that many have never heard of, began at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, in 1977. The erudite poetry fan, Robert Forster was a local, while Grant McLennan the laid back one, belied an often difficult childhood with his father dying when he was four, having to spend several years at a boarding school, and his mother re-marrying and moving to a remote cattle station.
"[McLennan was] the Go Betweens poppier, more conventional (but no less poetic) songwriter."
"[Robert Forster] was easily the more quirky writer in the Go Betweens."
The two eventually became three, with the arrival of long-time drummer Lindy Morrison - and then three became four (Robert Vickers), then five (Amanda Brown), then a different five (John Willsteed in for Vickers). Then it fell apart in 1989, everyone went their own ways for a decade, before Forster and McLennan found themselves back together again for a further three album hurrah, only ending when McLennan's lifestyle finally caught up with him in 2006.
Balance
The Aphoristic Album Review site sums up their relationship - "McLennan is the more straightforward writer of the pair, while Forster writes angular and spiky songs, and the two balance each other very well."
"When the rain hit the roof, with the sound of a finished kiss,
Like a lip lifted up from a lip." (The Wrong Road, Spring Hill Fair - McLennan)
"They held their own with the best records released by The Smiths and should have had a similar breakthrough to REM. Despite the lack of success, their legacy lives on through the music; their influence can be heard in fine groups such as Belle & Sebastian, Real Estate and The Clientele." (Jonathan Wright, GodIsInTheTVZine - 2016)
Forster gave his thoughts on the songwriting relationship to Monique Schafter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "I came to the realisation that an artistic compatibility was more important than some sort of musical prowess... We were highly conceptual from the start because we didn't have the musical chops."
He noted about Grant - "His songs were immediately a lot more riffy, and innately he was far more melodic than I was. There was a melancholic edge to it. His lyrics were a little more self consciously poetic than mine."
Cattle And Cane
The song Cattle and Cane, from second album Before Hollywood, is considered by many to be one of the Go Betweens best, and possibly McLennan's peak as a lyricist, so much so that it became one of APRA's (Australian Performing Rights Association) Top 30 Australian songs of all time. It is a very autobiographical song that reflects all of the emotions he faced through childhood. McLennan reflected on it not long before his death; "The rhythm struck me as strange, the mood as beautiful and sad. The song came easily, was recorded quickly and still haunts me."
"I recall a schoolboy coming home,
Through fields of cane, to a house of tin and timber,
And in the sky, a rain of falling cinders,
From time to time, the waste, memory wastes."
The Go Betweens: Cattle And Cane - here
(Official music video)
The song has three clear phases - of the young boy; at boarding school; and finally at university. McLennan clarifies, "I'm just trying to put three vignettes of a person, who's a lot like myself, growing up in Queensland, and just juxtaposing that against how I am now."
Spring Rain
One of Forster's best loved tunes is Spring Rain, from 1986s Liberty Belle & The Black Diamond Express. It is a monologue on monotony, about a man waiting for change to happen to him, and could be a reference to TS Eliot's The Wasteland, with its line; "Memory and desire, stirring, pull roots with spring rain." There is a reflection of the man's past and a desire for a better future.
"With all those people that I never, never need.
These people are excited by their cars.
I want surprises,
Like spring rain."
The Go Betweens: Spring Rain - here
(Official music video)
Other lyrics
"If the cliffs were any closer,
If the water wasn't so bad,
I'd dive for your memory,
On the rocks and the sand." (Dive For Your Memory, 16 Lovers Lane - Forster)
"I'd evade waking up if the alarm wouldn't ring,
I'd walk into quick sand if I knew how far I'd sink.
Twin layers of trouble,
Two times that might,
Twin layers of lightning,
Both of us can strike." (Twin Layers Of Lightning, Liberty Belle - Forster)
Grant McLennan told the NME in 1988 that, "I maintain that the Go Betweens write about love better than anybody else in the world." Hayley Scott in The Guardian described Spring Hill Fair track River Of Money as having, "lyrics [which] are some of the Go Betweens best, and on paper they read like strangely affecting free verse."
"It's neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness
To confine itself to its causes....
He had dealt with the deluge alright
But the watermark of her leaving was still visible." (River Of Money, Spring Hill Fair - McLennan)
Forster was no slouch when it comes to a good song about love either - take Clouds, from 16 Lovers Lane, as a good example.
"Visions of blue
I'm angry, I'm wise,
And you, you're under cloudy skies.
Blue air I crave, blue air I breathe,
They once chopped my heart the way you chop a tree.
Told to equate achievement with pain,
I took their prize and paid them back with rain."
The Go Betweens: Clouds - here
(Live at The Tivoli, 2005)
How did they get missed?
Ed Power wrote in the Irish Times that the Go Betweens were like "local heroes and peerless pop poets rolled into one." He also looked at the comparison between Forster and McLennan, and a well known songwriting duo from the past. "The Beatles parallels were cited beyond Australia, too, with Forster and McLennan heralded as the Lennon and McCartney of 1980s jangle pop. The comparison was apt - if not entirely correct. It would be perhaps more accurate to say The Go Betweens were The Beatles, if The Beatles had two George Harrison's."
Joshua Klein perhaps sums them up well, in his Pitchfork article. "Up to the end, the band made music that demanded to be heard by being as good as it possibly could be, simple as that. That people didn't listen says less about the music than it does about the people not listening."
A Summary
The fact that we ended up only looking at writers from Australia and New Zealand might be coincidence, or maybe not. Perhaps the fact that all four of them, and their bands, at one point or another upped sticks and moved half way around the world (to England, and in Crowded House's case, LA) to meet the music industry head on. That slight homesick feeling, coupled with a sense of place, comes through in many of the songs - the writing about their home became much sharper through the long lens of distance.
Are they poets or just smiths who add words to music? Is it the words that elevate the sound of the music, or the music that gives flesh to the words? Probably a moot point, but it was a good starting point and excuse to delve into the lives and words of four interesting and very talented writers.
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