Return to Oz

by Bleddyn Butcher

First published in New Musical Express, 28 June 1986; nipped and tucked, October 2011

When the hometown boy flies into Perth Airport, Perth, Western Australia, his first thought is “Why did I ever leave this beautiful city?”

It’s 3:30 in the morning when I arrive. Even at this ungodly hour, my winter coat is superfluous. With my peevish bones wrapped in cockney cashmere, I’m ludicrously overdressed for Australia’s autumnal balm. Customs officials greet us in shirt sleeves and shorts.

In the warm night air, the ride from the airport is dreamlike. The car glides through the sleeping city. There’s almost no one about. Headlights flare once or twice in the distance. Suburbs unfurl in the darkness, beneath a sheeting of leaves. The broad river smoothes the city’s brow.

With daylight comes jubilation. A clear untroubled blue tolls across the sky. Unlike the ghostly token obscured by London’s unbroken cloud, the sun here has some presence, some pizzazz. You feel it on your face and shoulders, you feel it in your bones.

“In Australia”, my four-year-old informs me, delighted by the discovery, “they warm the pavement up so you don’t have to wear shoes.”

That gladness persists in older inhabitants. Accustomed, by five years of East End privation, to crabbier manners, I am unprepared for the sunniness of the mean disposition. Queuing, it seems, is a sign of rank paranoia. People here don’t see the need. They enjoy their good fortune. The climate is brilliant. The standard of living is high. The food is good. Fruit is both fresh and plentiful. Meat tastes like it might once have frolicked or roamed. Alcohol is cheap, amazingly cheap.

Don’t you know? It’s raining pleasure.

Perth’s easygoing nature is not a product of climate alone. Geography, too, plays a part. Like most supposed utopias, Perth is a long way from the rest of the world. Fourteen hundred desert miles separate it from Adelaide, the nearest Australian city. Fourteen hundred miles is a fair hike, a forbidding distance. It tends to discourage impulsive wanderlust. It discourages disruptive cross-pollination, too.

Those who remain are proud of their idyllic retreat, remote from the cares of the world. Events in April – namely, the bombing of Tripoli and the meltdown at Chernobyl – tend to confirm their view. In times of tactical reprisal and nuclear catastrophe, Antipodean distance has its consolations. It keeps the some of beasties at bay.

Even so, memory suggests we take our good fortune too much for granted. The energetic embrace of the sun – the water-skiing, the wind-surfing, the aqua-thrillways – acts as a kind of moral narcotic, numbing finer feelings. Constant gratification induces imaginative paralysis:

… salty lips to taste, skin to touch/nothing matters very much…

Blissed out, I abandoned this Eden for five stern years of penance in London’s decrepitude. So why, now that the old skin is shed, am I coming back?

Fate, the arch ironist, dealt me a simple twist. After a youth spent deploring my countryfolk’s musical endeavour, deploring its slavishness and vapidity, a large part of my time in London has been spent gawping with amazement at the inventiveness of fellow expatriates. The first band of consequence I encountered turned out to be called The Birthday Party. Nick Cave has since proved himself a darkly humorous writer and charming iconoclast. The Go-Betweens’ oddball intelligence and literate whimsy refresh wheezy post-punk. Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments beguiles the listener with dreamy melody. And The Triffids…

The Triffids are responsible for the return of this prodigal: The Triffids are a Perth band with canonical stock. Songwriter David McComb’s critical eye and grand passion have forced a review of my previous assessment of our stunning climate. I may even recant.

Like many young men, McComb has impeccable taste; unusually, he’s turned it to creative use. Where his earlier parade of influence prompted the odd derisive jibe, newer allusions are marks of his artistry. He blends all sorts of textures (homegrown, store-bought and foreign) to distinctive effect. His songs are audibly indigenous, evoking both the look and the mood of the Lucky Country. I recognise the landscape – and not only that. McComb has begun mapping a peculiarly Australian malaise, Edenic ennui, a restless discontent latterly prone to implode. Remarkably, given my own example, he gets its measure without feeling the need to flee.

