Triffids pedal steel player Graham Lee talks to LAUREN ZORIC about the legacy of his friend, bandmate and one of Australia’s great songwriters the late David McComb.

February 2 will mark the 10th anniversary of the untimely death of David McComb, singer and songwriter from The Triffids. He would have turned 47 this year. The band took a hiatus at the end of 1989, and McComb joined various constellations of musicians for projects including his one solo album, Love of Will (1994); early Blackeyed Susans performances and recordings; and The Red Ponies, his backing band that toured Europe in 1994. However, his worsening ill health – a 1996 heart transplant and subsequent complications – made it difficult for him to regain his musical momentum, although he did complete a degree in art history at the University of Melbourne.

Since 2006, Graham Lee, the band’s pedal steel player and now custodian of The Triffids’ legacy, has been involved in the painstaking work of raking through the considerable McComb/Triffids archives to compile rarities, re-master the band’s recordings and repackage the albums with extensive liner notes and photographs. The reissues (released in UK/Europe by Domino Recordings and Liberation in Australia) stirred up some long overdue Triffids reappraisal and rightful recognition. As did the SBS Great Australian Albums documentary series, which featured Born Sandy Devotional.

The Triffids were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2008; a documentary, Love In Bright Landscapes, is in the works; and at least one book, Bleddyn Butcher’s Save What You Can: The Day of The Triffids and The Long Night of David McComb is scheduled for publication in August. Academics Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy also appear to be writing “a book on the music of David McComb”.

Following a fans-instigated 2006 live commemoration featuring all the surviving Triffids members and close associates in Belgium, the 2008 Sydney Festival put on The Triffids and Friends Play the Songs of David McComb: A Secret in The Shape of a Song. This event is now premiering in Melbourne at Hamer Hall on January 29, and then on to the Perth Festival from February 20-22.

Lee met McComb and The Triffids for the first time in Sydney around 1984 after being introduced by mutual friend James Paterson, then a man about town in the well-regarded inner city act JFK and the Cuban Crisis. At the time, Lee was more of a country and bluegrass musician, being a dobro (acoustic lap guitar) player, and had moved to Sydney two years before. He grew up on the Sunshine Coast and later lived in Brisbane for 10 years.

Lee has been the driving force behind the reissues and live performances and also operates thetriffids.com. I have lost countless hours here, pawing through a huge body of McComb and Triffids background material, including a ton of unreleased MP3s, complete documentation of the McComb juvenilia (reams of cassette recordings from the late ’70s/early ’80s) and writings.

This is an edited version of a chat we had in December 2008. I would have talked for much longer, but Lee is a busy man.

Were you courted to become part of The Triffids?
Dave was the mastermind of the band in more ways than simply the songwriting. He always wanted to do things a little bit differently and was constantly on the look out for people who could form part of his aural landscape, and I guess I was a bit unusual. And he did have a lot of respect for the pure areas of music such as country and bluegrass and soul, although he didn’t actually aspire for his music to fit into any of those genres. A couple of weeks later, I got an invite around to the house that The Triffids shared at Lawson’s Square in Redfern, and told to bring my instrument with me. We promptly sat around on the floor with a ghetto blaster in the middle recording some songs. Those songs ended up being recorded in a slightly more professional way and released on Lawson’s Square Infirmary, and that’s where I started with them.

Did you think twice and wonder – where is this taking me? Or were you ready for something to come along?
I was ready for something to happen. I was one of many musicians in Sydney at the time playing the odd gig here and there and I had no real ties, I didn’t have a job and I was well and truly open to any suggestion of adventure, and musical adventure even better.

So that was around ’84…
Yeah, we recorded that Maxi EP, a few days before The Triffids left for Perth and thence to the UK. And I didn’t hear from anybody. I might have got a card from Dave maybe, but that was the trip when they first made a splash, they got a support slot with Echo and the Bunnymen on their UK tour, and came back with all this unexpected success. It was shortly after they came back that I got a call from Dave asking me to play on a little east coast tour, which I did. They went back to the UK in ’85 and I went with them.

“The law, particularly in the recording studio, was that everything had to be extraordinary … You couldn’t trundle out any tired cliches and get away with it.”

