Les Murray, 1938-2019

Very sad to hear of the death of the great Australian poet, Les Murray over the weekend.

I've probably mentioned on here before, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, he was one of the first contemporary poets I read. That was because this poem, The Widower In The Country, was one of the inspirations for the song New Year's Greetings, by The Triffids (and if you're a regular visitor here, you'll know that they're one of my favourite bands of all time). Loving the song, I was curious enough to seek out the poem, then couldn't get enough of Murray's work.

I also recently read his book Killing The Black Dog, which is excellent – unstintingly honest, and yet warm and generous. He'll be very sadly missed.

From the notebooks of David McComb

I know I've banged on before about my love of The Triffids, but I've only recently come across the official Triffids Facebook page. Just recently it's been featuring pics of David McComb's notebooks, with the original lyrics and ideas for all the songs on Born Sandy Devotional, the album that (I suspect) most fans would regard as their masterpiece. If you don't know it, go and have a listen now.

Even if it wasn't one of my favourite albums, it would be fascinating – McComb seems to have had a very clear idea of exactly how he wanted the album to sound, right from the earliest stages, as well as a vision of lyrically coherent selection of songs. But it's interesting that, reading the most recent post, he wasn't keen on including Personal Things, which for me is one of the highlights of the album, with absolutely great lyrics.

Incidentally, there's also a Facebook page for Love In Bright Landscapes, a proposed film about David McComb and The Triffids that is seeking funding support.

Conversations with Nick Cave

I am, I would have to say, a bit ambivalent about Nick Cave and his music. There was a time, around Let Love In, when I listened to him quite a bit. Looking it up, I've just noticed that not only was ex-Triffid Martyn Casey a member of the Bad Seeds by then, but Triffid head honcho David McComb also contributed backing vocals. But I can't say I've ever wholly gone along with the 'genius' tag he gets so often.

Still, that's irrelevant. This article in The Guardian is what I really wanted to talk about. Cave's responses to his fans feel genuine and generous, and I found this open letter to a grieving fan particularly moving.

I will have to go back and dip into Cave's back catalogue a bit, though. Given how prolific he's been, I've probably missed a lot.

The Triffids - Wide Open Road

Thanks to our recent heatwave, and the promptings of poet Martin Malone, a man even more enamoured of 1980s Australian pop-rock than I am, I've spent large parts of the last week listening to The Triffids and The Go-Betweens. Here are the former, from 1986's masterpiece Born Sandy Devotional. They should have been huge.

Julian Cope vs Bill Drummond

I recently found myself re-reading Julian Cope's autobiographies, Head-On and Repossessed. I think I bought them when they first came out as a single volume in 2000, but after enjoying them a lot at the time, hadn't picked them up since.

Cope's story of the Liverpool punk scene, the glory days of The Teardrop Explodes, and his on-off solo career in the 80s, is never less than entertaining, not least because you're never sure quite how much to believe. Amid all the tales of feuds, drug-fuelled road trips and transformation from teen idol into shamanistic rock god, though, there's lots of interesting stuff on stardom and the workings of the music business, as well as on the nature of creativity. It's a bit of shame he hasn't written a further volume covering his increasingly eccentric solo career since 1990, including his emergence as a megalithic expert.

It's an understatement to say that Ian McCulloch, Dave Balfe and Bill Drummond don't come out of the books too well, so in the interests of a bit of balance (although I am a long-term Cope fan), I've ordered a copy of Drummond's own book, 45. As the arch-scamster who created The KLF, he ought to have a good story to tell.

While searching for it online, I also came across his late 80s (and pre-KLF) solo album The Man. Most copies on there cost £25-plus, but I managed to snap up a used one for £7. It turns out that he was backed on the record by my old favourites The Triffids (minus David McComb), so it's got curiosity value for me, if nothing else. It also contains a song called Julian Cope Is Dead - I wonder where he's coming from with that one?

Vagabond Holes

Some of the music of your youth stays with you because you find you've attached it to significant events, because it's effectively the soundtrack to your memories. Some you keep going back to simply because it's too good not to. With some, of course, both reasons hold true, and that's why The Triffids have been a pretty much permanent fixture with me for the last 20 years (I only cottoned on to them during their last ever UK tour, then worked my way through their back catalogue. Discovering them was a genuinely revelatory moment, too, but that's a story that can wait until another day).

