Most Fridays after school we’d meet at my friend Noel’s house to watch The Tube on Channel 4. One afternoon in the spring of 1986, a ragtag band from Perth called The Triffids shambled onstage. They had a pedal steel player and a violinist and a cellist with bleached white hair, and the lead singer was an intense-looking young man, kind of rough but elegant in appearance, pitted cheeks, swept-back coxcomb, black-and-white polka-dot shirt. His name was David McComb, and he was 24 years old. He had blazing eyes and sang in a rich, deep baritone, like a young Scott Walker, only with the soul of country and western singer. It was, more than anything, the voice of someone who’d lived beyond his years. A young man with a long past.

The song was a slow, groaning torch tune called ‘Stolen Property’, and its heavy airs – vapours rather – seemed to echo up from deep wells of drama and heartache. Drums clattered, basslines brooded, strings keened – the song went on for ages, crescendo piling upon decrescendo. It spoke of unrequited love, of faithlessness both perpetrated and suffered. We were too young to fully understand its gloomy, doomed airs. It made us want to grow up fast and have our hearts broken in life-or-death affairs, to drink with style and wear shabby suits and drive all night and stay in fleabag motels.

Noel had the foresight to stick a tape in the VCR as soon as the band started playing. All summer, we must have played that video until the chrome flaked off, and when The Triffids’ second full length album Born Sandy Devotional was released, we taped the songs Dave Fanning aired on his evening show until we could afford to get the bus to Dublin and buy the record.

The album peaked with a mini-epic called ‘Wide Open Road’. In it, the narrator drives across a great agoraphobic expanse, eaten alive with jealousy, imagining the woman he loves with another man. “Well the drums rolled off in my forehead,” McComb sings, triggering a military tattoo from Alsy MacDonald, “And the guns went off in my chest / Remember carrying that, baby, just for you / Crying in the wilderness”. The scale of the song is enormous, a sort of alternative Badlands in which Sissy Spacek abandons Martin Sheen: “I lost track of my friends, I lost my kin / Cut them off as limbs / I drove out over the flatlands / Hunting down you and him… So tell me how do you think it feels / Sleeping by yourself / When the one you love, the one you love / Is with someone else?”

The song’s narrator camps out at night and tries to sleep, tormented by memories, and in the morning he gets up again and drives red-eyed and wired across vast tracts of outback. Who knows what he’ll do if he finds them? Kill them both maybe. Or just walk away when he sees that his beloved’s new love is true. He won’t know for sure until it happens, so he keeps going, the days becoming a blur of tin shacks and gas stations and one horse towns and cattle holdings and roadside bars, a big empty sky overhead, a desolate road under the wheels.

This restless, tormented character crops up in every song on the album. In ‘The Seabirds’ the loner grows sick of himself, and, in thrall to some obscure death wish, announces a trial separation from his lover and spends one last night in a motel with a stranger who needles him: “What’s the matter now lover boy / Has the cat run off with your tongue / Are you drinking to get maudlin / Or drinking to get numb?” The man doesn’t answer, just continues drinking through the night and when morning breaks he walks to the sea and calls out for the birds to take him, he’s no longer afraid to die, but even the starved gulls won’t touch his body.

Then, in ‘Estuary Bed’, a man eaten with grief or guilt hides in his shack wringing his hands, listening to the country songs on the tinny radio and the sounds of children returning from the beach, Shakespeare resonating in his head: “Sleep no more, sleep is dead”.

We meet this man again in ‘Personal Things’, only now he’s Lady Macbeth afflicted with an obsessive-compulsion born of remorse, trying to scrub the stains off his hands (“You can rub it off / You can scrape it off / You can drink it off / You can burn it off”), reciting lists of revenant objects, a fetishist’s catalogue of exhibits, a book of evidence made up of “a red scarf that she wore, a rinse in her hair, a blister, an undersized shoe / Her name on a tag that can’t be washed off, a place at a table for two”. Insomniac and amnesia-stricken, he can’t forget what can’t be remembered, and this disremembering won’t let him rest.

Maybe he’s brooding on the girl in ‘Tarrilup Bridge’, a woozy waltz, murder mystery and descendent of ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ sung by a ghost (the voice of keyboardist Jill Birt) who packs her bag, leaves a note on the fridge and drives into the river, by accident or intention we don’t know. Then, at the peak of the album’s third act, comes ‘Stolen Property’, the point where we came in, a blues song for broken souls who have no one to tell them it’s all going to be alright, so they make do by comforting themselves with thrown trick voices (“Pick yourself up,” the wretch of a narrator barks at himself, “hold yourself up to the light”). But nobody’s fooling anybody. It’s not getting better, and it never will.

But at the end of it all, ‘Tender Is The Night (The Long Fidelity)’ is a chink of light in the darkness, a woman’s frail voice pleading, “Baby let’s go out tonight / It will all turn out alright I’m sure / Don’t want to drink at home again tonight / So let’s go out.” We don’t know what the man’s answer is, whether he continues to punish himself – and her – or whether he puts the bottle down and walks out the door and into the daylight. The thought occurs now that with this song David McComb was writing his own epitaph: “I knew him as a gentle young man / I cannot say for sure the reasons for his decline / We watched him fade before our very eyes / And years before his time.”

Born Sandy Devotional was one of the most original and ambitious records of the decade, but it didn’t sell. The Triffids went on to record a couple more landlocked and sea-serenaded masterpieces, Calenture and The Black Swan, before disbanding. Bassist Martyn P Casey joined the Bad Seeds. McComb formed The Black Eyed Susans and struggled with drink and drugs for another decade before his body gave out in 1999. The band’s pedal steel player ‘Evil’ Graham Lee now tends The Triffids’ legacy and curates their website.

In 2006, Domino instigated a sequence of remastered reissues of the band’s back catalogue. First up was Born Sandy Devotional, and hearing it again was like meeting a teenage flame after 20 years have passed; you fear the encounter in case the ineffable thing she had is gone, and you fear even more that it hasn’t, and you walk in the room and there she is, more compelling than ever. Miss Born Sandy Devotional.

There the story ends, but for a bittersweet postscript. Last Tuesday, July 1st, The Triffids were at last inducted into the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Hall of Fame.

Hallelujah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSMF3h7LE2Q