What are your impressions of living in London at that time in the mid ’80s?
We didn’t really get out much – we didn’t have any money. Even then, London wasn’t a very good place to be if you didn’t have any money – the tube stopped running at about 11, and you’d go out somewhere, drink three quid pints and be having to catch a cab home … [so] we really didn’t get out much. We didn’t mix much with local musicians, we mixed a little bit with the Australian crew. At that time we were around Hammersmith, Ladbroke Grove, Westbourne Park, and we’d generally have a couple of houses, and there’d be us, members of Hot Records, our manager Sally Collins, and we’d all be crammed in there.

We didn’t get paid much, but we were surviving and able to make records. That’s where most of the money would go, because we didn’t have a deal at that time. Born Sandy was paid for by ourselves. The Triffids were quite a hard working band as far as touring went, and we could actually make money from touring. Whenever we came back to Australia we’d tour heavily and make some money.

What kind of crowds are we talking about in Australia at that point?
We’d play like, the Paddington Town Hall – that was about 1000 people. So they weren’t small crowds. Sometimes people get the idea that we were successful overseas, but we weren’t successful at home. And while it’s true that we weren’t on the level of The Sunnyboys or any of those big bands of the time, we had a modicum of success and plenty of people knew who The Triffids were, but it seemed to us that we would never hit the mainstream, and to be a cult band in Australia is a far less finically viable thing that being a cult band in the UK. It’s just a bigger market.

Would you say you were a consistent live band, or did it fluctuate?
We were pretty consistent. We did pride ourselves on having a good show. Dave in particular would be mortified if he felt he had personally let people down. He really took it very seriously, his role as a front man as well, terribly seriously. And he did it brilliantly.

What was Dave like in those days? He was obviously a very emotional person, but was he moody?
In some ways he did have quite a weight on his shoulders – he was the songwriter, he was the front man – he had all that on his shoulders so I don’t blame him for the occasional moody outburst, but he was also very kind. He was an amazing correspondent, he was always sending postcards to people, he always remembered your birthday, twice a year he’d prepare these compilation cassettes he’d send out to all his friends, he’d dub off 30 or 40 copies, make up these special covers. I’ve still got all those tapes. It’s great to put on sometimes. He had an amazing interest in music of all kinds. He was constantly surprising you with what he’d discovered. But he wasn’t your tortured artist.

But the music, and the lyrics, might suggest otherwise…
But he was able to function as a normal human being. He was obviously far more talented than most normal human beings, but he was a friend. He was our friend as well as a songwriter, and he was a friend to many people.

You’ve spent a lot of time immersed in those albums of late. Do you wish there was anything you’d done at the time that might have changed The Triffids’ course?
I often think of what may have happened. In the early ’90s, Dave actually hadn’t given up on the prospect of The Triffids playing again. In fact, we almost did in ’94 when the compilation Australian Melodrama came out and we nearly did an Australian tour to support that album. But that’s when Dave started to get sick, so it didn’t happen. But reading some of the postcards he was sending me in the early ’90s, he’d say things like, “I’ve been writing all these songs, and strangely enough, they don’t seem to fit my solo album, in fact, they sound more like Triffids songs.” I think he really wanted to get the solo album off his chest, so to speak, but he did come to the realisation that The Triffids were a really good vehicle for the majority of his songs. And possibly had his health not deteriorated so dramatically and quickly, we might have got together and things could have been different.

And I often also think, had we been touring today, things could have been different too, because it wouldn’t be such a slog with the way communications are today. We would have been much more easily able to maintain a career without moving to the UK, and one of the reasons that the whole thing ground to a halt is that we’d been on the road for so long, and we’d been apart from our friends and families and living out of suitcases, and it got a bit too much. We all needed a break.

People talk about how Born Sandy Devotional is the quintessential Australian album as it evokes the sense of space, desolation, isolation. Do you think that your distance from Australia intensified your feelings of Australianness?
Possibly. It’s sort of hard to say. I’d say that 50 percent of the album was written in London on that trip in ’84, and 50 percent in Australia. A lot of it was written on tour.

David had said that he was very focussed on writing songs specifically for an album, as previous releases had been a hotchpotch of songs glued together.
That’s exactly right. And that’s what he did. If you go through his notebooks he was constantly making lists of song titles and he had various versions of titles that had the word “devotional” in it. There would be lists of songs and he’d throw this one out, put this one in, be working on another one. It was a masterplan and the theme was unrequited love.

