Features
Bleddyn Butcher On The Triffids: Part 1
By Aaron Curran
On the anniversary of David McComb’s death, AARON CURRAN talks to famed writer and photographer Bleddyn Butcher about his new Triffids biography, some 10 years in the writing. Part two Monday.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Whether or not you recognise the name Bleddyn Butcher, odds are that you're familiar with the photographs he's taken. Working on staff at NME in London through the 1980s, Bleddyn captured iconic shots of many musicians of the period, including Joe Strummer, Tom Waits, Billy Bragg, U2 and Mark E. Smith. He also covered a wave of Australian bands that – like him – had made the journey to England in search of new audiences and creative fulfillment. Some of the most memorable photographs of The Birthday Party, The Go-Betweens, The Moodists, and The Triffids were taken by Butcher and his work has received continued acclaim, with his portfolio of Nick Cave being particularly renowned.
Bleddyn has recently published a biography of David McComb and The Triffids, some 10 years in the writing, called Save What You Can: The Day of The Triffids (released independently by his own Treadwater Press). With Butcher, McComb and most of the band all growing up in Western Australia, they had much in common and became close friends (“We were all drunks who loved music,” he quips). Bleddyn has augmented his significant personal knowledge of The Triffids with thorough research to produce an intimate and revealing read, written with insight, love and respect for its subject.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
Save What You Can is an inspired and exhaustive book which details both the day-to-day life of David and the band, as well as a song-by-song overview of pretty much everything written, recorded or played by The Triffids. The research you've done is commendable.
Well, thanks, that was always the plan. The whole purpose of the book was to honour and preserve [David's] memory and to do that it needed the detail about his songs … I do need to thank Pat Monaghan, he gave me the most support other than my wife, his recollections and assistance in scouring for details were invaluable, and he was witness to the band's development in Perth in the early days…
There wasn't that much published about The Triffids – they're not The Beatles. Despite their reputation as critical favourites and media darlings, there was not that much written about them … just a bit of press in England, thankfully, as a result of there being three weekly music papers at the time, with a lot of pages and column inches to fill.
On that note, let’s talk a little about your history with the band. As well as being a friend of The Triffids, you were professionally connected to them as a photographer and a journalist for the NME in London. Did you cover The Triffids as soon as they arrived in England?
I started off as a photographer for the NME, but I began writing in the same year that the band arrived in the UK: 1984. The writing only eventuated because I would go to shoot a show or an interview and the journalist assigned wouldn't turn up, which was embarrassing for all concerned, so the editor would ask me to do it. I wanted to cover The Triffids pretty much straight away. I went to see a show with them supporting The Moodists, it was a really good gig. Dave was wearing his Perth MTT bus driver's jacket onstage! That was just before Graham joined, so it was a Field of Glass'-era show.
The Triffids weren't the first Australian band to arrive in the UK in those post-punk times. The Birthday Party and The Go-Betweens were already there?
Yeah, and The Moodists had arrived in '83. The Birthday Party had been there since 1980, I think.
Did it shock you that bands were arriving from Australia who were really good, that they were hitting the ground running straight away?
No, what shocked me is that bands were arriving who were all much better than the English bands. Nick [Cave] has spoken about this in the past, so I'm a bit wary of toeing the party line [laughs], but it happens to be exactly my experience as well, and David's experience too actually, he talked to me about this. The British music writers were great but the bands weren't.
“We became friends very quickly. We were all drunks who loved music, so sitting around drinking beer and listening to records all day was our idea of heaven.”
