Mid-80s and among current bands my music choices run to The Smiths, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Pogues, New Order, Talking Heads, The Fall, BAD, Propaganda. Happy Mondays and the revolution they’re going to bring about in my taste and my life are a couple of years in the future. But there’s one other band who I, my brother and a few mates are into and all know are going to be huge, and they’re The Triffids. Successors to the Birthday Party as Australia’s best band but nowhere as in-your-face because as well as new wave influences there’s folk and traditional blues in there, even a bit of folky psychedelia.
Of course, they never did hit it big but they left behind a great series of albums and some wonderful songs. This is from Calenture, which I think is their best album despite dodgy production. Fair to say it’s the finest
-ever archaeology/museum visiting-inspired song about an Iron Age human sacrifice narrated in the modern day by the victim himself. It’s not gothic at all, but downbeat, poetic and quite haunting. Maybe not entirely representative of the Triffids’ sound but I hope those who don’t know them or have forgotten them will like it and check out their other work.
My brother and I saw them play to a sparse crowd at the Warehouse in about 86, couldn’t work out why there weren’t more there and why they weren’t widely popular. It’s still a mystery. They had a hit a few years later off the back of a track chosen for Kylie and Jason’s wedding scene in Neighbours(!) but from memory they’d already split. I’d moved on by then myself in my musical tastes though they still had (have) a place in my affections.
Their lead singer, David McComb fell victim to heroin in the 90s, had heart problems, ended up getting a transplant, being in a car smash and the shock of that causing heroin-related toxicity and his body rejecting the transplant. I remember how shocked I was when I found out he’d died. This was the song I played.
“I took a hard fall, I couldn’t get up”.