A book, Vagabond Holes: David McComb and the Triffids, will be published by Fremantle Press on September 1st, looking at the life and work of the leader of this wonderfully individual band, who emerged from Perth, Western Australia, in the early 1980s and, relatively briefly, became the darlings of the London music press, before disappearing into undeserved obscurity.

McComb died, aged only 36, in 1999, and the book makes no attempt to tell either his or the band's story in full, but rather to collect a glorious miscellany of memoirs, scholarly essays, memorabilia, short fiction and poetry relating to them both.

The musicians contributing include ex-Triffids Jill Birt, Alsy MacDonald, Graham Lee, Robert McComb and Martyn Casey, plus the likes of Nick Cave, Steve Kilbey, Mick Harvey and (another of my Aussie musical heroes) Robert Forster.

Poet John Kinsella, a Perth contemporary of McComb, contributes a really fine elegy, while my poem Unquiet, one of several I've written over the years inspired by or in some way relating to The Triffids, also features.

A collection of McComb's poetry, Beautiful Waste, is also being published. I've not had chance to have a good look at it yet, but he was always a highly literary lyricist, so it should make good reading.

The books should be available at all good bookstores in Australia and New Zealand, or directly through the press's secure website. It's also hoped that it will be available through Amazon in the UK and USA.

Remembering The Triffids

I've raved at length in the past about my love for 1980s Aussie band The Triffids and their idiosyncratic brand of country rock, so I'm delighted that one of my poems, Unquiet, will appear in a book called Vagabond Holes: David McComb and The Triffids, to be published this September by Fremantle Press. Edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy at the University of Melbourne, it will feature contributions from a range of journalists, academics, musicians and visual artists, plus poets including John Kinsella and Laurie Duggan.

The poem is one of a few I've written that owe something to McComb and his band, whether in terms of inspiration, mood or setting. Another, Hutt River Province, appeared in Troy Town.

But anyway, I recommend the book, and any of the band's albums. Today, with the UK in the grip of a proper winter for once, is as good a time as any to transport yourself to the sun-baked, parched expanses of Western Australia.

UPDATE: I think the band's entire back catalogue has now been remastered and reissued - details here. And, if you read my next post, Andrew Shields' review opens by talking about Hutt River Province.

Swan song

I've raved before on here about The Triffids, the best group ever to come out of Australia (yes, even better than The Go-Betweens). When they appeared on the scene in the mid 80s, they were rightly lauded by the music press, but like so many other great bands of that era, failed to quite cut it commercially, even when they moved from an Aussie indie label to Island.

Their best album, to my mind, was 1986's Born Sandy Devotional, on which they sounded unmistakably Australian (no, scrub that - unmistakably Western Australian). Great, poetic songs about loners and losers, all of them victims of an unforgiving, harsh landscape, with a country-tinged, occasionally epic backing.

By 1989, they were experimenting with drum machines, samples and programming, and although you couldn't describe The Black Swan as an unqualified success (it's far too eclectic, ambitious and thus unfocused for that), it's actually stood the test of time pretty well. And it's just been re-released, complete with loads of bonus tracks (it was originally intended to be a double album), although the best things about it are still probably the 'typical' Triffids tracks - the gorgeously languid Too Hot To Move, the poppy Goodbye Little Boy and the hugely evocative New Year's Greetings. The latter is based on a Les Murray poem, The Widower In The Country, and fully does its source justice.

The album had just come out in May 1989 when I saw them play at Newcastle University. In fact I remember walking past the students' union record shop on a very hot day (we had summers, back then) and hearing Too Hot To Move blasting out, and going straight in to buy the record and tickets for their forthcoming gig.

Live, they were wonderful - intense and brooding one minute, poppy and playful the next. But sadly, that was it. They took a break, never intending it to become permanent, but it did. Singer and main songwriter David McComb released one patchy solo album, and dabbled in other bands, but died in 1999, closing the door on a sadly underrated band.

Do yourself a favour - buy the re-release, buy them all if you can. You won't regret it. In the meantime, here they are in their heyday, performing Wide Open Road.

Ramblings

The usual trawl through the Sunday papers turned up this story. Not sure whether to laugh or cry, really, but there's much more on it over at Poets On Fire.

In the Sunday Times, Stewart Lee (in between comedy commitments, he's long been their champion of all things alternative) gave this review to another re-release from the back catalogue of The Triffids, criminally neglected 80s Aussie country gothic types. I can't vouch for this one, but their 1986 album Born Sandy Devotional is a classic, and there's also a pretty decent compilation called Australian Melodrama.