“When music affects us to tears, seemingly causeless, we weep not from ‘excess of pleasure’; but through excess of an impatient, perpetual sorrow that, as mere mortals, we are as yet in no condition to banquet upon those supernal ecstasies of which the music affords us merely a suggestive and indefinite glimpse.” – Edgar Allan Poe
There was much rejoicing in the Revelatorium when we learned that Nick Tosches is at work on a new novel entitled The Book Of Going Forth By Day. He’s posted a sample or two in the blog section of his myspace (see blogroll). On the same site you’ll find audio of Johnny Depp reading the opening section of In The Hand Of Dante.
Here’s Steve Earle (no mean writer himself) raving about the man in an interview we did last September:
“Nick Tosches is the one guy that started out writing about rock ‘n’ roll that became a great novelist. I think Jon Landau could’ve (too), he was that good, but he stopped writing. Probably my second favourite book of the last 20 years, after (Michael Ondaatje’s) Coming Through Slaughter, is Tosches’s In The Hand Of Dante. That’s a mind-blowing fucking book. I can always read whatever Tosches writes and I’m really glad he writes a lot. Some of the stuff I don’t go around recommending to people, but In The Hand Of Dante…Of course he’s gonna lose women about ten pages into it – he starts the book with his gun to the head of a girl with his dick in his mouth, and it’s all over with most women at that point, and that’s unfortunate, ’cos that’s a ridiculously original piece of work. It’s funny, we’re kinda neighbours now, and I bump into him now and again. It’s a very big deal, I mean, I live in Greenwich Village and I ran into Sam Shepard and some pretty impressive people, but Tosches, I almost got run over one time ’cos I saw him. And I’m an Emmett Miller freak, so Where Dead Voices Gather is one of my favourites, a classic example of journalism and fiction simultaneously.”
Sam Shepard’s Beckett-esque Western lament Kicking A Dead Horse, starring Stephen Rea, just opened in the Public Theatre in New York. Might stir up memories for anyone who saw Mr Shepard play a few tunes at the Cobblestone in Stoneybatter last year.
It’s a beautiful loop. Musician and producer Daniel Lanois originally envisioned his film Here Is What Is as a documentary about the making of his latest solo album, but the record in question eventually became the soundtrack to the film.
“I wanted to make a record, and a friend of mine said, ‘Why don’t you bring a camera into the studio and look at the situation through a lens?’” Lanois explained over tea in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin last April. “So I said okay, and that opening shot with Garth Hudson playing the piano intro came to us very early on. On the strength of that I decided it seemed like a reasonable idea, and we kept moving from city to city for the purposes of my work. Every town we went to, we caught a little something, and it just started adding up to a nice film. Quite late in the project there was that sit-down with Eno, where we just had a little bit of an exchange, and by slotting in those philosophical moments it just kind of tied everything together.”
As Lanois attests, making a film is an exponentially more challenging enterprise than recording an album, even if your client list includes Bob Dylan, U2, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson and the Neville Brothers.
“It was very expensive to make, to feed people and put them in hotels, travelling and everything, but I’m proud of it,” he says. “Is it a perfect film? I’m not sure about that, but it can at least hold its head up in terms of having brought quality to the table.”
That quality is evident in the pace of the film. Patient, unhurried, at times it evokes Wim Wenders’ aversion to fast and ostentatious edits.
“Some of the young idealistic record listeners that I know, they don’t want to see fast edits anymore,” asserts Lanois. “They’re curious about the authenticity of something, and to slow the pace down a little bit. It doesn’t mean slow the rhythm down, but just slow the pace of the servings. I wish I had a nice uninterrupted film of the movement of Michael Jackson’s feet. We never see him dance, we see the editing room dance.”
Featuring cameos from the aforementioned Band organ grinder Hudson and Brian Eno, plus Billy Bob Thornton, Sinead O’Connor and drummer Brian Blade, Here Is What Is ventures deep into the music, depicting the recording process in graphic detail. There are a lot of close-ups of hands: on piano keys, on the pedal steel, on the mixing desk.
“Yeah, a bit of a hands theme,” Lanois chuckles. “It started with Garth. And Adam, the guy working the camera, also shot close-ups of my hands on the steel guitar, which is a very complex instrument, and to see how it’s done is fascinating enough to show for a while in itself, so why not?”
At this point, Lanois leans in and examines the interviewer’s fingers. “Can I see that ring?” he says. “What is that?”
It’s an antique ring inset with a blue stone, given to me by a writer friend who maintains a side business selling vintage jewellery. She trawls the net for interesting pieces, winnows through them, evaluates their worth and sells them online.
