triffids on the beach

Linda Gebar tribute - Life's what you make it

2011-01-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

In October 2008 Linda Gebar, one of Melbourne’s most popular and dedicated music industry personalities passed away just 10 days after giving birth to her second daughter Annaliesse. Linda was a long-time booker of The Punters Club, had managed Frente, The Blackeyed Susans and The Killjoys, and had worked for APRA and 3PBS. More recently Linda had been booking The Continental Hotel in Sorrento and was managing her partner’s band The Honeys.

On 18 January 2009 a tribute concert was held, and 20 songs played live were put on a tribute cd. You Triffheads should get it.

I've selected two tracks as a teaser :
Blackeyed Susans - Blue skies : http://www.mediafire.com/?666e236ze7xg6d4
Paradise Vendors (with Graham Lee !) - Sixteen tons : http://www.mediafire.com/?4yclzjkjzzq6zjv

Annie M.G.

2010-05-21T06:50:00.001-07:00

Op een mooie Pinksterdag
Als ze even kon
Liep ik met m'n dochter aan het handje in het parrekie te kuieren in de zon
Gingen madeliefjes plukken, eendjes voeren, eindeloos
Kijk nou toch je jurk wordt nat, je handjes vuil en papa boos

Vader was een mooie held, vader was de baas
Vader was een duidelijke mengeling van onze lieve Heer en Sinterklaas
Ben je bang voor 't hondje, hondje bijt niet
Papa zegt dat hij niet bijt
Op een mooie Pinksterdag, met de kleine meid

Als het kindje groter wordt, roossie in de knop
Zou je tegen alle grote jongens willen zeggen "handen thuis en lazer op"
Heb u dat nou ook meneer, jawel meneer
Precies als iedereen
Op een mooie Pinksterdag
Laat ze je alleen

Morgen kan ze zwanger zijn
'k Kan ook nog vandaag
't Kan van de behanger zijn of van een Franse zanger zijn
Of iemand uit Den Haag
Vader kan gaan smeken en gaan preken tot hij purper ziet
Vader zegt "pas op m'n kind, dat hondje bijt"
Ze luistert niet

Vader is een hypocriet
Vader is een nul
Vader is er enkel en alleen maar voor de centen en de rest is flauwekul
Ik wou dat ik nog 1 keer met mijn dochter aan het handje lopen kon
Op een mooie Pinksterdag samen in de zon
Op een mooie Pinksterdag samen in de zon
Samen in de zon

The Triffids : a secret in the shape of a song in Hasselt 17 April 2010

2010-05-03T04:47:00.000-07:00

A first recording of the show on Saturday has appeared. You can find it here : http://rapidshare.com/files/383009944/Triffids-17-04-2010.rar

A huge thanks to the original uploader.

btw the very amateur pic is from the Sunday show, where even Warren Ellis was singing Once a day.

1. introduction by "Handsome" Steve Miller
2. Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think (vocals: Graham Lee)
3. Place in the Sun (vocals: Alsy MacDonald)
4. introduction by Alsy MacDonald
5. Tarrilup Bridge (vocals: Jill Birt)
6. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Rob Snarski
7. In the Pines (vocals: Rob Snarski)
8. Hell of a Summer (vocals: Rob Snarski)
9. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Mick Harvey
10. The Seabirds (vocals: Mick Harvey)
11. Kelly's Blues (vocals: Mick Harvey)
12. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Mark Snarski
13. Bury Me Deep in Love (vocals: Mark Snarski)
14. Bright Lights Big City (vocals: Mark Snarski)
15. Life of Crime (vocals: Mark Snarski)
16. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces some birthdays
17. Rob McComb projects and comments on old family pictures and reads some of Dave's poetry
18. This One Eats Souls (The Blackeyed Susans)
19. Ocean of You (The Blackeyed Susans)
20. Leaning (The Blackeyed Susans)
21. The Good Life Never Ends (The Blackeyed Susans)
22. Red Pony (The Blackeyed Susans)
23. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Melanie Oxley
24. Embedded (vocals: Melanie Oxley)
25. I Want To Conquer You (vocals: Melanie Oxley)
26. Lifelike (vocals: Melanie Oxley)
27. Raining Pleasure (vocals: Jill Birt)
28. Goodbye Little Boy (vocals: Jill Birt)
29. Jill Birt announces Adrian Hoffman
30. Bad Timing (vocals: Adrian Hoffman)
31. Beautiful Waste (vocals: Adrian Hoffman)
32. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Stef Kamil Carlens
33. Personal Things (vocals: Stef Kamil Carlens)
34. Trick of the Light (vocals: Stef Kamil Carlens)
35. Lonely Stretch (vocals: Stef Kamil Carlens)
36. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Simon Breed
37. Stolen Property (vocals: Simon Breed)
38. Wide Open Road (vocals: Simon Breed)
39. Jerdacuttup Man (vocals: Graham Lee)
40. Save What You Can (vocals: Simon Breed)

