Bleddyn Butcher On The Triffids: Part 2

In the final installment of a two-part interview, Triffids biographer Bleddyn Butcher talks to AARON CURRAN about David McComb’s work ethic, his distinctly Australian vernacular and the mystery surrounding his death. Part one here.

As well as mining his own experiences, David seemed to enjoy using literature as a springboard in his work, like the poems of Les Murray and Marina Tsvetaeva. Do you think his creative methods were different from his peers in this or any other ways?
Yes, I think his methods were more sophisticated. These days there seems to be a general misunderstanding of what creativity is, so that if an artist alludes to other works then it’s theft … People don’t seem to understand what an allusion is anymore, they just think it’s plagiarism. They’re two very different things. But if you want to understand David’s method from a mechanical perspective, he’d simply use ideas from another work to kick start his own imagination, with very different results from the original. He wasn’t taking anything that he didn’t develop much further himself.

David would work on songs for a long time wouldn’t me? Constantly paring away at them, or repurposing different sections and using them for other songs?
Well let’s take one example, ‘Trick of the Light’. It was the first day of recording at the Wool Shed [in Ravensthorpe, WA, the self-recorded sessions that became the In The Pines* LP] I had jetlag so was up at 5am and David was generally the first awake anyway, being the MD of the sessions and the person who basically organised the whole week away there. So when it came time to start those first recordings, I was the only other one awake. He told me that he’d just written this song, which was bullshit, it turns out he’d been drafting it for two years! [*Laughs]

People who never saw The Triffids can still get a sense of what a great band they were from the records. You can hear how each member contributed to a group sound that was more dependent on feel and atmosphere than individual abilities. However, the book implies that David chafed at the restrictions of the band format later in The Triffids’ career, do you agree?
Yeah, he tried playing with other people, but I think that’s a healthy approach for any musician. But at the same time he was trying to foster a community spirit in The Triffids and was eager to share the spotlight, despite being the most talented and charismatic member of the band. This is probably why The Triffids’ live performances later on were a little weaker, as David pushed to get the others to share the stage and sing some songs. That introduced a meandering element into their live presentation. For instance, I’ve heard [Graham Lee’s setpiece] ‘Once A Day’ a hell of a lot in my life, a lot more than I really needed to hear it. It’s not a bad song, but when it became a crowd sing-a-long at Triffids’ shows it was weary beyond belief.

What you’ve just said reminds me of those great words David wrote, I believe on a postcard to [musician] James Patterson: ?What I like above all in a song is a sense of mystery … a kind of inaccessible truth, an unresolved core of strange beauty.” There’s not a lot of mystery in ‘Once a Day’!
No, it’s just a thin gag, if you’ve heard it once that’s enough really. So that impulse to make the band more of a collective, which at base is a generous impulse, actually blunted their attack. It was certainly a lot lighter and less intense than their earlier performances

David wasn’t afraid of referencing bands or genres that were much older than his years, like country, folk, early blues. It’s nothing unusual to reference those genres now, but in the early ’80s such broad tastes were different from the usual post punk canon, weren’t they?
Like Nick Cave, Dave had older brothers, who were very influential in terms of their musical perspective. They both had a sense of what punk was asking them to discard and didn’t always go along with that. David only embraced punk for about six months or so though, and his biggest influence from punk was probably Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, not the Sex Pistols or The Ramones. I think I can lay claim to introducing Dave to Howlin’ Wolf though.

Occasionally in the book David’s confidence seemed to falter … Was he struck by self doubt or was it external influences that weighed on him most?
No it wasn’t self doubt, certainly no more than that felt by anyone who is creative. No, it was the machinations of the business that exposed him to some dirty moves and that weighed on him. David and the band were vulnerable to these machinations at key points in their career. For instance [in the book] you’ll read that a certain record company (Hot) simply never paid them what they were owed; despite selling lots of records, they weren’t paid what was owing to them and then the record company went bankrupt. That would get to anyone, as would signing deceptive contracts that don’t eventuate as promised. Lots of musicians I know – from Dave Graney to Jarvis Cocker – found themselves in similar positions to David there. That caused some soul searching but it didn’t affect the quality of the music that The Triffids were producing.

I guess it had a more practical result, with the band having to hit the road and tour as much as possible to keep the money coming in? Well, that leads to one thing that distinguishes The Triffids from most of their peers because they actually saved a lot of the money they made from touring. They behaved as if there were eight people in the band, but the cut of the money for two went straight into the bank. They needed that money for flights particularly, but also recording. The Triffids owned most of what they recorded outright, they funded this themselves. That shows a level of determination and self sacrifice that was rare.