“In a way that’s what I do with music,” Lanois says. “I select the best riffs, the best lyric ideas, the best titles, the best grooves, pull them out of a day’s work and say, ‘Let’s sweep everything else under the rug and present our best wares.’ It’s incredible what happens through a day, and often times the most signiificant moments will not be noticed because people might think they’ve got bigger fish to fry. But sometimes that one little sliver of delight will be enough to build a whole record on top of.”
One of the more interesting sequences in Here Is What Is illustrates how Lanois approaches mixing as performance, playing the desk like an instrument. Watching him manipulate the various elements of a track like ‘Bladesteel’ is akin to observing a painter at work.
“It’s something that I develop, just trying to tap into my musical gift,” he says. “Not every person at the console has an ability to understand the positioning of ingredients and is able to move the faders in a musical fashion. It’s usually thought of as a technical job, but I like a set-up that forces me to respond to what’s coming up in the arrangement and make it sound more dangerous, or give it a stadium sound, so I see every little bend in the road as an opportunity to present the ingredients in a slightly different fashion.”
In other words, the mixing becomes a much more intuitive and ‘live’ process.
“Absolutely. I think the bedrock of it is it exists as an emotional performance. I usually don’t use computers for mixing, but even if I do, I make my foundation a performance, and then I might add a little something to it, change the vocal performance or the harmonies if I didn’t get that quite right. A lot of mixers start with one sound at a time and build it up, and consequently you might end up with a lovely edifice, but it might not be a place you want to go into.”
One of Lanois’ other specialities is generating ambient sounds of no discernible origin and using them to suggest drama or danger in the mix. These are usually distortions or manipulations of fragments sourced from the artists’ performances.
“I like the idea of, as I said in the film, grabbing a little sample from the available ingredients,” he considers, “almost like taking a photograph of the cloth that you’ve chosen to make a suit out of, and then you just blow up a certain portion of it, and maybe that becomes a pocket. It’s not just a sewn-on pocket from another batch of fabric of a different colour or a different weave, you actually use what’s already there and put it on the item.”
So it’s like a DNA swab or a skin graft lifted from the host body instead of imported from a foreign agency. An organic approach to a synthetic process.
“Yes. And I believe listeners feel that connection, sort of a way of maximising what you have rather than superimposing a bunch of other options, which is the tendency that people have, because there are so many wonderful tools available in making records and mixing. You can try 50 different boxes until you find the one you like, but we have to remember that some of our favourite Jamaican records, the great reggae records, they might only have had one black box, and they put everything through it. There’s some kind of wisdom to that, because nothing lives in isolation, everything is related, it comes from one effect. So I still like to do that, put everything through one echo box.”
Lanois believes that artists can become paralysed by options, and often get the best results through consciously imposing limitations upon themselves, thus encouraging innovation within those confines.
“It can happen even with people,” he says. “There’s something nice about deciding on a group of folks you want to work with. It’s like a group of friends around one table having a great night, and the stories keep getting better and better, and you walk out of the situation and think, ‘Wow, that was amazing!’ You didn’t have to fly in additional comics – the people at the table were funny in their own lives. They were already ridiculous enough!”
Is he a tough taskmaster in the studio?
“I’m tough on myself, and that becomes contagious. When people feel that level of commitment from me they expect it of themselves. It only works if you’re willing to put in the time and the hours, if you’ve high expectations of yourself and are pushing yourself – not in a bad way or anything, but in a committed way – then the rest of the room will naturally respond to that level of commitment, so it raises the standard of work done.”
Is it easier to work with musicians he’s known for a long time?
“What’s nice about working with people you’ve worked with before is you’ve gotten the small talk out of the way and you can pretty much get to the melodies and the lyric and the grooves. I mean, I like a fresh face, I made a record with Willie Nelson and I hadn’t met him before, and I like that record, Teatro. Four days it took, in my old shop in California. That was my best shop, an old theatre, fantastic. There’s something about not having any windows. There was a little popcorn area where you could get a soft drink and sundries, but when you walk into the theatre, it’s a very dark old cinema, and there’s something to not being aware of the day or the disappearance of it, just a timelessness.
“Maybe it has to do with Bob Dylan’s title Time Out Of Mind,” he continues. “I like the idea of working in a dark space, more of a closet. The house that I use in Los Angeles is a beautiful villa, built in the 1920s, fantastic rooms throughout the whole house, and downstairs it has this little servant’s kitchenette, a counter and a sink and shelves all the way around the room, a little octagon shape, and there’s something very sweet about that room, it’s almost my favourite room. I’ve been fantasising about setting up a little tabletop studio and making it so that I don’t have too many rooms to flirt with.”
Location, Lanois says, is a crucial element in the character of any record. One can’t imagine the Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon or Dylan’s Oh Mercy having been recorded in anywhere but New Orleans.
