The Triffids: Born on a Treeless Plain

Well, we’ve talked a bit about David McComb on here before, as part of our look at the great Australian musical poets of the 1980s; but this time, let’s look a little bit more at him and his band, The Triffids.

If you think Australian music in the 80s began with Men At Work and AC/DC and ended with Kylie and Jason, and there was only INXS in between, then please think again. To be fair, it took me a long time to realise that there was a lot more to discover too. There was the Go-Betweens, The Church, the Hoodoo Gurus, Hunters & Collectors and the Black-Eyed Susans (of which McComb was also a member)...and there was The Triffids. Rock critic Clinton Walker said of them, “their sound is light, delicate and melodic at the top end, anchored by a tough, sinewy rhythm section at the bottom.. Triffids songs are vignettes, stories of life and love, detached but by no means objective, rendered both sensitively and stridently.”

McComb and The Triffids were born out of Perth, a city rising out of Australia’s western desert. McComb, the youngest of four boys and with two doctors for parents (a plastic surgeon and a paediatrician), was able to attend Christ Church Grammar School in the lovely Perth suburb of Claremont, looking down on the Swan River. He excelled at English Literature and Divinity before heading across the river to Western Australia Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) to study journalism and literature.

As the 1970s progressed, he found himself getting into Dylan, Cohen and the Velvets, which led him to hook up with Alan ‘Alsy’ MacDonald to form Daisy, a project which produced music, books and photography. McComb recalled, “The outside influences were more from, like, going to record stores after school… I found out what sort of music I thought was important.” This project would evolve into The Triffids, getting the name from the John Wyndham classic The Day of the Triffids. McComb was playing acoustic and bass, while MacDonald handled drums and vocals, and they were joined by Phil Kakulas on guitar and vocals and later Julian Douglas-Smith on piano and Byron Sinclair on bass. 

As the 70s moved into the 80s, McComb was already becoming a prolific songwriter, penning over a hundred songs in a few years; the band recorded a number of cassette tapes; and the line-up changed several times. Kakulas and Sinclair left, paving the way for one of his older brothers, Robert McComb to join in on guitar and violin, and Will Akers to come in on bass. The line up was completed again when Margaret Gillard joined on keyboards.

The Triffids: Reverie (audio only)

July 1981 saw them release their debut single, Stand Up, on the Shake Some Action label, having won a competition on 6NR university radio; this featured Mark Peters on drums, as MacDonald had temporarily left. There was more shaking up early the following year, when Gillard and Akers left, with Sinclair returning and Jill Yates coming in on keys. This new line up put out the Reverie EP on Resonant Records.

The Long Road Ahead

With Perth being a small market for a band, they needed to expand their horizons. This meant some brutal cross-country trips to Sydney (about 2,500 miles from Perth) and Melbourne to play shows. They would spend time out East, trying to make the most of it - doing some recording as well, but having to live in fairly awful conditions.

Photo: Richard Worsley

Sinclair left again, with Martyn P. Casey coming in this time. They managed to bag some decent tour support slots to get in some cash; working with The Reels (including Craig Hooper, who would briefly in the initial Crowded House line up), The Church, Hunters & Collectors and Uncanny X-Men. 

Mushroom Records was a label that I think everyone in the UK just thought was where Australian soap stars went who were looking for a music career. But in late 1982, The Triffids joined their roster, releasing the single Spanish Blue, closely followed by the Bad Timing and Other Stories EP. They were a four piece by now - Casey, the McComb brothers and MacDonald - and they were joined by Jill Birt on keyboards in 1983. And that was the end of their Mushroom experience.

The Triffids: Spanish Blue (official video)

They moved to indie label Hot Records for their long playing debut, Treeless Plain, released in November 1983. Slightly strangely, despite being well received, they released no singles from it. It was recorded over 12 exhausting midnight to dawn sessions in Sydney, with the band producing themselves, helped by young engineer Nick Mainsbridge. Despite some critical appeal, David McComb was not necessarily fond of it saying, “I don’t think it’s a great record, but at least we tried to do a few things that pub bands wouldn’t normally do.”

Hell Of A Summer, which many thought was about Perth, gives a good insight into the band at this stage, as it was actually written in, and about, Melbourne; “We felt more suffocated in Melbourne than we ever had in Perth,” McComb told Walker in 1983. MacDonald talked of the album more generally, that it was “not meant to be an accurate representation of what we’re like live, because we’ve done some sort of adventurous things with the production.” It was, McComb asserted, “a strong collection of sort of stories… like a whole lot of little confessionals.”

The Triffids: Hell Of A Summer (live on The Tube)

The album also starts to show their relationship with the environment around Perth, taking its name from the Nullarbor Plain, a vast expanse the band crossed maybe a dozen times or more in their eastbound road trips.