I love Chapter 11, when the biographical narrative cuts to David’s own tour diary verbatim, you get a real sense of what it was like traveling with the band, their comfortable rapport, as well as Dave’s larkish sense of humour and way with words. Do you think that humour gets lost from contemporary perceptions of The Triffids?
I think not just for The Triffids but for their peers too, people forget that they were having fun. In among the drama and the hardship, there was a lot of fun. If you can institutionalise gap years, why not institutionalise a few years in a rock band too? Unplanned things can happen in that time and they did happen to the Triffids, like becoming unfeasibly popular in Scandinavia. What was that about?! Who knows but it was great.

?David only embraced punk for about six months or so though, and his biggest influence from punk was probably Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.?

I admire that the book’s not afraid to be critical of David or the band when the work ran out of steam, whether it was their so-so single ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water (Till Your Well Runs Dry)’ or a bad live show they played.
Well, some of that critical stance is coming from me directly, other times I’m thinking back to when David and I spoke about things that they’d done which we both felt were lacking. There’s no point in pussy footing around when you write a book like this, there’s no point in lying and pretending everything he wrote or the band played was perfect. While I’m sure David would have difficulties with some of the things that I’ve written, I’m just as sure that he wouldn’t give a fuck that I wrote them. That’s the type of person he was.

In Jon Casimir’s obituary for David in the Sydney Morning Herald, he positions The Triffids’ work in opposition to the then-dominant genre of pub rock in Australia, quoting David as saying, “People have decided that there is an identify to Australian music and that is pub rock, second hand American bland rock. I find that disappointing … that people assume that’s the honest, indigenous Australian music”. In what ways do you think David tried to create a distinctly Australian vernacular in his music?
That’s a big question. I think a lot of musicians of David’s generation had the same impulse. Dave Warner I’ve mentioned but he was different, more like Colin Hay from Men At Work, they had more of a satirical aspect in their lyrics, whereas David [McComb’s] approach was more like Australian writers, people like Tim Winton, Robert Drewe, Helen Garner. He definitely wanted to speak with his own voice, to represent his own identity but without being nationalistic; more a punk rock determination to be himself than a jingoistic flag-waving exercise. He was determined to reflect his own experience and he thought the work would fail if he dressed it up in different clothes.

I think that distinctly Australian sound reached its pinnacle on Born Sandy Devotional*, far more than *Calenture*, far more than *The Black Swan.

Yes, absolutely. Lyrics aside, it’s the actual sound of the record, the space of it, which evokes the light and the landscape, but also a sense of distance, of being lost in vast spaces, as well as a kind of yearning.
I think that connects with what David wrote about being torn between two cultures – or touring, if you want to be reductive about it – and he seemed to realise that this theme wasn’t self indulgent, it reflected a wider malaise, a wider anxiety felt by Australians. [That Australian vernacular] results from a mixture of the imagery and the sound. All the emotional dramas are given a geographic context and that geography is evoked with a sound: on ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ it’s evoked with the vibraphone, which to me conjures connotations of the South West of WA, places like Nannup and Busselton, as well as lyrically connecting with Tallahatchie Bridge [Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode to Billie Joe’]. Whereas ‘Wide Open Road’ and ‘Lonely Stretch’, they evoke the desert regions, the salt flats, the mulga … implicitly barren places. That’s done with Graham’s atypical pedal steel and some very subtle piano.

The atmospheres are very deliberate and they’re illustrative of the lyrics and the themes. I don’t think that had been done before in Australia. The only band that I can think of who got close to that before was Cold Chisel, on a couple of their very best songs.

The book was initially titled Save What You Can – The Day of The Triffids and the Long Night of David McComb, however, you later made the decision to end the book earlier, at the point the band went on hiatus, rather than document David’s later solo work, with other bands, or his death in 1999. Why did you make the decision not to cover the last ten years of his life?
The glib answer is that there’s another book in it and Save What You Can is long enough as it is. But more seriously, I wanted to make sure that it was David’s achievements that are recognised, and not his somewhat-squalid demise. I don’t think that anyone has any business talking about his decline if they haven’t acknowledged the great things he achieved. And one naturally comes before the other.