“Geography plays a big part in record-making,” he says. “My visit to New Orleans initially was just about education really, I wanted to hear those parade bands and go to some of those clubs to hear some of the Saturday night dance bands. At that time I used to enjoy listening to (Zydeco master) Rockin’ Dopsie, who played this tiny place called The Make Believe, it had been a store at one time and was turned into a little club, and the drummer’s throne sat right in the storefront window, he had his back to the street, and you could look in the window and check out the drummer.”
Lanois is just as effusive about the U2 sessions he and Eno attended in Fez, Morocco, last year.
“I had never been there,” he says. “The Medina was strikingly ancient. I was humbled by how people ran their little shops, these tiny, tiny hovels in the wall, there was a shoemaker in the Medina in Fez, and he just sat while he worked, his little shop was not tall enough to stand in, so he was crouched in this little hole in the wall. If you wanted your shoes fixed you just peeked into the hole and handed him your shoes and he’d mend them. He’d probably crawl out of there a couple of times a day to get himself a cup of tea, but while he was working, that was his little cobbler’s bench, a hole in the wall. It’s very funny, because you enter the Medina and two minutes in, you’re lost. And it immediately becomes like Spinal Tap: ‘Wait a minute – is this the right way?’ And the walls are really tall, and you can see the locals sitting up there laughing.
“But more important to the geography is the setting up of the studio specific to a record. So if you bring in equipment and unload the cases and set up in a room, the people involved in that record are going to feel it’s something special to them. I think that in itself is a good mood-setter, you’re not walking into a generic place. We made the bulk of The Joshua Tree in Adam Clayton’s house, and that was a fantastic room with a plank floor, had a fantastic sound, my favourite kind of room really.”
Does he ever get cabin fever while making an album?
“I’ve talked about it – it’s like being in a submarine.”
Das Boot is often cited as the film most analogous to being on tour.
“Yeah right, on tour especially, oh my god. A solo tour, maybe that’s my next journey. I’ve been designing a travel system, a complete touring system, that is carry-on. Here’s how you carry your personal belongings: you modify a long trenchcoat, all the way to the ankle, with a lot of pockets. And you carry all your clothing and toiletries and personal items in the coat because they can’t tell you to not take a coat on an airplane. Six t-shirts, six underwear, six socks, I wear the pair of pants I got on, one pair of shoes and one hat.
“And with regards to the guitar and the amp, I carry a viola case – the airlines are used to seeing classical musicians so they turn a little bit of a blind eye to it – and I modify a Fender Duo-Sonic guitar, Fender’s tiny short-scale guitar, and I cut the body off of it with a jig-saw, so you’re only left with the neck and the mounting area of the neck, and that fits into the viola case. And then I put a little battery powered amplifier and speaker into the viola case. That is my entire touring equipment. That way you never lose your luggage and you’re always looking good.”
Reports that the Mark Twain museum in Hartford, Connecticut is in dire financial trouble coincided with this reader’s revisiting of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, inspired at least in part by George Saunders’s great essay ‘The United States Of Huck’ published in The Braindead Megaphone several months ago.
There’s no bad time to get reacquainted with Huck, the backwoodsy wild boy with the heart of, if not gold, then pig iron. Finn couldn’t be anything but American, and more than that, a southerner, but he obeys no borders, and has reincarnated in novels from all territories over the last 120 odd years.
The first thing the reader notices about the novel is its opening lines are so unorthodox they’re almost post-modern:“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”
Such is the book’s influence on skewed first-person narratives (especially those related by juvenile delinquents), that almost every writer attempting a Huck Redux, regardless of creed or nationality, seems compelled to forge a humdinger of an opening line that encapsulates his creation’s vernacular, character, and predicament.
In Dara McCluskey’s Patrick McCabe documentary Blood Relatives, which aired as part of RTE’s ArtsLives series the other week, you can hear the ghost of Huck echoed in the voices of the novelist’s wife, family, and fellow writers as they repeat the opening line from The Butcher Boy: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.”
If the barefooted, pipe-smoking runaway’s argot inspires mantras, his spirit is a manitou. He’s there at the start of Iain Banks macabre highlands tale The Wasp Factory (“I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.” ). He’s Niall Griffiths’ wild colonial boy Ianto from Sheepshagger, a feral Welsh urchin driven to wreak terrible vengeance on big city weekenders who have turned his former homestead into a holiday retreat.
He’s in Nick Cave’s novel And The Ass Saw The Angel (Cave also swiped the opening holler of “Looky yonder” in ‘Tupelo’ from the part where Huck and Jim encounter a capsized boat on their Mississippi odyssey). He’s in Russell Hoban’s 1979 post-apocalyptic fable Riddley Walker:“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly been the last wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time before him nor I aint lookin to see none agen.”
