The song though, that was the thing, a slow, groaning torch tune called ‘Stolen Property’, and its heavy airs – vapours rather – seemed to echo up from some deep well of drama and heartache. Drums clattered, basslines brooded, strings keened, it went on for ages, crescendo piling upon decrescendo. It was the sound of unrequited love, of faithlessness both suffered and perpetrated. It made us want to grow up and have our hearts broken in life-or-death affairs and learn how to drink irresponsibly – but with poise – and wear shabby suits and stay in fleabag motels and drive all night on deranged odysseys, possessed by a daemonic kinda love, that temporary mental illness which for the lucky few becomes permanent. We must have played the videotape of the performance until the chrome flaked off. All that summer Dave Fanning aired songs from the band’s album ‘Born Sandy Devotional’ on his evening show, and the record became the soundtrack for many hot and claustrophobic summers thereafter. A person couldn’t just listen to that collection, they had to live in its queasy, agoraphobic cinemascape.

The undoubted centrepiece was an mini-epic called ‘Wide Open Road’. In it, a man drives across a great blank expanse, crazed with jealousy, eating his heart out, imagining the woman he loves with another man. “Well the drums rolled off in my forehead,” it begins, 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,” the singer confesses, “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?” A rhetorical question: the answer’s in the voice. The narrator camps out at night and tries to sleep, tormented by memories, and in the morning he gets up 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 walk away, gutted and humbled 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 litany of shacks and petrol stations and one horse towns and cattle holdings and roadside bars, a big empty sky overhead, a desolate road ahead.

This restless, haunted character crops up in every song on the album. In a song called ‘The Seabirds’ another man, or the same man further down the line, 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.

And there’s ‘Estuary Bed’, where a man riven with grief or guilt hides in his shack wringing his hands, listening to the country and western 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”. What’s he contemplating? Bloodshed? Suicide? We don’t know, but he’s tormented for sure, maybe by the phantom of a murdered lover or maybe the voice of a drowned child.

We meet this man again in ‘Personal Things’, only now he’s Lady Macbeth eaten up 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 what’s eating him is 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.

But then, at the peak of the album’s third act comes ‘Stolen Property’, where we came in, a blues for the broken and the botched who have no one to tell them it’s all going to be alright so they make do with comforting themselves in thrown trick voices (“Pick yourself up,” the wretch of a narrator barks at himself, “hold yourself up to the light”), but really, nobody’s fooling anybody.

And 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 chooses to put the bottle down and walk out the door and into the daylight. The disquieting 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.”

And so it came to pass: The Triffids went on to make a couple more landlocked, 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 a decade of various demons before his body gave out in 1999. The band’s pedal steel player ‘Evil’ Graham Lee now tends The Triffids’ memory and curates their website.

This month, Domino begin a sequence of remastered reissues of the band’s back catalogue. First up is ‘BSD’, and it’s like meeting an old flame after 20 years; you fear that meeting 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, even more compelling after all this time – it wasn’t some delusional infatuation, she really was a beauty.

Ah yes, ‘Born Sandy Devotional’, she was my first love.

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One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.