There still seems to be a lot of sensitivity on the subject of David’s death among those close to him, even after all this time. For instance, I’ve read criticisms about the inadequacy of the Wikipedia entry on David and The Triffids in terms of its summary of his death. Is this because the Wikipedia article promotes negative interpretations of sketchy facts when there are other possible interpretations?
Yes, that’s the answer, for me anyway. None of the people who wrote it are doctors, none of them know the context of his death, and none of them know the details of what actually happened, so pronouncing in the way they have is really dumb, they’re not qualified to speak about it. And mostly what they’ve written is wrong.

So why is there no attempt to contradict the falsehoods and address them? Why doesn’t someone update it with the truth?
Because certain people close to him don’t want to talk about this. I’ve come to a point where I know there’s another book there but I don’t know if I’ll ever write it, because I have no interest in writing a book that skirts around certain things. Sorry, I hate being vague in saying “certain things” but I have no option here. If there were ever to be a second volume it would be because I could write about the whole truth. David’s passing is not edifying, it’s not cathartic, it’s not even a tragedy – it’s squalid. Maybe there are elements of a tragedy, because there’s certainly an Iago or two in this story, though I don’t think David’s sin was pride. But I’m not so sure this part of the story needs to be told. It’s certainly not going to be told by me without the cooperation of those involved.

Domino has reissued most of the band’s albums, which means most Triffids’ material is back in print, for awhile at least. Do you know of any more gems still locked in the archives?
Well there’s the costar tapes, that band [McComb’s last] made a number of recordings in 1997, just before Dave toured with the Dirty Three. Six songs, I think, all very good. Rob Snarksi has sung one of them, ‘The Good Life Never Ends’; another is a song called ‘Devil Please’, which Dave co-wrote with Paul Kelly. ‘Everything Fixed is Killed’ is another great one, Mick Harvey does a very good version of that in his live set now.

So that costar session, together with a re-release of Love of Will, would be the main ones to release still?
Yeah as these things go, the costar stuff might just become an added extra on the eventual Love of Will* re-release, which I think would be a mistake as they’re quite distinct, though I can understand the value of just getting it out. The live Triffids album *Stockholm has never been re-released, that was a controversial one in its time but a storm in a teacup really, just because Dave later dubbed audience noise onto a recording they’d made live in the studio for Swedish radio, which some of the Swedes got up in arms about. People are either mistaken or lie and say they don’t have copies of things but you find with time they invariably do, so maybe more of David’s music will emerge with time. But I’d say those costar recordings are the jewel.

?David’s passing is not edifying, it’s not cathartic, it’s not even a tragedy – it’s squalid.?

We’ve talked about how The Triffids’ reputation has continued to grow: Born Sandy Devotional* recently took a high placing in the *100 Best Australian Albums book; it was later voted number six in triple j’s industry poll of the Hottest Australian Albums of All Time, yet didn’t make the listener’s poll which surprised me a bit. I hope that it doesn’t remain an album that’s a critic’s favourite yet not heard in the broader community, do you agree? Yes, that’d be disappointing. I’m not an independent witness here but it was obvious to me from first listening that ‘Wide Open Road’ was an outstanding song that should have been a top ten hit, even more obvious that ‘The Seabirds’ was too. Absolutely remarkable songs, beautifully written, played and recorded in every respect – fully imagined and realised recordings. I could not understand why the songs and the album weren’t bigger here.

I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t believe David McComb’s songs would last. Not everything he’s written was a work of genius but in my opinion there’s enough there, for a person of his lifespan, for him to be judged as an outstanding artist who achieved more than most.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that he did it pretty much by himself. Jill wrote two songs, Alsy and Rob one each, and there’re a couple of collaborations; otherwise everything else David wrote alone. Whereas if you take Cold Chisel, the others were writing as well as Don Walker, and the same goes for Daddy Cool. Robert Forster wasn’t the only writer in The Go-Betweens, Nick Cave wasn’t the only writer in The Birthday Party, but David had a more popular touch than either of them at that point which he achieved on his own. And he did it seemingly effortlessly, even though it involved a lot of hard labour that wasn’t audible, producing songs that remain very effective and extremely moving decades after they were written.

I’m surprised David’s songs are not more revered and I do hope they’re played and heard more and that his reputation continues to grow as it deserves to.

PART ONE: Butcher on The Triffids early years in Perth, their relocation to the UK and his motivations behind writing the book.

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####?Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids is available now from Treadwater Press and Melbourne’s Basement Discs.