Encore #1:
41. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces Harald Vanherf
42. Property Is Condemned (vocals: Harald Vanherf)
43. Setting You Free (vocals: Mick Harvey)
44. Pile Up (vocals: Kaat & Daan)

Encore #2:
45. Enemy Mine (vocals: J.P. Shilo)
46. Fairytale Love (vocals: Graham Lee, Rob Snarski & Adrian Hoffman)
47. "Handsome" Steve Miller announces The Triffids for a final song
48. Tender Is The Night (The Long Fidelity) (vocals: Alsy MacDonald & Jill Birt)
49. The Triffids take a bow

I want to conquer you - Angie Hart

2010-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Wow, what terrific Triffids concerts (3) we had in Hasselt. And still digesting the 10cd box.

I thought Melanie Oxley was brilliant, and what a version of I want to conquer you ! Here you get Angie Hart's version (you know, from Frente), from the bonus disc to her very nice "Eat my shadow" album, issued in 2009.

http://rapidshare.com/files/382759659/05_I_Want_To_Conquer_You.mp3

Chad's tree - crossing off the miles

2010-03-31T01:57:00.000-07:00

The good folks at memorandum recordings have issued the Chad's tree discography on a 2CD set titled Crossing off the miles. It contains :
- the Buckle in the rail LP
- the Kerosene LP
- the non album single tracks
- 7 demos and 4 alternative mixes and live

Highly recommended. More info here : http://www.myspace.com/chadstree

As a teaser you find an mp3 of one of the demo tracks called Summer rain.

http://rapidshare.com/files/370255102/summer_rain__chad_s_tree_.mp3

An essay on the Triffids

2010-03-16T05:27:00.000-07:00

from http://populardemand.wordpress.com/2010/03/13/the-triffids/

All torch songs, all good luck charms, all winters

What use eyesight if it should melt?

When you move from one end of the world to the other, the colour of money changes, and so does the colour of the sky. The new money is confusing: it makes you slow and clumsy at the supermarket checkout, but the new sky leaves you turning in circles, looking for the old one. It is not simply disorientation. The elements have realigned themselves.

Everybody who has ever left Australia – and maybe or maybe not returned to it again – will tell you that you will miss the sky, and miss the light. They told me, and I believed them, but I didn’t realise how immediately or how deeply the longing would take hold. I arrived in New York City at the end of summer, when the weather is at its brightest, and within a week I was walking along the Hudson River shoreline, still fighting jetlag and the sense that with yellow taxis and yellow traffic lights and external fire escapes and American accents I’d just landed on a film set, disconsolately seeking a shade of blue that wasn’t there to be found.

Once, years ago, I saw a cartoon that had been reproduced from The Bulletin (at least I think it was The Bulletin), originally printed not long after the magazine’s founding in 1880. The Bulletin became known during its earliest, most influential era in Australia as “the bushman’s bible”: it was a startlingly racist and rabidly conservative magazine that pioneered a now-familiar editorial approach whereby the best interests of the business class were slyly championed as the popular causes of the common people. “Australia for the white man”, ran its masthead, at least until it became profitable after World War II to import migrant labourers at knock-down prices.

This cartoon depicted a young British woman, an English Rose, the best of the free-settler stock (to be distinguished from the shameful rabble of dirty convicts who had begun arriving almost a century previous), and comprised a sketch of her profile before-and-after landing in the colony. There she was with her dainty features, demure expression and pale, pale skin; “Three weeks later”, ran the caption, she was a squinting, ragged harridan, deformed by the light of the sun as it shone with relentless intensity across the southern sky. Now, The Bulletin being a pile of paranoid, xenophobic claptrap doesn’t make the sentiment behind this little cartoon mistaken. The Australian sky – and the sun, and the light – is incomparably harsh. It makes you squint and grimace. It can, given the right or wrong circumstances, make you crazy.