Europe beckons

Travelling was clearly second nature by now, so they decided to push themselves further and head to Europe. This was a fairly well trodden route for Antipodean bands looking for a pot of gold in the UK, but it rarely turned into commercial gain. Split Enz, The Birthday Party (and then the Bad Seeds), the Go-Betweens and many others had all tried it over the years. Graham Lee would later recall that the choice was “not necessarily to go to the UK, but to leave Australia.” There was also a feeling that the Australia of the time that was conditioned on pub-rock and punk, was perhaps not so ready for their more delicate sound.

In August 1984 they were in London. They were well received there, as Treeless Plain and the Raining Pleasure EP (produced by Mainsbridge) had been released by Rough Trade to some acclaim. But funds were tight and their plane tickets were due to expire in December, so they had three months to make something of the trip. Things were going well enough though. NME announced that 1985 would be “The Year of the Triffids” and another EP, Field of Glass, was recorded and released. 

Five became six with the permanent addition of Lee (who had played on some earlier recordings), and the good run continued with a European tour supporting Echo & The Bunnymen, gaining them some continental fans, and they backed this up with some summer festival appearances, including Glastonbury, PinkPop and Roskilde. Despite being brought up on the other side of the country (Brisbane), Lee’s musical development somewhat mirrored McComb and MacDonald, going into record stores to discover country rock records by the likes of the Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons.

The Triffids: Raining Pleasure (official video - a rare lead vocal for Birt)

A Sandy Opus is Born

Money was still tight though, no major label deal was forthcoming, but they still managed to record an album in London with Gil Norton at the helm (who would become legendary for his work with Pixies, Foo Fighters, Jimmy Eat World and many more). Born Sandy Devotional came out in March 1986 and would go on to be regarded as one of the finest Australian albums of the decade. 

Despite being brought to life in London, the album left everyone with feelings of isolation and that it had a very Australian feel. Lee explains, “When you record an album abroad, it helps you to focus yourself.” There was also a theme of unrequited love across the record, which means that lots of songs McComb had written at that time didn’t make the record as they didn’t fit this theme.

Australian journalist Ian McFarlane remembers that the record “was full of some of the most lonely, spacious songs ever written.” It cracked the UK Top 30, as did main single Wide Open Road (one of the Top 30 Australian songs of all time according to the Australian Performing Rights Association [APRA]). 

The Triffids: Wide Open Road (official music video)

McComb recalled that the words came to him in Melbourne and like the album as a whole, “Seemed to naturally evoke a particular landscape, namely the stretch of highway in between Caiguna and Norseman, where the Triffid’s Hi-Ace monotonously came to grief with kangaroos.” Lee further explained its greatness; “it’s a simple song recorded with extreme dynamic subtlety. Every piece has its place from the softly swooshing drum machine beat to the insistent bass line that doesn’t always follow the chords - a true McComb / Casey trademark - to the several melodies that act as counterpoint to the vocal.”

In 2016, as the record's 30th anniversary beckoned, The Guardian got the thoughts of some Australian musicians on what they acknowledged was, “widely regarded as one of the finest Australian albums ever made.”

Lindy Morrison (Go-Betweens) said of Chicken Killer, “Martyn P Casey and Alsy MacDonald set a cracking, rolling rhythm that carries this wild tune to the finish line…. David is as big and blustery and confident as ever as he sings for his lost love, with gorgeous imagery.” Steve Kilbey (The Church) said that, “You could not find a more Australian song than Lonely Stretch… A monstrous epic of a song…. I declare this to be the most vivid, crucial, exciting Aussie song of all time… An absolute masterpiece.”

The Triffids: Lonely Stretch (audio only)

Gareth Liddiard (The Drones) had Stolen Property as his favourite, especially the “shift halfway through that always sends chills down my spine, where Dave sings, ‘Maybe lost possessions, maybe stolen property.’ It’s Dave losing someone, but regaining himself.” 

There was even time to rattle off another album. In The Pines was recorded while the band awaited the release of Born Sandy Devotional, at the McComb family place in the small town of Ravensthorpe, southeast of Perth. They worked on songs in a shearing shed with some basic eight-track equipment, and the results saw them drift into a more folk/country feel. They noted that of the $1,190 spent on the recording process, $310 was the alcohol tab! There was little concern for the commercial risk of doing an album like this as they weren’t making much money anyway. Lee said that the decision to record somewhere a little odd was partly because, “we were allergic to playing the game.”

Australian Made

Midwinter of 1986-87 saw an exciting new live adventure in Australia. Tired of big foreign bands coming in and taking all of the public's gig-going money, someone came up with the idea of having a touring festival that only featured Australian bands. The event toured outdoor venues at the six State capitals. Jimmy Barnes (Cold Chisel) and INXS were the headliners, with a bill that also included Divinyls, Mental As Anything, The Saints and The Triffids. It was said that they may not have been invited, but Michael Hutchence insisted they needed to be on the bill.