Huck knows no gender either. Read how pragmatically and unselfconsciously he dresses up in bonnet and skirts in order to glean intelligence about the bounty hunt for his scapegoated slave friend Jim, and one thinks of the half-breed bisexual berdache boy in Tom Spanbauer’s The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon. But the most explicit literary homage to the novel was probably Davis Grubb’s classic 1953 tale Night Of The Hunter, adapted for cinema by Charles Laughton.
Huckleberry Finn is a much darker book than it lets on. It’s also flawed and problematic, especially in its portrayal of Jim as an impotent man-child, and the controversial ending. But it’s still a hell of a story. They’ve tried to ban it and and burn it as recently as the 1990s, when the American Library Association ranked it the fifth most frequently challenged (in the sense of attempting to ban) book in the US that decade. Some things never change. On the book’s publication in 1885, The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee famously decided to exclude it from their collection, denouncing it as, “the veriest trash… dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”
The following first appeared in the Sunday Business Post…
Tobias Wolff has written memoirs that cross over into novelistic terrain (This Boy’s Life, In Pharaoh’s Army), short novels that merge with memoir (The Barracks Thief, Old School), and, as a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University for 17 years, has mentored such luminaries as George Saunders, Jay McInerney and Alice Sebold. Despite this, the Eng-lit history books are most likely to garland him as a master of the American short story.
Wolff once declared that his fidelity to the short story form can be attributed to his belief that it’s more forgiving than the 300-page haul. He was being cute. If the novel is sometimes defined as a long work of fiction with an inherent flaw, the short story is, if anything, even more exacting, requiring economy, precision engineering, and the sort of lateral leaps of faith that lift a yarn from the ordinary to the transformative in the final act.
Almost every tale in Our Story Begins, a collection of his finest short fiction plus ten new titles, testifies to Wolff’s virtuosity, establishing character and scenario in the opening pages, quickly building narrative momentum, and culminating in a moment of unexpected satori. One pictures a chess master at work, meticulously plotting moves that will end in an audacious sweep of the board.
He might have been tagged as a dirty realist in the ’80s, but Wolff’s parables frequently enter the realm of the strange and metaphysical. He revels in his characters’ capacity to surprise themselves and the reader, freeze-framing stalled souls at the point where circumstances force them to commit life-changing acts that are by turns bizarre, reprehensible, and sometimes heroic.
For example, the coked-up ’70s swinger party in ‘Leviathan’ breaks wide open in its second half to admit a redemptive fable about a handicapped boy and a malevolent whale. ‘In the Garden of North American Martyrs’ snapshots a mild academic who unexpectedly harangues faculty suits with graphic descriptions of the torture of Jesuit priests by Iroquois tribesmen. ‘Bullet in the Brain’ tips its hat to Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ and anticipates David Foster Wallace’s ‘Good Old Neon’ by charting a cynical book reviewer’s moment-of-death flashback in almost cinematic prose.
And if many of his stories are morality plays about stupid white men with access to guns and blunt objects (‘Hunters In The Snow’, ‘Soldier’s Joy’, ‘The Chain’), or one-act dilemma-dramas in which rogue males do the wrong thing and think themselves into feeling good about it (‘The Rich Brother’, ‘Desert Breakdown, 1968’), Wolff can also evoke the aching tendernesses of puberty and adolescence (‘Flyboys’, ‘Two Boys and a Girl’, ‘Smorgasbord’).
He’s also funny as hell when the mood takes him. ‘Next Door’ manages a satirical riff on picket fence politics that incorporates a pyjama farce worthy of Doris and Rock directed by Ang Lee:
“I don’t mean for it to happen but before long old Florida begins to stiffen up on me. I put my arms around my wife. I move my hands up onto the Rockies, then on down the plains, heading south.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘No geography. Not tonight.’”
Wolff’s new stories have their work cut out matching his greatest hits, but there are several contenders for future classic status, all of them preoccupied with separation and mortality (‘Her Dog’, ‘Down To Bone’, the haunting ‘Nightingale’). The reader walks away from Our Story Begins with a vague but persistent sense of aftermath, an unsureness as to whether we’ve heard some of these tales in a bar, dreamed them, or have somehow known them all our lives.
Wolff was in the country recently doing press for Our Story Begins. There’ll be an interview in a forthcoming Hot Press, but while we were talking, he registered the titles of his top five favourite short stories with the Revelatorium’s chief librarian. Enjoy.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army opened in the US last week. We’re big fans of Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone). Here’s a New York Times piece that allows a peek inside the director’s sketch book.
The three-way co-operative relationship between Del Toro and his fellow Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón (Children Of Men) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams) is a beautiful thing. Take a look at this Charlie Rose Show special.
Joe Coleman specialises in freakshow art, rockabilly iconography and general PT Barnum weird Americana. His style is the visual equivalent of Katherine Dunn’s great novel Geek Love. Our favourite of his works is ‘The Man Of Sorrows’. Part the canvas flaps and take a peek at:
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.
