David McComb Comments On Ten Songs
From Juke Magazine May 19th 1990
Red Pony (Treeless Plain, 1983)
Sand in your eye/Sun upon your back
Next to you my love/All colours turn to black
Began this one night in Winter 1982 whilst living in the Prince Of
Wales hotel in St Kilda. Finished it backstage at the Pier Hotel, Frankston
when the Triffids were supporting Uncanny X Men and Little Heroes. I guess
I don't need to comment on that; the line-up speaks for itself.
The purpose of Red Pony was to make the lyrics as minimal and abstract as
possible, so there was no more rational a message contained in the words
than there was in the music. It was the first track we recorded with a
string section. I don't think we knew exactly what we were doing. As I
recall the song owes more than a little to Creedence's version of 'I Put A
Spell On You'.
My Baby Thinks She's A Train (Treeless Plain, 1983)
My baby thinks she's a train
She don't know the difference between pleasure and pain
Now this is a real piece of shit. A novelty song. Unfortunately a
large proportion of our audience found it immensely appealing, and to this
day there's always some wag who stands at the front and yells out for it
(usually the same inspired souls who demand Farmers Never Visit
Nightclubs). I have no one to blame but myself. A bit like Hitler annexing
Poland, i.e. it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Wide Open Road (Born Sandy Devotional, 1986)
Well the drums went off in my forehead
Guns went off in my chest
Begun at Julian Wu's ex-house in St George's Rd Toorak (…ah,
the end of a beautiful era…Julian watching splatter videos like
Cannibal Apocalypse whilst completing erstwhile ideologically right-on
semiotic essays).
One morning I sat bolt upright in bed seconds after waking up and virtually
all the lyrics appeared instantly. I just tried to keep it as blunt and
direct as possible, even if the results made myself or the listener
squirm.
Some weeks later I realised there was a Johnny Cash song that shared the
same name, but then it was - conveniently - too late to change it. I
finished the music at a sound check somewhere in Europe.
A Swedish friend named Lars announced to me that his flatmate, recently
separated from her boyfriend, was inclined to repeatedly play Wide Open
Road and burst into tears. I had no idea whether to say 'that's nice', or
'how terrible'.
Like the rest of the Born Sandy Devotional album it seemed to naturally
evoke a particular landscape, namely the stretch of highway in between
Caiguna and Norseman where the Triffids' Hi-Ace monotonously came to grief
with kangaroos.
Stolen Property (Born Sandy Devotional, 1986)
There's someone standing in the rain
Like they have no place to go
Begun in Perth on a very rainy night in 1984. Eventually finished in the
then-Triffids manor in West Kensington above the flat where Coleridge
enjoyed the odd hit off laudanum.
I'd like to say that Stolen Property was dashed out in a seizure of
inspiration but unfortunately it took many long boring months, trying to
fit the various pieces together.
Still, it stopped me laughing in church as they say.
For some reason the song demanded to be very long, slow, involved and
hopefully as depressing as possible.
Another weepy.
In The Pines (In The Pines, 1986)
Where we go running
When we want to hide
Graham Lee (I think he's old enough to do without the crap nicknames
by now [one which Dave coined by the way gentle readers] ) once told me of
a Leadbelly/Stanley Brothers song called Black Girl/In The Pines, which he
breathlessly assured me was the scariest song ever written. I said, 'Great,
let's hear it'. He took so many years getting around to lending it to me
that I ended up writing my own substitute version. (My plan in the
beginning-G.L)
Ridiculous as it may seem there is actually a grove of Athol Pines near
Ravensthorpe that provided the necessary documentary image for writing the
song. The last time I checked they were coming along very nicely.
The version on the LP of the same name is rinky dink to say the least. As
ever, the band licked it into a more powerful live proposition.
Bury Me Deep In Love (Calenture, 1988)
And the little congregation gathers
Prays for guidance from above
You know the story: burial at sea, self suffocation, desire to be
buried alive, drowning, nostalgia for the inorganic state, desire to return
to the womb, desire for security and love at the expense of identity and
freedom, Eros vs Thanatos, the inherently conservative (self-destructive)
human urge, ETC BLAH ETC ad nauseum.
I'm sure we all go through these obsessive phases. The trick is growing out
of them.
Bury Me Deep In Love started as a very slow groove inspired by Al Green's
beautiful Beware. Evolved into the orchestral monster on Calenture via
Craig Leon's hideous mutation - which I have on tape, but which no one will
ever hear. A 30,000 pound mistake (ahem).
A Trick Of The Light (Calenture, 1988)
And then she stood out front wrapped in her bath towel
Yelling, once you leave boy, you can't return
Written one morning in the company of Bleddyn Butcher, in the
woolshed where In The Pines was recorded, while waiting for the band to
arrive.
I can't for the life of me think what it's about. If anyone wants to know
the juicy personal details that inspired these songs, please write to Mr
Toby Creswell. He has a much better memory for these things than
I.
The Spinning Top Song (McComb/Peters, The Black Swan, 1989)
You're either on my arm or under my heel
Hurt me all you can/You don't know how good I feel
An extremely nasty, vengeful, wired, thuggish, dusted,
vomit-breathed, bragging brute.
The narrator is what I believe is currently referred to in academic circles
as an unreconstructed male - that is to say, NOT a New Man. Or as Ice Cube
would have it, 'Do I look like a motherfucking role model?' Nothing a
speedball wouldn't fix.
My tastes in popular music (like those of my good friend Martyn P Casey)
were severely re-arranged after hearing Sun D Moet's Hey Love, LL's Going
Back To Cali, Schoolly D's Saturday Night, Ice T's Drama and Roxanne
Shante's Bad Sister etc, etc. To this day I continue to be mystified by the
ultra conservative boring bigotry of even some of my more talented
Australian rock contemporaries. No, I won't name names - you know who you
are.
The Clown Prince (McComb/Kakulas, The Black Swan, 1989)
Let them weep/Let them burn for you
Where were they when they could have learned from you?
Most of the lyrics were composed whilst stumbling around the streets of
Rome, when the Triffids were there to appear on the Italian version of the
Ray Martin Show. (very disorganised, and no one as adorable as Ray).
It would not however have been arranged or recorded without Phil Kakulas
(please write to me) and the Broadway posse. ('88/'89 - now that's what I
call a summer…a magic, unrepeatable period for the aforementioned
Kakulas, myself and Willie 'The Torch' Akers, which gave birth to the
Blackeyed Susans and several other forms of madness).
The Clown Prince himself is a cross between Michael Jackson and
Will.
New Year's Greetings (The Black Swan , 1989)
I send you a New Year's kiss
And I hope you will remember me like this
Stephen Street's favourite. This was initially a short story but was
persuaded to become a song. The idea of a middle-aged farmer narrating a
pop song was intensely appealing to me, as was the opportunity to let him
rant against as few of his most despised multi-national corporate products
(who says the Triffids aren't political?), itemise his daily routine, and
berate the smugness of Sydneysiders.
Most of the (West Australia) rural detail is extremely real to me, but the
idea owes a massive debt to Les Murray's poem 'The Widower In The Country',
which can be found in his Vernacular Republic anthology. Also, less
obviously, to an absolutely fantastic poem called 'New Year Letter' which
the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote upon hearing of Rilke's death
in 1927. Both this poem and Joseph Brodsky's related essay are guaranteed
to change lives.
Well, I've no more cards to put on the table.
-David McComb-
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