The Fever Dream

The upward trajectory seemed to continue; the acclaim for Born Sandy led to a three record deal with Island Records in the UK, and so they were back in the studio with Gil Norton. The record title, Calenture, refers to a sailor’s fever, and it hit associated themes of insanity and rootlessness. The album was recorded during their own back and forth between home and the UK, so you could see where the relationship to disorientated sailors might come from.

A problem seemed to arise from this period - it seemed that Island really wanted David McComb and not necessarily the rest of the band. Initial sessions with Craig Leon were a disaster, but fortunately the band were ultimately allowed to just get on with it, Norton was back and the album came out in November 1987. Michael Sutton (AllMusic) noted that you may be taken with with McComb’s “bluesy croon; deep and brimming with palpable sorrow, [his] voice never dwindles in intensity.” It featured two of their signature singles as well; Bury Me Deep In Love (later used in Aussie soap Neighbours, when Harold and Madge got married) and Trick Of The Light.

The Triffids: Bury Me Deep In Love (live on Blah Blah Blah, 1988)

A request to record the next record in Australia was denied by Island and so they found themselves in rural England (Somerset) with producer Stephen Street. The resultant The Black Swan, was critically mostly well received, but another commercial disappointment. Originally planned as a double album, it ended up being a slightly chaotic thirteen track single record. It brought in elements of club jazz, country and even flamenco, with an overall orchestral feel to it. Lee says that McComb had not only written the songs, but also arranged them in his head before recording, meaning that the demos sound very similar to the finished product.

The Triffids: Goodbye Little Boy (official music video - another Birt vocal)

There was a sense of disappointment from the band, coupled with exhaustion from their constant travel and touring regime. There was no hit single to be found; a cover was suggested, 'as they always work' - so they did a version of Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, but that didn’t work either. They went to play a couple of shows in New York in 1989 before taking a much needed break… which ended up being permanent.

The idea was: let McComb go off and do a solo album and then bring the band back together later on. The trouble was, his solo record took ages (he kept writing songs that sounded like band songs), most of the rest of the band took proper jobs (MacDonald a lawyer, Birt an architect, and Robert McComb a teacher), there was some settling down too MacDonald and Birt got married). Only David McComb, Lee and Casey carried on as full-time musicians. The first two joined the Blackeyed Susans, while the latter became a Bad Seed with Nick Cave. 

But it was to be bad health that ultimately denied any chance of a reunion. McComb initially went back to London to try out his solo career, but he was getting grief from chronic back pain caused by crushed vertebrae he got in 1986. He returned to Australia and managed one solo album (featuring Lee and Casey), Love Of Will, for Mushroom in 1994. 

David McComb: Setting You Free (official music video)

In a 1994 article and interview with McComb, the writer said Love Of Will found him “digging deeper into the emotional mire.” McComb told the interviewer, Graham Reid, that people listening to the album found it to be more like the Triffids than they were expecting. He had written 40 songs over several years, which he whittled down to the 13 that eventually appeared on the record. 

Then there were further problems brought on by his substance abuse issues - that got so bad he ended up needing a heart transplant in 1996. MacDonald later suggested that not being in a band led to an increase in his drug problem, because he lost the stability being in a band brought him. Despite all of this, he took a university course (Art History) and continued a prolific songwriting output. He recorded a number of demos, utilising loads of his musical chums to help him, but live performances were few and far between because of his pain struggles. When he was involved in a car accident in Melbourne, he ended up in St Vincent’s hospital, and a few days later, on 2 February 1999, he died at home just shy of his 37th birthday. The cause was ultimately a mixture of heroin toxicity and a rejection of his earlier transplant.

Triffid Revival

There was a three day festival of The Triffids in January 2008, as part of the Sydney Festival. The remaining band members were joined by a host of fellow Australian legends, including Rob Snarski (Blackeyed Susans), Steve Kilbey (The Church) and Mick Harvey (the Bad Seeds).

The Triffids w/ Rob Snarski: Hell Of A Summer (at the Sydney Festival, 2008)

When The Triffids were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2008, Kilbey joined the band to sing Wide Open Road. “It’s nerve wracking. It’s a huge song. It’s like singing Whole Lotta Love - everybody knows it and loves it. The moment I heard it I wished I’d written it, and after all this time through very unfortunate circumstances the dream [to perform it] has come true.”

The surviving Triffids, around 2016

If they were writing songs that seemed to be so Australian, why was it they found it so hard to get acceptance in their own country? Graham Lee thinks they were perhaps the wrong type of Australian band; “It wasn’t Men At Work’s ‘Down Under’. It was much more understated Australian references… There was a darkness that maybe people wanted to ignore.”

If you are interested, there is an excellent documentary on the band out there - Love In Bright Landscapes: The Story Of David McComb Of The Triffids that came out in 2021 and is well worth a watch if you can find it on YouTube.