Now that we were single guys, we'd be down The Red Hart or The Sun every Friday night on the pull. I argued that, with my dark hair and his blonde hair we'd have a sort of Butch And Sundance contrast thing going on. The ladies would have a choice. The ladies wouldn't have a chance.
After one knock-back we'd return to our seats and watch the older boys move in. At the end of the evening we'd head back to mine for coffee, spliff and fried-egg sandwiches. Mike would be driving his mum's huge battered boat of a Citroen, 'Waiting for the Man' would be blasting out of the stereo, and both of us would be rapping about girls, and our other favourite subject: music.
Music, or chart music, was abysmal in the mid-eighties. At the time I remember thinking: it will always be this way. I couldn't envision a future where records wouldn't have synths and clattery drum-machines. It was like trying to picture peacetime during war; and it was a war - the charts were the enemy and we knew we had God, or at least Morrissey, on our side.
But 'good' music was around if you were prepared to look for it. John Peel and Sounds weren't exactly obscure sources and Mike was a regular subscriber to both. He liked to bring round a record he'd heard on Peel's show and rave about it. I got to hear all sorts of odd bands in this way: The Del Fuegos (one great song: 'Nervous and Shaky') and The Jazz Butcher (no great songs but one great title: 'Bath of Bacon') were just two out of many. During one of these sessions he pulled out an album with a gaudy red and yellow sleeve. It was 'Raining Pleasure' by an Australian group called The Triffids. Apart from The Velvet Underground and The Doors, my favourite bands at the time were The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, R.E.M, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Waterboys and U2. Most of them had made, or were in the process of making, their Big Record with a Big Producer. The Triffids, in comparison, sounded tinny and thin. Still, they name-checked their local off-licence on the back of the sleeve and that was cool.
The following week, Mike bought two tickets for their Croydon Underground gig. After the sub-Talking Heads support band (we always watched the support band) The Triffids walked on stage. They looked strange and slightly un-cool. All of them were different shapes and sizes, and there was a bloke with glasses sitting behind a pedal-steel guitar. But they also had fantastic shirts, cuban heels and sixties sunburst guitars. This last detail was crucial. I remember seeing Johnny Marr's Gibson 335 on The Smiths Tube video for 'This Charming Man'. It said: I am against the eighties and its horrible shiny new guitars.
We were right at the front. From the first deafening, trebly chords of the opening tune to the final shred of white noise as the last song collapsed, The Triffids were a revelation. They were a thrashy, trashy rock'n'roll band - a combination of our beloved Velvets and Doors. This was more like it. At the time, most indie bands were pedalling a soft Byrdsian jangle. Primal Scream (who, ironically, went 'rock' later) were the epitome of this type of approach. We'd seen them at Nottingham Rock City a few weeks earlier, supporting The Jesus And Mary Chain. Someone had put a small ad in the NME along the lines of: 'look out Nottingham, there's gonna be another riot'. We cowered at the back hoping for some punk rock thrills, but only the Mary Chain delivered. The Triffids, then, were the answer to our rock'n'roll prayers.
As a wannabe singer, I always concentrated on the front-man. My teenage diary records that he looked like a) he'd been up for three nights tripping and b) Iggy Pop. Now I knew as well as the next indie kid what Iggy Pop looked like and it was nothing like the singer-songwriter of The Triffids, who was called David McComb - a very un-rock n roll name. So why the Iggy comparison? I hadn't properly grasped it, but they shared the same mixture of erudition and aggression. McComb's stage persona was macho but in a very hip, non-eighties way.
It was two in the morning when the lights went up and we'd missed the last train home. In an act of sheer bravado we (okay, Mike) approached McComb, who wasn't backstage drinking champagne like a rock star, but sitting beside the stage.
'We were wondering if you could give us a lift into London 'cause we've missed our train,' asked Mike, hopefully.
McComb looked us up and down with a charming smirk and said, 'You look like a couple of nice boys!' It was then I remembered we were both plastered in eyeliner.
Sparing our blushes, he added, 'we were going to ask if we could have a lift with you.'