Missing it brings its own craziness. How to describe in words the quality of light? I’ve tried for years, and failed; if I ever manage then I’ll consider it my supreme achievement, and happily put down the pen. It is white – white in a way that has nothing to do with the white of skin – irradiant: colour not as a hue but as a force. On clear days it makes the sky the most brilliant azure blue you will ever see, a sky that arcs up and up and seems to know no horizon. The heat of it in summer can strip paint, kill dogs, and make your skin burn and blister. In 1968 The Velvet Underground called their second album White Light/White Heat, but those New York habitués with their sunglasses after dark couldn’t have known what they were talking about. They’d never seen Australia.

You don’t miss your water

In 1986 The Triffids put a photograph on the cover of their second album, Born Sandy Devotional, which gives some sense of this light, and of the colours it creates. The photograph is of Mandurah – a coastal inlet 70 kilometres or so south of Perth, The Triffids’ hometown – taken in 1961, when the place was a sleepy holiday destination of fibro beach houses dotted along the shore of an enormous estuary that feeds straight into the Indian Ocean. I have only to look for a moment at this aerial shot and the sense memories of Australian summers come rushing back. Blinding white sand, baked by the day’s sun to such a temperature that it nearly scalds the arches of bare feet as you run desperately towards the water; upon entry the ocean cold, sometimes shockingly so, the depth of colour changing with the depth of the water, light transforming it into a hypnotic, interlocking sheet of cerulean, turquoise, aquamarine, moss and sapphire facets. In the distance the smell of burnt and yellowed grass, and everywhere the taste of salt.

Not much had changed along this coast by the time The Triffids up and left: Perth was still, in character and appearance, not much more than a rural town. But Western Australia’s contemporary mining boom now makes Perth the least-affordable city in the nation, and Australia’s role in the current global economy comes in good part thanks to this voracious plundering of the elements – nautral gas, iron ore, gold, diamonds – that lie beneath the soil of the continent’s western edge. When there’s nothing left to dig then the property prices will fall again, the miners will leave, and perhaps a few fibro shacks will remain from another era. The light and the ocean will always remain.

‘The Seabirds’, which opens Born Sandy Devotional, recalls this beachside Australia of budget motels, caravan parks, and flimsily built beach houses: it still exists in pockets, but it’s getting harder to find as the service industries – tourism, hospitality – pick up speed, for when the gas and gold run out. And perhaps the loss of accommodations where no flyscreens and a synthetic mattress wrapped in thick brown vinyl represents the best that can be expected of comfort – a near-unbearable arrangement in summer, when you lie awake for hours listening to mosquitos whine about your head, and then peel yourself off in a morning lather of sweat, knowing that an ocean swim is the only way to feeling human again – is not much of a loss at all. The loss inside ‘The Seabirds’, however, is greater than that of no longer having a cheap and anonymous bed to run to when money and love have both run out. It’s a song about exile written whilst in exile: Born Sandy Devotional was made in London, which is about as close to the other side of the world from Perth as you can get before you start coming back around again. The Triffids had arrived there in 1984, at the end of a northern summer, and almost exactly a year later they began recording their album. A London summer rarely gets above 25 degrees Celsius, and it’s a national news event if the thermometer tops 30, which is around the starting average for a summer back in Perth. The winters are grey, and if the sun is visible it’s a pallid wash that at its mid-afternoon height resembles, at best, the pre-dawn rays of an antipodean morning. The Triffids must have missed the light, during their many seasons away from home. Everyone who leaves Australia does.

Where were you?

Born Sandy Devotional is a great album title. Like Thriller or The Marble Index or Forever Breathes The Lonely World, it evokes a tantalising aesthetic universe before the music has even begun. It might have been called Greetings From Mandurah, W.A., or Love In Bright Landscapes, another great title that sums up The Triffids’ main thematic preoccupation better than any other, and was later used for a now out-of-print Triffids compilation. But Born Sandy Devotional has an added poetry, a concentration of meaning that draws you back to it, wondering, about how sand and devotion and birthplace might fit together.