The new Triffids LP Born Sandy Devotional evokes this distemper in song after song after song, creating a sense of bruised community. It’s a carefully crafted accomplishment, one of those rare records where disparate musical styles are bound together by recurring lyrical themes. The cover features an aerial photo of Mandurah Estuary, a weekend resort some 50 miles south of Perth, and an environment which informs the songs. The landscape provides not only setting but context. Place shapes – and reveals – character.

‘Wide Open Road’, the single, shows how: the title is a succinct allusion to pioneer myth – or to its contemporary remnant, rugged individuality. Wide open roads lead to lands of opportunity and, typically, inspire fresh starts. The song itself begins with plangent calliope which, especially when joined by the Go-Betweeny guitars, creates an impression of spatial grandeur, of the vast pleasure dome of the sky. Springsteen might have used this epic soundtrack to accompany one of his escapist fantasies, circa ’75: McComb applies it to a tale of emotional paralysis, contrasting the narrator’s stubborn self-pity with a backdrop of anthemic sound. In this vaulting context, the narrator’s inability to accept the end of an affair seems merely peevish. He shrinks from the great wide-open. He’s simply not up to it.

Other songs make similar use of atmosphere and landscape to reveal character. ‘The Seabirds’ describes the aftermath of a seemingly random and joyless adultery by setting its main scene on a beach. Stricken with remorse, LoverBoy takes himself down to the water and commends his soul to the deep. The sea spits him out. The deep don’t want no cheaters. Even seagulls give him the swerve. He sulks in the shallows. ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ is a mysterious suicide note. Jill Birt’s awkward reading gives it unsettling effect, an effect compounded by the danse macabre of yo-heave-ho violin and vibes – as if she drove off the edge of the Tarrilup Bridge so she could come back and haunt the place! In ‘Lonely Stretch’ the narrator, having missed his way in the dark, broods about metaphorical “wrong turns” he may have made. The music conveys a sure sense of menace but no certainty of escape: the danger may lie out there beyond the headlights or in here at the wheel of the car.

An anxious pattern emerges. What is it that prompts his characters to fling themselves at the landscape?

“It surprises me that no one’s noticed the importance of faith to these songs”, David admits. “The idea of love as a religion substitute. Fidelity, for me, is the modern or secular equivalent of religious conviction. It’s an act for which there’s no logical justification. It requires a leap of faith.”

Born Sandy Devotional’s battered characters long for this mystic commitment. They feel its absence. They fret.

Counting on Great Leaps of Faith may well be a fool’s errand. Certainly, the UK’s major labels have been unwilling to offer The Triffids any such commitment. The current LP was conceived, in part, as an elaborate come-hither. Recorded at their own expense in London last August, it breaks with their previous practice. In contrast to the breakneck midnight-to-dawn sessions from which early recordings emerged, Born Sandy Devotional was taped at a leisurely pace during more sociable hours. The six-piece band’s already lush sound was augmented with synths, emulators and strings. Producer Gil Norton supervised the painstaking construction of the poignant soundscapes conceived by McComb. Aesthetically, it’s a resounding success, textural sophistication aiding both nuance and emotional clarity.

Surprisingly, none of the majors recognised the band’s achievement. Tapes were circulated. They contained clear evidence of commercial potential and crafty artistry. Two or three companies made half-hearted offers, sufficient to cover recording costs but otherwise ambiguous. The band didn’t bite. Having come this far without financial backing, it seemed a shame to hock the tapes for a piffling one-year option.

Ballsy call. Faced with the prospect of strategic failure, it must have been tempting to capitulate, to succumb to the old wives’ tale of re-mixing.

Happily, The Triffids didn’t. Ignoring industry wisdom and the mire of voguish production, they decided to release the blameless tapes through Rough Trade. Further, unfazed by the majors’ disdain, they would record their next album in a woolshed.