The thing was that back in Australia you got the NME or the other music papers - but mostly the NME - by airmail, and poured over them in the few record shops that stocked them, or read them three months out of date when they finally arrived in newsagents. The UK did seem to have an incredible flowering of excellent music, talent and personalities, with writers to match them with a range of interesting styles: Ian MacDonald, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, and so on. They were all quite different in the way they wrote. Reading them made England seem like some kind of Mecca, you really wanted to go there, it seemed like the place where everything was happening. London more than New York. Americans were so snotty! I mean they were good but were they really so good that they could be that arrogant and snotty?! I'm talking about Patti Smith and The Ramones here, Television were fantastic and Tom Verlaine could be as snotty as he liked as far as I was concerned. [Laughs]
So that's why I went to London. But then you get there and you realised that few of those British bands could really play live. The dominant music trend in Perth and Australia at the time was for blues bands, who were usually boring, but at least they could play their instruments live. I went to see a whole lot of post-punk outfits in London, “skronk” bands who just couldn't play and that really didn't impress me.
Then here comes The Birthday Party. It was an amazing revelation. Not only were they, still to this day, the best live band I've ever seen, but they were Australian, coming from this colony on the other side of the world, a place that not only was far from the mainstream of music but wasn't seen to have anything of value to contribute to "rock's rich tapestry" - thank you Julie [Burchill, NME writer) - and yet they were clearly the most vital thing since the Sex Pistols. And let's face it, the Pistols, when the dust had settled, weren't all that terrific anyway, they had an attitude that turned out to be as inhibiting as it was liberating.
Those Australian bands that moved to London in the early '80s seemed to make a name for themselves quite quickly ... getting strong reviews, releasing records that sold in decent numbers, compared to what they were used to back in Australia at least. This hadn't happened before - I'm thinking about the Masters Apprentices' deflating experiences in London in the early '70s - and hasn't really happened again since, despite acts like Howling Bells and HTRK plugging away there in recent years. What was different about the early '80s?
A lot of things are down to luck, a one-word explanation that doesn't really tell anybody anything, but a great deal of it was luck. It wasn't easy for The Birthday Party and it wasn't easy for The Go-Betweens. It was never easy or successful for The Moodists. But the persistence of this powerful wave of totally credible bands made it easier for them all, it definitely made it easier for The Triffids. Also [NME journalist] Matt Snow, to give him his credit, was a great enthusiast for Australian bands and he had risen to the position of live editor at the paper, so he could commission whatever he wanted which was [The Triffids'] foot in the door.
So what were your impressions when you first met David McComb and the band?
It started with a skirmish of memorable correspondence. David wrote to me at NME, sending copies of Treeless Plain and Raining Pleasure, and I was pleased to be able to reply "thanks anyway mate but I already have these records.” When they arrived in town he made sure that I knew when they were playing. I think David and I met the first week they were here and I liked him immediately. The same with Marty [bassist Martin Casey, now of Grinderman and The Bad Seeds]. We became friends very quickly. We were all drunks who loved music, so sitting around drinking beer and listening to records all day was our idea of heaven. It's what we did all the time in London because we didn't really have to work. David's interests were never limited to just music though. He had interests right across the arts, which not everyone of us had, and these interests were distinctive, curious. He would love to share them and, while you didn't always agree with his passions, they were always worth knowing about.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
Reading quotes from David's journals and interviews with him in Save What You Can, he does come across as very knowledgeable and highly opinionated.
He was, yeah, but I've met plenty of more opinionated, less charming people in my time! [Laughs] I do feel the need to accentuate the positive here because David was a really sweet guy. He would never whine. I was thinking about this earlier, he would never complain and yet he often had a lot to complain about.
All the girls liked him, he was so charming. At social occasions, a lot of boys just talk to boys. David wasn't one of those guys. He would always remember the women who were around us, bringing them presents, flowers, making an effort to know that he was thinking of them too. I think that's very unusual.
So what cemented your decision to write Save What You Can?
I felt that I owed it to David. I suppose that's an over-emotive way to describe it but I always felt slightly evangelistic about David's work. Nick [Cave’s] too, but Nick doesn't need any help from me – well, not any more – but it was hard to get him into NME at first. They thought he was the spawn of the devil. I'm not meaning to big note myself here - "I could get them into NME" - it was still a battle. Understand, you had to fight your case and make a claim for this music.
