David Mccomb Was a Conscious Craftsman and a Scintillating Thinker About His Craft

214 S PATIAL R ELATIONS a only you can hear. With “Good Evening Dear Miss Alach,” the book finishes in a very different register from the rest. It is self-referencing regarding the foulness (I use the antiquated term) of the music industry, snobbishness, false values. A goodbye with irony writ large. Its modest proposal eats us all. It is an epilogue. In this journey through his poetry, I hope to have shown that David McComb was a conscious craftsman and a scintillating thinker about his craft. It was no mere utilitarian device of expression and opinion for him, but some- thing of his body, of the place he came from and where he went. Poetry was necessity. It was a survival kit that kept him searching for reason, for purpose, for a logic in a traumatized but also compelling world. Beauty never faded, even if it struggled for expression. Love was about separation and loss as well as about having and possession. Irony was the safety-net that always gave way when the poet went out on the tightrope. Furthermore, McComb was an ecologist of body and land, and wrote against invasiveness in all its forms. Sometimes he had to deal with that invasiveness and come up with whatever ‘escapes’ he could manage. He was a poet of total liminality. David McComb: Beautiful Waste107 INCE THE BROADER RECOGNITION of Born Sandy Devotional (recorded 1985, released 1986) as one of the great Australian music S albums, there has been a pleasing ‘growth’ in publications relating to definitively West Australian band The Triffids (named, of course, after the John Wyndham novel) and their singer–songwriter Dave McComb. This new addition to the library is a strange beast (like most biographies). Ostensibly recording the life of The Triffids, it is in essence an exploration of Dave McComb’s life through The Triffids. It was a band formed out of school friendships and family (McComb’s older brother Rob was brought in as guitar- ist early on in its evolution), a band that underwent line-up shifts and changes before settling into its core identity, and was often spoken of as a close-knit group of friends. But there’s a telling moment that Butcher documents, with the album Calenture (1987), the band’s first with a major label (Island), when 107 Long version of amputated article in The Monthly 78 (May 2012): 64. Review of Bleddyn Butcher, Save What You Can: The Day of the Triffids (Marrickville, NSW: Treadwater Press, 2011). a On Australian Poetry and Poets: Longer Views on Individuals 215 the first (failed) producer replaces band members with session musicians, with little opposition from McComb, who clearly for the time being puts per- sonal vision and ambition ahead of the band’s collective interest. It is unlikely that the reader will judge McComb too harshly, as contexts are manifest through this almost hagiographical account of McComb as creative genius, allowing us insight into the often tormented productivity of the band’s leader. But even the biggest fans among us will baulk at his not telling his close friend Alsy (band member Allan Macdonald) of the substitution. McComb is certainly a figure worthy of biography. A superb songwriter, musician, and poet, he is particularly interesting in terms of how and why his work uses, differs from, and interacts with other songwriters and poets of his time (and places). The trauma induced by alcohol and drugs, and the circum- stances of his early death (in 1999 in Perth, of heart failure a few days after a car accident in Melbourne, whither he had returned with his family to settle down peaceably) – these are part of this, but not the central interest. Only oc- casionally does Butcher’s attention to substance-abuse risk prurience, beyond the details necessary to McComb’s story. Inevitably, Butcher illustrates such abuse as it relates to McComb’s daily creative life, but as this book finishes with the breakup of the McComb version of The Triffids in 1989, we don’t follow the full horrific road to his death in 1999 – drugs are not the primary focus, for which I felt grateful. McComb’s brilliance had to do with his inherent creativity, and his ability to relate his own emotions (especially ‘love’) to his physical, intellectual, and even spiritual (outside religion) environments. He played with ‘brand Austra- lia’, and, as we see, there were glib, almost exploitative moments in his use of this, but it’s always with irony and awareness, and ultimately a desire not to ride the exotica bandwagon. At his best, mystery came through the quotidian, and if that seemed strange to outsiders, so be it. This was a songwriter who told stories of his experience, of where he came from, and of what effect it was having on him and his friends, while deeply informed by international cultural registers (starting with The Velvet Underground and, with the breakup following The Triffids’ studio album The Black Swans [1988] and the live album Stockholm [recorded 1989, released 1990], working with The Black Eyed Susans before immersing himself in country rock with his solo album Love of Will, recorded 1993, released 1994). If he lacked anything, it was an insightful politics. He comes across as naive in so many ways, but that might also be Butcher’s care not to cast McComb in an awkward light in this con-.

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