I came late to The Triffids, intrigued by that title and by the cover art, which occasionally glanced out at me from racks of second-hand LPs, long before I could come to terms with the music. Every few years I would try them again, and the only song that ever made sense to me was ‘Raining Pleasure’, with its droning violin and Jill Birt’s superbly detached vocal performance making it one of the oddest, most arid songs about the sweaty intimacy of sex ever recorded. I still think it’s among The Triffids’ finest moments, though what this says about my own erotic sensibilities is probably best left unexamined. As for the rest of The Triffids’ music, I found it odd in a way that was off-putting: it sounded excessive but without richness, pretentious but without flair. They struck me as a poor woman’s Bad Seeds, and I felt slightly embarrassed for them, 1980s also-rans caught in that unenviable zone between underground credibility and stadium supremacy. Countless bands have toiled and died in this middlebrow wilderness, and I thought that The Triffids were one of them, only partially redeemed by their long-standing historical and critical association with the infinitely cooler Nick Cave.

This early misunderstanding is partly a consequence of my age: I had my adolescence during the 1990s, when it could be argued that Australian music was less enamoured of its immediate pre-history than ever before. Like every other country that plays a role in the Western music industry, Australia suffered through a Nirvana Effect: corporations strip-mined a small but energetic independent scene and sold it back as “Alternative”, the lamest genre categorisation ever invented. A combination of peer and industry pressure meant that most bands – the ones with guitars, that is, who weren’t pioneering Australia’s hip-hop or electronic scenes – looked to America for their cues: acceptable musical models were Sonic Youth and Pavement, or locally, Radio Birdman, Sydney’s quintessential garage-punks, who reformed in 1996 thanks to their influence on everybody – at least it felt like everybody. Britain and Europe, the lands of promise and acclaim for Australian post-punk’s holy trinity – of which The Triffids formed one-third, alongside The Go-Betweens and The Birthday Party – were largely ignored throughout the 90s: Britpop, trip-hop and jungle barely made a dent. British influences were seen as an affectation, whereas American music carried the stamp of rock n’ roll authenticity, even if it was calibrated on a major-label budget. ‘Don’t Wanna Be Grant McLennan’, sang Smudge, an endearingly slack Sydney trio whose chief songwriter, Tom Morgan, was great pals with The Lemonheads’ Evan Dando and shared a similar – I would say superior – gift for writing two-minute songs that hid their pop nous in a wrapper of carelessness, as if Morgan had tossed them out during cigarette breaks. Grant McLennan tried too hard and The Go-Betweens were effete, like David McComb and The Triffids; Nick Cave was exempt thanks to the cachet of his well-documented heroin addiction, which fit the opiated tenor of the times – no matter that both McLennan and McComb had their own, less publicised struggles with the same drug. Plus, the yawping nightmare blues of The Birthday Party could still shock your parents, whereas they might be passingly familiar with The Go Betweens or The Triffids. Liking the same music as a bunch of middle-aged bores is rightly anathema to the teenage mind: who wants to be regarded as “mature” before you have to be?

Such assumptions and cultural prejudices are of course unfair; unfair to the The Triffids, who were in fact very young when they relocated to London. David McComb was twenty-three when Born Sandy Devotional was recorded, a good half-decade younger than his songwriting compatriots in exile: Cave, McLennan and Robert Forster. But then, perhaps you have to be very young to want to sound as old as The Triffids do on this record, desperate and exhausted, at the end of their tethers. At twenty-three it is important to love without moderation, to live as if you will never be able to redeem yourself and with the firm conviction that you will never care to do so. The first adult regrets and the first true heartbreak are the worst that you will ever know, and a person who can’t understand this will never sing a torch song. Born Sandy Devotional deals in immoderate and unrequited love; love in bright and distant landscapes; love and homesickness commingled, and when at last I did come to understand it – one day I put it on to listen to, a last-ditch attempt; I thought, if I don’t get The Triffids this time then I never will – I had to be old enough to appreciate the drama but not want to flinch away from it; old enough for it to not sound overwrought and anti-pop; young enough to still know what the drama feels like. I put the record on and then listened to it back-to-back at least twenty times in two days. I finally got it, suddenly and completely.