It's true, they had announced that they needed transport back to London during the gig but I'd assumed they were joking. Surely bands that had been in Sounds had a limo waiting to take them back to their hotel? No lift forthcoming, we flogged back to Kings Cross on night buses. By five in the morning we were in a Wimpy bar watching the pimps and the pros, and feeling cool in our shades. Yes it was going to take four hours to get back home, but this was an adventure, right? I could imagine McComb doing this sort of thing for inspiration. He seemed like the kind of writer who was interested in the seamy underbelly of city life. One of his songs began: 'Alcohol, heroin, it's all water under the bridge.'
I still have the set list from that gig and it reads: Chicken, Hell, Life, Prop, Lonely, Seabirds, Rain, Jesus, Pony, Waste, Stolen, Field, Water, Monkey. As a list of buzzwords its pretty impressive; as a list of great songs it's nigh on faultless. I didn't realise it then but McComb had completed nearly all his key work. There was one other lasting impression from the gig: Mike was a dead-ringer for McComb. I don't think I told Mike this, but if I had he would've cherished it as the highest possible compliment.
The Triffids blew me away that night but they didn't change my life. They were just one of many cool bands doing the rounds at the time. In the autumn they appeared on The Tube doing a blistering version of 'Hell Of a Summer'. This served to whet my appetite for the new album that the music press kept insisting was on the way.
U.L.U, the following year. Bizarrely, Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction were supporting (we always watched the support band). After the dry ice had cleared, The Triffids arrived on stage. Just like last year they opened with 'Chicken Killer' and just like last year Mike and I were right at the front. McComb began by slashing almost artlessly at the first chords - a review around this time called his playing 'kinetic' - but the volume and attitude were breathtakingly exciting. They premiered a new song my diary miss-calls 'Buried Deep In Love'; a short 'Field Of Glass' that contained 'Sympathy For the Devil'; 'Raining Pleasure'; 'Jesus Calling' (McComb: 'This is about one of my heroes') and 'Beautiful Waste' as an encore.
I began to notice the bigger picture. Like all great groups, each member had their own image and identity. David McComb was the leader/preacher; brother Robert his studious lieutenant on guitar; Martyn Casey - the bass player, another lieutenant, always well turned out in a denim jacket over a tucked-in shirt; Jill Birt - their Mo Tucker, softening the more macho tendencies of the music with her keyboard lines; and Alsy McDonald - concerned yet laconic behind his drum-kit. Finally, Graham Lee, seated and bespectacled, the sober anchorman, completed this odd collection of people. Later in their career, Island tried to push McComb into going solo - a fine example of record company wrong-headedness. If ever there was a band that was the sum of its parts it was The Triffids.
I started to relish details. I loved the two cans of Red Stripe on each amp as we anticipated their arrival onstage. I loved the way McComb ambled onstage to fix up his effects pedals when he could have got a roadie to do it for him. I loved the way Jill Birt sang the words to her song from an exercise book, and how the look of genuine terror on her face made the audience will her on.
I was starting to fall in love with this band. So when the hell was their new record out? I didn't have to wait long. Mike called at my house with a copy on the day it was released. I looked at the cover - an aerial shot of a beach with the tide out. Bad lettering. Not very promising. Remembering that record sleeves weren't their strong suit, I searched for the title. It was magnificent: 'Born Sandy Devotional'.
From the first listen it was obvious that everything had been dramatically improved: the production, the playing, the song-writing, the whole package. A critic wrote at the time: 'When they abandon self-production they will produce records that are not just very good, but staggering'. 'Born Sandy Devotional', produced by Gil Norton, is that record.
Side one begins on the first line of 'The Seabirds' - 'No foreign pair of dark sunglasses… ' - and the surge of Graham Lee's pedal-steel feels like you're swooping down on to the beach on the cover, and into their world.