But I always felt David's work was undersold. I also thought he wasn't necessarily helped by some of the praise he did get. Researching the book, re-reading some of The Triffids' favourable reviews, they're often just gibberish. I was battling a bit to find stuff to quote, most either amazingly superficial or excessive and flowery. The imagery has not dated well! [Laughs] I wanted to celebrate David and his work with this book and if it helps in a way to recognise his place in Australian music history, then that's all I could hope for.
It took a long time to write the book, more than 10 years. Was that much longer than you had originally planned?
Well, yes it was. No one in the band's going to really like to hear this but most [people I interviewed] don't remember anything. I thought that having cooperation from and knowing all the people involved would mean they would share their memories and that I'd be able to synthesise those memories with others and develop a narrative. That notion turned out to be an illusion. So my primary source for the book is David McComb, and luckily what a great resource he turned out to be! But I had no idea when I started the book that I would get access to David's letters and journals. I instead thought that the band and those who were around us would have anecdotes and memories, that the book would be formed from those, but instead people turned out to be so inhibited in what they would or could share.
David's been dead for nearly 12 years now. Things that were understandably too sensitive about to talk about in the first year or two year after he died, you'd think that those things become less callous to discuss after a decade has passed. But, no, for some it's still too sensitive a subject. It's a problem and remains a problem.
Marty, whom I love dearly, is not really a storyteller. David was the storyteller. Rob can see all sides of any incident, which doesn't help. It's not [Kurosawa's film] Rashomon, we're not interested in multiple possible permutations of what time the band got into the van. Alsy's got a good memory but when I asked him questions, he developed a particular verbal tic: "Oh, Dave would've done that.” Well I'm not really interested in what Dave would have done, I'm interested in what he did. Otherwise it could be made up. And if anyone's going to make up stuff in this book it's going to be me! [Laughs]
“Metaphors of being marooned, isolated, the Robinson Crusoe myth, stuck on the edge of the world, were regularly used and inverted by David, all the way through his career.”
Your approach seems to have been to use detailed research to recreate the past in an active way: using the present tense, writing about events as if they're only just happening, mostly from the point of view of David himself. But in daring to write The Triffids' story by recreating David's moods, motives and emotions, did you get nervous? That if David was looking over your shoulder he'd possibly disagree with your interpretations?
I'm sure there is much in the book that David would disagree with. Although we were very good friends, we often disagreed. But we did think about and experience a lot of the same things. Dave wasn't cantankerous but he was contrary and perverse, so I'm sure that I've sometimes interpreted his moods or motives incorrectly. But then again he wouldn't always tell you or admit to himself what he was truly thinking either, so how do you ever know?
Your summary of what I've tried to do in the book is accurate. I'm not particularly worried about any mistakes in the book that I may have made because there was no other way of telling the story without taking an imaginative guess. But from reading and rereading so much of David's own writing, I do think that I have a pretty good take on what he was feeling for much of the time, the things he felt deeply about. I also knew him for a long time so I could see how his opinions evolved. Perhaps it sounds corny but David did feel and think deeply and he could capture that in what he wrote; many of the songs are a testament to that too of course.
Once I got into the flow of the book I found it to be very revealing: you don't just tell David and the band's story, there's lots of detail about what was happening in the news, the culture too, giving a broader context. You also give a sense of their growth from children to adults, with changing expectations and understanding of what life in the music industry will offer them.
David felt that more keenly than the others, for he was the most ambitious and driven of the group. For some people – for some in The Triffids too – being in a rock band is what you do when you're a kid. But it's what David wanted to do with his whole life – from the time he was 16 – and he never lost that, not even in the years that are outside the scope of his book, the last 10 years of his life. David took music and writing very seriously, I mean he wrote over 60 songs while a young man at university.