Washing the salt off

Of course, I’m by no means the first listener to find something remarkable in The Triffids, and Born Sandy Devotional in particular: it’s an album almost guaranteed to make Best Australian Albums or Best Albums Of The 1980s or some other Best Of list, the kind that magazine and newspaper editors like to print partly as consumer guides and partly as nostalgic exercises in canon-building, rather than letting their critics actually write articles. The patina of critical appreciation surrounding them is partly what makes The Triffids difficult to approach, though perhaps less so if, like me, you were born too young to have much immediate investment in their mythology. Listeners of my generation have to make an effort to seek them out: though they are embedded in the Australian musical consciousness The Triffids have never been fashionable or popular in their own country; few artists sound anything like them and equally few will admit to them as an influence. The assertion is true: Born Sandy Devotional is a great Australian album, though glibly stating this is hardly enough to make it true. Why is it remarkable, and what can it still say about Australia nearly a quarter of a century – sobering calculation! – after its release?

If it were simply a warm homage to seaside provincialism it would be much less interesting than it is, but Born Sandy Devotional is affecting for the way in which the Australian landscape becomes strange again through the songs. The circumstances of its creation work in the album’s favour: made at such a distance, it reveals an estrangement from the land that has been fundamental to Australian life since colonisation began.

For all the patriotic paeans that one learns to recite or to sing in primary school – Dorothea McKellar’s ‘My Country’, Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’ – for every cringe-inducing Crocodile Hunter and erstwhile fearless explorer, there runs through white Australia’s relationship with the natural environment a profound unease and distrust; a conviction that the land must be fought against. Unlike the mystical utopianism that colours American depictions of the frontier, combining a sense of divine purpose with the conviction that the continent will, in the end, provide for all those who seek its bounty, Australians are scared of the huge space they inhabit. The vastness is a threat, the seeming emptiness of the country’s interior – where desert abuts desert and human habitation leaves few visible marks – deeply unnerving. Australia wasn’t colonised as a New Jerusalem but as a prison, and a sense that the entire project has been cursed from the start, cursed rather than blessed, is scored into the national subconscious.

I say subconscious because this estrangement rarely reaches the level of conscious articulation – rarely, because to do so would involve an acknowledgement of the horrific violence that has shaped Australian colonisation, an acknowledgement that, historically, we have been very poor at making. Australia is emptier of people than it might otherwise be because large swathes of the indigenous population were shot, poisoned, starved, moved onto missions, and otherwise eradicated in both systemic and ad-hoc attempts to “breed out the colour”. The legal fiction on which Australia was founded – Terra nullius, empty land – might have been officially overturned in 1992, but the violence it took to sustain, both literal and philosophical, had done irreversible harm. A sense of the country’s capacity for violence, a suspicion that if you stray too far from the inhabited coastal centres then terrible things might happen – worse, you might do terrible things, as if possessed by the land’s own haunting – is present in much of the most compelling Australian art. The Triffids don’t take as many words to say it, but their music sounds as if they know it, which when you’re writing songs and not essays in cultural criticism is by far the better option.

A few of The Triffids’ musical contemporaries said it more explicitly: Midnight Oil – whose legacy as the musical voice of the Australian left has been rather undermined in recent years by their singer’s second-wind career as Environment Minister for a determinedly centre-right Federal government – and the singular, overlooked Sydney post-punk outfit Tactics. But Midnight Oil never rose above a cod-proletarian, “workman-like” hard rock, and Tactics, for all their worth, remain of interest for their intellectualism – a rare trait in Australian music – more than for their sound. Both lacked the emotional and musical grandeur of which The Triffids were more than capable, and which reaches its apex on Born Sandy Devotional.

Wrong turn

It begins with ‘The Seabirds’, where the ravens of Gothic imagination are re-imagined as gulls who, though they’ll “pick the eye of any dying thing” refuse to peck at the tormented protagonist pleading to end it all. Musically it begins with Alsy McDonald’s snare crack fifteen seconds in, his drumming giving a nasty edge to an arrangement that might otherwise verge on the plush. It’s Sinatra for smacked-out squatters. ‘Estuary Bed’ is a calypso for lost childhood days in the briny surf only if you wilfully ignore the deliberate Macbeth references – sleeplessness, bloodstains that won’t wash off – and the overwhelming presence of a very adult desire, a desire that tastes like the salt of the landscape itself, as bodies merge with it.