Every successful songwriter eventually creates a unique universe into which the listener can escape. Morrissey had his rent boys from Hulme; McComb had his femme fatales from Perth. But it's not the characters in the songs that strike you first. McComb had made the landscape - the sun-parched tip of Western Australia - the star. 'Born Sandy Devotional' is the aural equivalent of Nicolas Roeg's 'Walkabout'. It's a harshly physical world; a realm of the senses. McComb had attempted this before - many of his earlier songs contain references to sensuality and an extreme climate: 'Sand in your eye, sun on your back' ('Red Pony); 'Salty lips to taste, skin to touch' ('Raining Pleasure), but this was a focused attempt at sustaining these themes for the length of an album. Needless to say, this was unbearably exotic for a kid from the home counties of England.
Essentially, you could boil The Triffids milieu down to The Beach. This should, in theory, have increased their cross-over appeal. For a while in the eighties it seemed as if everyone wanted to be on a beach. In the summer of 1986, Owen Paul's video for the execrable 'Youre My Favourite Waste of Time' showed him walking hunkily along a beach in a nice denim shirt. Back then, girls divided boys into hunks or wimps. We were definitely wimps (although I can hear Mike's voice stating categorically: speak for yourself, Jim). If you were an indie-kid and had a few Cure records to your name then the beach was the most hated place to be. Morrissey's line, 'a dreaded sunny day and I'll meet you at the cemetery gates' is the ultimate expression of this. No, McComb was on a very different beach to Owen Paul. It was the same beach all romantic outsiders in music have walked on, from Nick Drake on the 'Fruit Tree' box-set to Chris Martin in the 'Yellow' video.
The emotional landscape is just as well-drawn. Designed as an open letter to a departed lover, the record sometimes sounds as if it's a concept album about sexual jealousy. It goes through all the miserable stages: the anguished 'Where were you? in 'The Seabirds' at the start of the album is answered by 'where you are now it's just getting light' in the final song, 'Tender is the Night'. The album is a devotional to one person, but it's also a vicious, spiteful phone call made late at night when pissed. ('Love includes every emotion: hatred, guilt…' said McComb in an interview.) It is the testimony of someone coming to terms with betrayal, and the failure of a relationship.
Even though it was over a year since being dumped by my Dream Girl, I still wasn't over her. In fact, my infatuation had grown to monolithic proportions. My diaries were becoming ever more histrionic and morbid; they were full of adolescent pain, rage and despair. In short - the exact emotional terrain of 'Born Sandy Devotional'. Yup, I was ready for 'Born Sandy Devotional', even if the world wasn't.
This would all be very well if it wasn't for two things: firstly, the voice. What a magnificent, monstrous instrument McComb's voice is. Like a preacher's stentorian bellow, it's designed to leave you in no doubt as to who is In The Right. Only occasionally does it verge on camp or melodrama. An angst-ridden line such as 'I yelled my insides out at the sun' (from 'Wide Open Road') sounds as if it's intended to evoke the bloody and traumatic experience of actually being born. Sung by Jim Kerr, say, this would be ridiculous; but the conviction in McComb's voice somehow carries it off.
Secondly, the quality of the songwriting on display. These were the songs I'd seen in Croydon the year before, now harnessed and honed in the studio, yet losing none of their power. The album's set-piece is 'Stolen Property'. From the strings that snake and swell around the opening bassline to the final resigned phrase it's an astonishing piece of music, their 'Idiot Wind'. McComb uses this epic backdrop to collect his tortured thoughts into some kind of order. For him, it was, to use that irritating nineties phrase, 'closure'. No one called it that then. He was just sorting shit out in his head.
Looking back, it seems like a very grown-up record for a kid to be listening to. But then again, it's precisely the sort of thing an arty, angst-ridden teenager would listen to. At no point did it strike me as odd that Mc Comb, a grown man, should be singing about this stuff. Maybe it should have done.
'Born Sandy Devotional' isn't a record anybody makes more than once', said the Melody Maker at the time. It's also a record that, if it hits you at the right age, is a once in a lifetime experience. After finishing our exams we headed to the south of France for, ironically, a beach holiday. We listened to the album on the beach everyday (along with The Go-Betweens 'Liberty Belle', but that's another story).It cured me of the girl, and I had 'closure'.
