Domino Recording Company proudly presents…
The Triffids – ‘Wide Open Road’ taken from the album
Born Sandy Devotional.
This reissue campaign will conduct itself over an eighteen month period commencing with Born Sandy Devotional. Others to follow: Treeless Plain, Raining Pleasure, In The Pines, Calenture and The Black Swan.
The Triffids arrived in London with a wad of cash they’d saved up and 5 return plane tickets scheduled to expire by Christmas. They’d given themselves three months to make inroads in the UK as a band, or have fun trying, and unequivocally, they succeeded to a point where they graced the first NME cover of 1985 which it predicted would be The Year Of the Triffids. Formed in their hometown of Perth, Western Australia, by school friends David McComb and Alsy McDonald, brother Rob soon becoming involved, they were all very much sons of the establishment from well-to-do families. They released their first single as The Triffids in 1981. After one or two changes, Marty and Jill completed the now familiar line up before recording their debut album in 1983.
Much is always made about the remoteness of Western Australia in relation to understanding the Triffids’ music. Their music was also informed by a vast wealth of influences and a deep musical knowledge: from UK punk to California rock from a much earlier generation, Sixties’ folk, Dylan, Van Morrison, classic soul and country music.
Delayed by record company wrangles and lack of finances, Born Sandy was recorded in London in August 1985 with Gil Norton (fresh from working with Echo & The Bunnymen) producing. By now they’d also added the bespectacled and anything but ‘Evil’ Graham Lee to the band, contributing the haunting, atmospheric lap and pedal steel guitar that added so much to the album’s ambience. If the sound was one of eastwards wide open roads across the treeless Nullarbor Plain and intimidating landscapes, David McComb’s songs enveloped the listener with a stark passion.
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After disbanding, the group returned to Australia where, Alsy, Jill and Rob took proper jobs as lawyers, architects and teachers respectively, and settled down. Marty joined Nick Cave and Graham, continued to do sessions and live work in Australia. TheTriffids (sans David) also backed The KLF’s Bill Drummond on his only ever solo album, The Man, released by Creation in 1990. David continued writing and performing, releasing just one tortured solo album, Love of Will, for Mushroom in 1994. Undergoing a heart transplant in 1995, he died in February 1999, following a car accident.
The Triffids music will live on as resonant now (perhaps more so) as then and a testament to a unique group and, in David McComb, one of the finest songwriters to come out of Australia.They could have been contenders but, somehow, their epitaph was destined to be the music itself and David’s songwriting and never a wall-full of Gold discs.
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