The Triffids have been in absentia for too long, forever a band praised for their originality and foresight of ideas without getting their fair dues. As revered as the likes of 1986’s Born Sandy Devotional is, until now it has been mostly appreciated but ignored. All that is sure to change with the twentieth anniversary edition being released, alongside a repress of the iconic single ‘Wide Open Road’.
As drummer Alsy MacDonald rubs the sleep from his eyes and watches the sun come over the backyard fence, he reminisces. Can it really be 20 years ago that the band’s defining album came out? “When all of these other things come along,” he says in reference to family and the like, “you tend to just get on with them and not really think about a lot of the things we do on a day-to-day basis. Now listening to it twenty years later it’s quite good – I haven’t had to live with it for so long so I can look at it in a different light.”
With the same mix, Born Sandy Devotional has been remastered from the two-track stereo master-tapes. “We didn’t actually go back and remix it because I suppose it’s an unwritten code that you don’t really tamper with something,” Alsy explains. “It’s pretty hard to be objective about some of our records because when I hear things I think ‘oh, we should have done that like this’ but it’s quite different for the fans and people who liked the music. We want to give them the best quality reproduction that we can, but without actually changing the way it sounds.”
It’s clearly a lot bigger, brighter, and more impressive – the way that it should sound in the modern world. “That’s the benefit of having remastering technology that makes older records sound good,” he evinces.
When queried as to what the reaction to it would be now if it was to be released as a new album, and how it would be judged in today’s current context, Alsy is initially stumped. “That’s actually quite a good question; I don’t really know the answer to it,” he comments. “I’m thinking, is it really a period piece that is a product of its time? In some ways it is, but the arrangements and the songs and the things that Dave is singing about on the record they don’t really date at all. So I can imagine that it might sound a bit different today, but I don’t think our attitude to making it and trying to get our themes across I don’t think that would be any different.”
He says that the same question could be applied to any record in anyone’s collection, and to try and think ahead of what it might be like if they an artist were to put it out today; in some ways it’s a bit absurd. “I don’t think we’d change much about the way we wanted to present those songs and make them sound. They might sound a bit different in the instrumentation perhaps, but not radically.”
A lot of atmospheric music and noises appear on the record, like the background strings and some of the washes of the keyboard that you don’t really hear up front but you hear in the background. “That’s the way we’d still do it and that’s the kind of back-drop that Dave wanted to his words on those songs.”
Dave McComb died of an accidental drug overdose in 1989. As to how Alsy thinks he’d feel about re-release, he believes McComb would be pleased to be able to re-release everything in an updated or refreshed format. “He was always keen on trying to put out a record and package it in a way that was attractive or suited to the way we were thinking. I don’t think that now he would do much different in terms of repackaging or rethinking the record to the public.”
The obvious different would be that he would be around to sing the songs if the Triffids were to perform once more. Even though we can’t be a touring act now days because we have different things in our lives, if we came together to do it I think he would really like the opportunity to re-present this twenty years after we’d done.” Instead, the Triffids are going down the rout of the MC5-DTK, and roping in special vocalists on selected tracks for a European jaunt, including the likes of Rob Snarski.
Alsy is hoping that the re-release of Born Sandy Devotional leads to a re-evaluation of the Triffids musical heritage within Australia, with the band’s native land always a mixed blessing for the group in terms of our acceptance. “It’s strange: we really cut our teeth and developed the kind of music and songs that we played and being Australian is one of the reasons our records sounded like they did and one of the reasons why Dave wrote some of the words that he did. But at the same time it really did take us going overseas to put it all in perspective and perhaps get an acceptance from a different kind of audience, one that wasn’t so dedicated to the pub-rock scene that was around in the 1980s.”
To escape, the Triffids moved from their native Perth to Sydney at end 1981, basing themselves there for 2 years through to 1984, but spending large chunks of time on the road. They decamped to the UK in the middle of 1984, with their own money; they weren’t dependent on others to make decisions for them. It went really well from the beginning. “We had a couple of really good shows and got noticed by the British music press, and it took off from there.”
Already, they’d had some level of support from Rough Trade, who licensed their material for release in the UK from their Australian label, right up to and including Born Sandy Devotional. “Even though we were doing well over there we didn’t have a concrete record deal to ensure everything was put out as best as possible; that came a couple of years later,” he explains. “Twenty years later I think that culture has shifted because of the internet and downloading and the type of music that’s being played now. I don’t want to sound too old, but maybe there’s a lot of people around now who’ve never heard us before that might think ‘oh wow, this came from Australia twenty years ago’.”
The Triffids’ re-release of Born Sandy Devotional is out now.