The haunting really gets underway with ‘Tarrilup Bridge’, a creaky, queasy melodrama of an unhappy woman recalling her own death. Sung by Jill Birt in a gauche, wavering voice reminiscent of Young Marble Giants’ Alison Statton, ‘Tarrilup Bridge’ is a tale of stoic country town misery that ends in a suicide that is possibly disguised as an accident. God knows how many such deaths occur across Australia year in and year out: cars on deserted roads that have been driven inexplicably into rivers or bent around tree trunks. The privacy to destroy oneself in rural isolation is a perverse benefit of having so many roads for so few people. The song’s spookiness carries a hint of carnival panache: herky-jerky strings and ghost train xylophone, a smatter of demented laughter added to the mix. The sideshow quality – Hear The Sad Lady From Beyond The Grave! – makes the song stranger and better. And then there’s ‘Lonely Stretch’.

Now, there’s no denying the influence of Nick Cave on The Triffids. The Triffids never denied it themselves. Through both The Birthday Party and his earliest work with The Bad Seeds, Cave’s Gothic sensibilities are writ all over his younger contemporaries. The admiration wasn’t one way, either: Cave loved The Triffids back. But here’s one key difference: I don’t believe that Nick Cave has ever written a single memorable song that actually deals with his experience as an Australian. He would have been a happier man, one gets the impression, had he been raised in New Orleans, Berlin or Paris – anywhere more exotic than plain old Melbourne. David McComb – another child of the upper-middle classes – shared Cave’s fondness for European literary sophistication, and historically, I think that the aforementioned sense of British and European musical influences on Australian artists being an affectation stems from this standing association of “European” tastes with the expensively educated: in Australia’s anti-intellectual milieu, only posh snobs read difficult books. But McComb was drawn as a songwriter, even in his earliest work, to articulating an experience with Australian landscape and culture, with its isolation and its strangeness: “Nothing happens here/Nothing gets done/But you get to like it”, he sang on ‘Spanish Blue’, The Triffids’ second single. Nick Cave has never been obliged to do similar, but his towering influence over Australian music has brought increasingly diminishing returns, as young bands persist in imitating his signifiers of late-1970s Berlin decadence at nearly three decades remove from their original context. The Triffids took Cave’s peculiar musical take on Weimar cabaret via the Baptist pulpit – “Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham”, indeed – and turned it to the purpose of Australian Gothic, a genre with its own local history, and one well-suited to stirring up the ghosts of the country’s past.

A first listen to ‘Lonely Stretch’ brings ‘From Her To Eternity’ – newly released in 1984, and the first sound of Cave’s post-Birthday Party incarnation – unmistakably to mind. The booming vocal swathed in a reverb that can bode no good; the oscillating organ and clanging, percussive spasms caused by someone – probably David McComb’s older brother, Robert – hitting their guitar strings; the drums that sound like a malevolent midnight junkyard: all these things recall Cave’s still-astonishing track, in my opinion the best solo work he ever recorded before embarking on a twenty-five year downhill slide. The Triffids, on the other hand, have a musicianship that the Bad Seeds have always struggled to approach, and David McComb is a forceful, emotive singer. Musicianship can kill a song stone dead when a too-tasteful execution trumps feeling, but in this case their discipline as a band – achieved through countless live performances – keeps The Triffids on a leash of just the right tension. They snap and release, limbering up for the first minute or so before tightening into an emphatic rhythmic thump, and then ploughing on through the final section with increasing speed and frenzy: cymbals crashing, McComb calling down the heavens, the melodic instruments veering off into an atonal screech like metal grinding on metal as a nasty, nasty car accident looms up in the front windscreen. And yet it still sounds like a pop song: the melody gets stuck in your head, and McComb leads the lot with a vocal performance – call-and-response with the rest of the band included, plus a couple of exuberant “Woos!” thrown in to mark particular points of acceleration – which convinces you that he dreamed of lit podiums, well-cut suits, and a live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

‘Lonely Stretch’ is about a car accident – or at least, it’s about the sort of car accident that you can have on an Australian road whilst driving from one isolated nowhere to another. Across the endless flat, your mind plays tricks on you: something appears in the headlights, or does it? A remnant of the past, a wraith reminding you of all the bad mistakes you’ve ever made. It flickers and then vanishes again. You want to chase it down, but out here a wrong turn is fatal: in a week you’ll be a local headline, and in three your missing vehicle will be found with your parched and lifeless body inside of it, going rotten in the sun. But in the end it won’t be the desert climate of hot days and freezing nights or the unmarked track that kills you. “Baby I was wrong/I was wrong from the start/You could die out here/From a broken heart”. What makes men and women send their cars crashing into trees and off of bridges? A broken heart can drive you to terrible things, which become more terrible in a depopulated landscape, where no decision can be redeemed or reversed by another human being. ‘Lonely Stretch’ is about unrequited love, oh yes, but there is no one left inside the song for that love – now turned hard and desperate – to be directed at. There is only the land, which offers no comfort; which for all its space begins to close down upon you, just like the music, its cavernous dimensions become claustrophobic, as if the entire thing was a thunderstorm happening inside your own head.