Which reminds me that most think of Treeless Plain as The Triffids' debut album but of course it wasn't. They'd released seven albums before that on cassette tape, some like The Dungeon Tapes featuring quite accomplished material. Do you think being so prolific at such a young age gave David an immediate edge over his contemporaries, as he was able to more rapidly excise the juvenilia from his songbook?
Exactly, yeah, he quickly learned what worked and what didn't ... He learned about form, how a song has to turn on itself and provide a twist, a mystery, it's like a thriller, otherwise the suspense that's built up is dissipated to little effect. He worked that out. Some of those songs he wrote while at uni aren't particularly magnificent, they're lightweight songs but they're not inconsequential fluff ... A song like 'Artists', it offers just one or two insights with a cheeky little resolution, but it succeeds because that's all it's meant to be. [David] wouldn't want lines from that quoted on his headstone, though it's nothing to be embarrassed about. Not that he has a headstone, as his ashes were scattered. But now I digress.
The book captures a strong sense of growing up in Perth in the 1970s, and The Triffids are often referenced as a quintessentially Western Australian band...
I think because of Born Sandy Devotional, particularly.
So was growing up in Perth that pivotal to David's songwriting development, or would he have followed a similar path if he had grown up in a different part of Australia, or a different country altogether?
I think Perth was crucial because the metaphors and analogies that he was drawn to were nurtured by a life there ... It's the “stranded” metaphor, so it began with The Saints really but David ran with it. Metaphors of being marooned, isolated, the Robinson Crusoe myth, stuck on the edge of the world, were regularly used and inverted by David, all the way through his career. Now those metaphors mirrored my own experience of growing up in Perth, it seems to mirror other peoples too, and it was definitely a reflection of David's own experiences there. He would talk about how his lyrics more and more seemed to reflect the lives of people he'd known back in Perth, those who stayed behind who became crippled with an aimless angst borne of inertia, the weight of having to cross an ocean or a desert to get anything done. When you start to feel like nothing different is ever going to happen, this becomes a very constricting feeling. Plenty of places are described as the arsehole of the universe, but when you grow up in Perth it's difficult not to think that it trumps them all through sheer distance. Particularly so back then, before modern communications. Waiting three months to read the NME is a classic example of this. Now Nick Cave would never admit to having read NME, even though he might have, but still I don't think Melbourne was quite as isolated as Perth back then.
The letters David sent home to his girlfriends over those years became one of your most valuable resources in completing the biography. Given how personal they were, how did you come to get access to those? Well, one woman gave me her letters on the condition I didn't try to interview her, so that was a Faustian bargain but one I would have been foolish not to accept. So that was one cache, while another cache he'd photocopied himself and I got hold of those. Why photocopy his own letters? I imagine one reason was vanity. But the main reason I think is because the reciprocation rate was quite low ... He was writing a lot of long detailed letters and not receiving as many in return, so in order to keep track of what he'd said I think he photocopied them, so he didn't repeat himself in his next letter.
But did using those letters create any challenges for you? Choosing what details to include that were pertinent, yet without becoming intrusive and voyeuristic?
The letters are judiciously quoted, I haven't shared everything. David made an attempt to universalise his own experiences, to transmute his own life creatively, so I think it's fair to mention those life experiences in his autobiography, particularly as he was rarely completely literal. Although he often uses the first person singular in his songs, you don't get the sense - or at least I don't - that he's only writing about his own life. I think he's telling stories. But that doesn't mean the songs aren't a kind of secret or shadow autobiography too. David's experiences were changed for his songs, ornamented, metaphorised if that's a word, but they're still his own emotional experiences at the base of his songs. Even songs that at first don't appear to have any direct relevance to his life, like 'Jerdacuttup Man', they are still a reflection of what was going on in his heart and his head, despite David not being a directly confessional sort of songwriter. It's not like those early '70s singer/songwriters who were accused of writing songs about the lint in their navels and the patches on their jeans.
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