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David McComb is an affable chap. He cheerfully refutes my schematic construction of the band’s careering. “The sheepshed is an idea we’ve had in the back of our minds for about four years. It’s an experiment we’ve always wanted to try and this simply the first opportunity we’ve had.” Nevertheless, it’s hardly calculated to curry favour with homogenising A&R departments.

“Why not? It was an experiment and now we’ve got it out of our systems.”

The laboratory in which the experiment was conducted is a large corrugated-tin affair, some 40 feet wide and 80 long. It stands in cleared mallee scrub about 360 miles south-east of Perth, ten miles north of the coastal town of Hopetoun. Inside, the shed is divided roughly in half by the drive shaft which powers the shears. On one side of this apparatus are the marshalling pens, on the other a clear wooden floor. Six shearers work side by side, separating a beast from its fleece every two minutes or so and bundling it roughly into the nudist removal chute. At this rate, six hearty shearers can to fleece the farm’s 11,000 sheep in ten days.

To fuel this mammoth wool-gathering, they eat lamb for breakfast, lunch and tea, chewing their way through one unit of mutton every two or three days. Our namby battalion can’t match their appetite. It takes thirteen of us a week to get through one.

The Triffids’ workrate is nonetheless impressive. In the four days actually spent recording, they complete 19 tracks, not counting their ad lib of ‘Click Go The Shears’. (The week before I arrived, they’d recorded another four songs at a ‘proper’ studio in Perth.) They busk a fair approximation of the shearers’ eight-by-the-clock-hour day: four two-hour shifts followed by a half-hour smoke. Our breaks are chiefly devoted to debating the possibility that Halley’s Comet, a charismatic blur clearly visible in the southern night sky, has somehow shortened the yardarm. Those in favour of this crackpot notion generally carry the day. Gleefully conforming to national stereotype, we drain 15 slabs of Emu Export during our six-day stay.

The week’s preferred reading is no less sober. McComb’s copy of Sir Les Patterson’s The Traveller’s Tool becomes the dog-eared kitchen favourite. There is something bone-headed about Barry Humphries’ ribald delight in stereotypes but his vivid vernacular, if not exactly nourishing, makes great junk food.

“Did you know that the Eskimos have 80 different words for snow? We don’t get much call for that here in Australia but no other country can match us when it comes to decribing vomit. ‘Technicolour yawn’, ‘parking the tiger’, ‘yelling into the big white telephone’: these are but the tip of the iceberg.”

I don’t know whether Humphries still justifies perpetrating his appalling creations by claiming a satirical purpose. Latterly, his delight in their monstrosity seems to outshine by some candles the steeliness of his critique. International delight in their monstrosity suggests that, for many, they define willy-nilly the Australian type.

McComb uses a less insistent form to express his own ambivalence. He avoids stereotypes, abandoning received images of Ocker culture in search of a more complex understanding of the national mood. The characters in his new songs, like their counterparts on Born Sandy Devotional, are filled with nameless dread. Lives fall apart without warning, friendships end, fortune palls.

In ‘Kelly’s Blues’, already a set-list regular, The Triffids co-opt the gloomy style Crazy Horse perfected on Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. The subterranean rumbling of the bass guitar sends tremors through the song’s foundations. On first listen, the lyrics might simply describe a deserted house but the ponderous accompaniment gives them direr significance. On what rogue impulse has this Kelly dame abandoned house and home? Her number one admirer works himself into a right proper lather – and the elements share his distress! Omens aren’t good.

Fearfulness also infests ‘In the Pines’, a parallel-universe version of Leadbelly’s ‘Black Girl’, inspired by hearsay. Pedal steel guitarist ‘Evil’ Graham Lee told McComb it was the scariest song he’d ever heard. He could only remember one line: “In the pines, in the pines/Where the sun never shines”. Impatiently, McComb wrote his own version. It’s scary, too. Both songs present the dark forest as a place of refuge and the scene of a terrible crime. The sequel is, if anything, bleaker: McComb’s longing is as lethal as Leadbelly’s wrath. His characters hide from “the light” itself. They can’t face the truth.