And that, pretty much, was that. Other less worthy groups came and went in our affections. We saw The Triffids again at the ICA, The Boston Arms and finally at the Town & Country Club (now The Forum). We were miles away at the back and the immediacy, the sheer physical assault of their sound just wasn't there. McComb looked slightly lost, throwing shapes on a little parapet at the front. Island were trying for the big push. The next album, 'Calenture', seemed disappointing in comparison with its predecessor. I didn't buy the follow-up, 'The Black Swan', and after that it was over, they split. Mike stayed more loyal, buying the records McComb released throughout the nineties. When I saw Mike there'd always be a Triffids conversation. There were dark rumours circulating the music industry: McComb was ill; he was a junkie living in Tufnell Park; he'd given up music, etc, etc. But we were busy getting on with our own lives and The Triffids were becoming part of the past.
Despite this, their influence was subtle and pervasive. When the time came for me to name my own group I took Flamingoes from Roxy Music, but I also wanted an exotic creature or thing like The Triffids. We met Gil Norton too. He was in the frame to produce us at one point. We were mixing at Wessex and he was upstairs with Catherine Wheel. Our manager, Deborah Edgley, introduced us; she knew him from Pixies days. He seemed like a nice chap. Flamingoes don't sound anything like The Triffids, but it's the little things. When I had to find a new bass I bought a sunburst P-bass, with a tortoiseshell scratchplate. It was only while researching this piece, looking at the inner sleeve of 'Born Sandy Devotional' that I realised it was just like the one Martyn Casey used to use. And there's the odd line or two in my own songs that I know I pinched off McComb. As Alex James observed, nothing stays with you like the music you loved aged 15 to 19.
I'm glad it was Mike who gave me the news. After all, it was he who had introduced me to the band in the first place. We were having a pint at the Camden Falcon in '99 when we got on to The Triffids.
'You know he's dead, don't you?' said Mike.
'Who's dead?'
'McComb - he died in a car crash in January.'
I hadn't listened to The Triffids for years but I was shocked. It was one of those moments when you feel a part of your youth die. January? But it was March now. Why hadn't I seen any obituaries or tributes? The answer was simple: the Triffids 'failed'. They are a testament to the futility of being in a band, but also to the nobility: to do all that careful work, to commit your life to music, when so few bands are remembered. They didn't become the Australian R.E.M, as predicted; McComb will never have an airport named after him like John Lennon, although he should. 'Born Sandy Devotional' will never be in those 100 Best Albums of All Time lists, despite The Triffids being a 'critic's' band. For my money, 'Born Sandy Devotional' is up there with 'Blood On the Tracks'. Yet - so what? 'Blood on the Tracks' was never a personal favourite of mine. It never meant shit to me, to paraphrase Chuck D. I appreciate the skill of the song-writing on 'Blood' but it never affected me. I like Dylan and yet Dylan is someone else's artist and McComb is mine.
Incredibly, 'Born Sandy Devotional' still sounds good today. The gorgeous lustre of 'Estuary Bed' and the resigned optimism of 'Tender is the Night' sound as thrilling in 2006 as they did in 1986. Plus, it's still mysterious. 'Born Sandy Devotional' - what a title. McComb said he wanted something like 'Blonde on Blonde' - 'a sort of law unto itself.'
I've listened to it every night for a week now, but I don't want to overdo it. Essentially, it's a relic, a memory, and shouldn't be disturbed. 'Born Sandy Devotional' is the sound of a summer and the start of a friendship. I've looked through the diaries, the yellowing cuttings, the set-lists and the tickets. I've looked at my tape covers of earlier Triffids albums in Mike's backward-sloping hand. When he put his pen down and looked at me in the classroom that day maybe we didn't know as much about love as we thought. Obviously, we knew sweet FA. But 'Born Sandy Devotional' was as good a textbook to start learning from as any, and it was written by a bloke who knew just a bit about love.
Copyright James Cook 2006. Thanks to David Cavanagh and Andrew Mueller for their essays on The Triffids and The Go-Betweens respectively.