Crying in the wilderness

The Triffids recorded a handful of other songs that reached the same visionary power as ‘Lonely Stretch’ – in fact they recorded them earlier on, not long after arriving in London, for a Peel Session that would be released as the Field Of Glass E.P. The leap between these three live tracks – ‘Bright Lights, Big City’, ‘Monkey On My Back’, and ‘Field Of Glass’, none of which were ever re-recorded – and the material on their first album, Treeless Plain, which had been released only twelve months previous, is quite staggering. Treeless Plain is by no means a bad record, but it does occasionally lapse into country-rock plod. The most striking tracks – ‘Red Pony’, ‘Hell Of A Summer’ – have a certain awkwardness to their arrangements: you get the clear sense of a band with musical ambition, but lacking the skills or budget to be able to pull off what they want to hear. As a live song ‘Hell Of A Summer’ would become a behemoth, with Martyn Casey (later, of course, to join the Bad Seeds) creating a bassline that prowls its way through a complement of humid organs and squalling strings. It’s this live sound that astonished overseas audiences of The Triffids, and was captured for posterity on their Peel Session and a couple of performances for British television.

The Peel Session – particularly ‘Field Of Glass’ – are evidence of deep immersion in the most powerful post-punk sounds: The Birthday Party, but also Joy Division and Suicide, belying the myth that Australian bands of the time evolved their sound in freakish isolation, the musical equivalent of our flora and fauna. If there is a star it’s Jill Birt, whose keyboard playing gives every track a dark, rolling momentum and a sense that her melodies might conceivably fill a cathedral with their weight and volume.

Bruce Springsteen is the other, perhaps unexpected influence on the doomy, reverberant turn that The Triffids’ music was taking – he would pop up again as an explicit reference point in David McComb’s notes for the recording of ‘Lonely Stretch’: “‘State Trooper’ (vocal echo)”. ‘State Trooper’ is certainly there in David McComb’s vocal for ‘Lonely Stretch’ – the song’s rhythm is similar too, as is the poisonous atmosphere of guilt, with a narrator on the brink of madness. Like Born Sandy Devotional, Nebraska is a great road album, and it retains a sizeable cult following among Australian bands with hundreds of kilometres to travel between shows: the ultimate downer soundtrack for the long drive across state borders while battling a morning hangover. Springsteen too is interested in what happens when people take their demons and their miseries out onto the road, across the desolate badlands of America where dreams of freedom and opportunity for all have gone very sour. The Springsteen of Nebraska, emotionally defeated but nevertheless determined to engage with the realities of his home soil, makes an instructive comparison with Born Sandy Devotional – though the latter is as musically lush as the former is barren – and a more helpful comparison that the lighters-aloft Springsteen of ‘Born To Run’, with which The Triffids have also been compared. “‘Wide Open Road’ is our ‘Born To Run’”, said Steve Kilbey, singer and songwriter in 1980s art-rock ensemble The Church, “it should have been an Australian hit.” Whether it should have been a hit is a debatable point, though it was the second closest that The Triffids ever came to a hit in their own country – Number 64 with a bullet. It depends on whether or not you think that writing a chart-topper is a blessing. ‘Wide Open Road’ should have been a hit? Maybe. But it is not our ‘Born To Run’.

Wide open

There exists a piece of footage filmed on January 10th, 1987, when during a brief return home The Triffids played on the bill of the Australian Made tour, a summer festival with stadium-lite rockers INXS headlining. An opening helicopter shot gives a glimpse of Perth: the Swan River, the Indian Ocean, that blue sky and the parched summer paddocks surrounding Subiaco Oval, more commonly home to Australian Rules football matches. “With a band like us it’s difficult to know how to write the setlist at the start of day,” begins David McComb, his high speaking voice a surprise in comparison with the resonant, velvety baritone of his singing, “cos we’ve had so many hits in this country.” The polite irony of his tone is lost in the air above the enormous audience, but the sharpness of his stage presence is unmistakeable. In a stripy blue-and-white neckerchief, a collared white shirt, black trousers and sparkling gold waistcoat he still looks ineffably cool, which means that in 1987 he probably looked like an alien. I hope for his sake that he didn’t try walking around the streets of Perth in that ensemble, but what a shame they hadn’t invented Jumbotron television screens back then, so that the people five hundred metres back from the stage could have appreciated the sartorial effort. And then The Triffids launch into ‘Wide Open Road’, a good performance, though it can’t top the studio version on Born Sandy Devotional.