It’s such a spooky record. ‘Lonely Stretch’, ‘Tarrilup Bridge’… a shiver really does go up and down your spine listening to these songs.
He was quite a fan of Flannery O’Connor and some of the gothic writers from the Deep South. And that comes through in ‘Chicken Killer’ and ‘Tarrilup Bridge’. There’s not much cheerful news on the album! Most of the characters aren’t terribly happy. There is a small amount of resolution, but a lot of mystery. Dave always said if a song didn’t have any mystery, then for him it wasn’t a successful song. And he certainly had plenty of that in his life and in his music.

So is the reissues process finished now?
No, not quite. Apart from the fact that if they let me I could keep going on for years! There’s nothing more in the way of official releases, but there’s a huge amount of stuff to delve into. We haven’t done an updated “best of” either. We should possibly do a best of that isn’t for aficionados, but for newcomers to the band’s music. And there’s the deluxe rarities pack and the DVD. There’s a fair bit of video, plenty of film clips.

Dave and Alsy [MacDonald, drums] used to hang out with filmmakers and artists etc, from the very beginning. They would make film clips on a little Super 8 camera. There’s film clips for most of the really early singles, a fair bit of on tour stuff, TV shows. There’s a particular one I’ve got a very, very bad quality copy of – we went over to Rome and played on the Italian version of the Midday Show, and we were on it for three days running! It was just a bizarre experience and I’d love to have a good quality copy of that.

What about the huge number of early songs that were only recorded to cassette? Is there much we should hear on those?
I have master copies of all the cassettes, in fact they are on display down at [Melbourne’s] The Arts Centre at the moment in an exhibition. Some of that stuff should appear at some time. There’s 75 songs there before Dave ever went into a recording studio.

Do you see The Triffids influence in any other bands now?
Nothing direct, but people say they’re influenced by us, so I believe them, but it’s sometimes hard for me to hear it. I got sent a band called The Holy Sea. I can’t hear it, but I know the songwriter is a big fan of Dave’s. I’ve been listening to a band from Perth called Empty State, and Adrian the singer-songwriter for that band is a huge Triffids fan, and he’s only 17 years old. I can’t hear the direct influence, but I really like his music.

The Triffids body of work sets the bar pretty high.
Yes, yes it does.

Did David push the band to excel?
Yes, yes he did. The law, particularly in the recording studio, was that everything had to be extraordinary. He really wanted everything to be just amazing. You couldn’t trundle out any tired cliches and get away with it.

That must have been wonderful.
He was always bubbling with production ideas. It would have been great to hear him actually produce somebody. He had such an amazing knowledge of music and the way it’s made – not theoretical – but like, when we were getting ready to record any of our albums, he’d make hugely detailed production notes that would list half a dozen particular parts of songs that we should listen to, to get some idea of the kind of atmosphere he wanted for a song. And you can pick it if you knew, but you wouldn’t from listening to the final Triffids song.

So it must have been incredibly useful to have all those notes for the remixing and remastering.
Oh, absolutely. Particularly for Nick Mainsbridge who remixed Treeless Plain and Brendan Calloway who remixed In The Pines, it was fantastic to have Dave’s notes. They really had to put themselves in a very precarious situation trying to give an updated version of those albums without turning them into something completely different, the risk of getting the balance totally wrong between the present, future and the past. But I think they did a brilliant job.

Do you think Dave knew what he was doing as he was creating this huge archive of background material?
I certainly do think he knew what he was doing, yeah. If you read the teenage notebooks which are also on display down at the Arts Centre, and there’s some on the website as well, you see the way that he wrote about the band as a 17-year-old, and it was quite obvious that he knew that at some stage people would be reading these notebooks. I think he did know.

Do you remember where you were when you heard about David’s death?
Yes, I was at home. I’d just got a dial-up internet connection, so I was online, and people couldn’t contact me. My friend Steve Miller, who is going to be the emcee for these forthcoming shows, he came round and said, I guess you haven’t heard … And he was right, I hadn’t heard. I remember it very clearly.

A SECRET IN THE SHAPE OF A SONG

Thursday, January 29
Hamer Hall, Melbourne, VIC

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