Like his best songs, these two wed lyrical concision and atmospheric arrangement to impressive effect. The match is not always successful. Some of the newer lyrics are oblique and rambling. ‘Trick of the Light’, for instance, boasts gorgeous chords and chorus but they’re weakened by lyrical drift. The musical structure calls for a story but the words are abstruse and confused. The unfocused imagery robs the melody its potential appeal.

When I point out the mismatch, McComb mentions his desire for change.

“I went through a period of thinking it was wrong to actually finish something. After Born Sandy Devotional on which we wrung every possible nuance from the songs, I wanted to experiment with more relaxed forms of songwriting.” Admirable as it may be in the abstract, restlessness is only one measure of experimental success. The one-shot recording technique used at the woolshed sometimes served an urgent purpose; at others, it simply documented prototype songs.

April also saw the inaugural presentation of Perth’s ‘Original Rock Awards’. The event is a frustrated response to the local music industry’s reliance on ‘cover bands’. Human jukeboxes are a long-established Westralian tradition. There’s a huge demand for radio favourites out there in the suburban barns. The bands really “fisting in the brass”, as McComb has it, are those churning out energetic versions of 1960s and 1970s hits. The predominance of this strident nostalgia inspires increasing resentment in the few local bands playing their own material. An annual boost for such troupers may prompt a turning of the tide. At least, that’s the theory.

On the night, my own favourites are given much formal encouragement. The Triffids win the most prestigious of the categories in which they were entered, with McComb carrying off the trophies for Best Singer, Guitarist and Songwriter. (The band performs a cussed cover of ‘Into the Groove’ in acknowledgement.) In truth, there isn’t much competition. Of three other bands playing that night, only one showed signs of proceeding beyond the slavish phase. The Triffids, despite lingering traces of influence, are far more sure-footed. They have their own sound. If they pluck the occasional thread from rock’s rich tapestry, so what? From their sources, The Triffids have learnt how to make magic: their themes are their own.

McComb himself is untroubled by accusations of theft. “Imitation is slavery, stealing is divine – especially when you’re stealing thunder!” I had supposed his ‘Stolen Property’, a brooding opus in the tradition of Van Morrison’s ‘Listen to The Lion’, was an expression to this attitude. It’s a complex song with a shifting point of view. On one level, it’s an evocation of the eternal triangle, with ownership the measure of success; on another, it questions possessiveness. The debt to Van’s sonar meditations is obvious. When McComb sings lines like “finders keepers, loser weepers” and “this is stolen property” with an assurance surely learnt from the stumpy curmudgeon, it’s hard not to think he’s taking the piss. I tell him. He’s amused.

“Well, I hadn’t thought of that – but our old English teacher used to say, ‘If a team of brickies are building a wall using two different shades of brick and the wall that they build has the shape of a cross in it, the fact that they didn’t intend to make the pattern doesn’t mean you can’t talk about the cross.’”

See what I mean? Ever the diplomat. Why shouldn’t he draw on Van’s music? It’s part of his heritage. The Triffids, like most Australians, have absorbed much foreign culture – English literature and American television have long been staple fare, imbibed with mother’s milk. So too with pop music. Unlike many forebears and compatriots, The Triffids don’t count their own efforts lesser or inauthentic. The Cultural Cringe is no longer a colonial stock response: nor should it be.

Equally, though it often expresses local fears, The Triffids’ music has a much broader appeal. McComb’s literacy clarifies his insight, his command of the universal language gives it emotional depth. His intuitive exploration of the darker forces bubbling beneath the brash surface of Australian society parallels the work of the Aussie short story writers he admires. Like Robert Drewe, Helen Garner and Tim Winton, he grounds his fictions in the insistent everyday. The stories he tells disturb the popular Ocker image and reveal the squeamish creature beneath.

Strewth!

Who says you can’t go home again?

© Bleddyn Butcher, October 2011