‘Wide Open Road’ is the one Triffids song that has impinged to any significant degree on the Australian public consciousness. Even if you know nothing else about The Triffids then you’re likely to have heard it, through one of those mysterious instances of cultural osmosis whereby a song that hardly ever gets played on the radio and hasn’t been sold off as an advertising jingle is, somehow, still present in your head. I could sing the chorus of ‘Wide Open Road’ years before I could have told you the name of any other Triffids song. Like most songs that are encountered more often as myth than as fact it has been over-simplified, though musically it would be hard for the song to get any simpler than it already is: a wash of ethereal keyboards, a pedal-steel guitar deployed by “Evil” Graham Lee like a theremin, and the rest of the instruments kept under due restraint. The arrangement is put together with the delicacy of a card tower, which is particularly startling coming straight after the full-fisted throttle of ‘Lonely Stretch’. There is a trace of Joy Division’s most melodic moments – ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ – and just as ‘Lonely Stretch’ took on the Bad Seeds, ‘Wide Open Road’ answers back to that other, now-mythical Australian song of the 1980s, The Go-Betweens’ ‘Cattle And Cane’.

Perfect pop songs come to most artists only once, if they come at all; what is remarkable is that within three years of each other two Australian bands, exiled to London for want of any decent audience back home, playing chaotic tennis matches with each other in between recording sessions, could have both written songs that still remain so perfect, absolutely undiminished no matter how many times you encounter them. What is more, that both songs are landmarks of distinctly Australian writing – songs that take on, in music and words, the task of conveying what it feels like to live here. There. Here. Where is home? Nothing focuses the mind on the qualities of your own landscape – its colours and light, its temperature and topography – quite like being away from it, and missing it constantly, even when you’re trying not to miss it or denying that you are missing it or never expected to miss it in the first place.

To a large extent I thank that other, oft-overlooked female participant in Australian post-punk, The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, for the impact of both. Her technique of following the melody and not the beat – ‘Cattle And Cane’ is in 11/4 time, by the way, should you wish to try and play along – is inimitable, but Alsy McDonald came closest on ‘Wide Open Road’, partially assisted by a drum machine. The result in both songs is an ambience that still feels contemporary – nothing, bar nothing, dates a recording like the drum sound – set off by the lightest of rhythmic touches; shifting and subtly alive. The space opened up by the lack of strictly measured, forward propulsion is also what allows the songs’ melancholy moods to spread out like watercolour, and it is the same space that makes the songs sound – and not just read – Australian. There is a vast distance between the sugar cane fields and the limit of the sky, or between the bitumen and the horizon on the highway that cuts across the Nullabor Plain, between Caiguna and Norseman, which is ostensibly the setting for ‘Wide Open Road’.

‘Wide Open Road’ is not just melancholy, it’s sad. Anyone who maintains that it’s a song about the pleasures of taking off in a car across Australia’s massive expanse is not listening properly; they’re engaging with the myth of the song, and not the fact of it. “So how do you think it feels?/Sleeping by yourself/When the one you love, the one you love/Is with someone else”. The loneliness and wanting is unambiguous. “Well it’s a wide open road/A wide open road/And now you can go any place/That you want to go” – anywhere, which when you’re heartbroken and alone means nowhere, turning in hurt and bewildered circles.

Just a dot on the map

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born To Run’ is not a particularly happy song either, it must be said, just as ‘Born In The USA’ is not a patriotic one, but nevertheless it has a certain defiant optimism that ‘Wide Open Road’ doesn’t; a tinge of against-the-odds triumph which is probably inevitable when you’re playing stadiums and every song needs to be somehow buoyant. Apart from their slot on the Australian Made tour The Triffids never got to play stadiums – it’s hard to tell if they ever wanted to.

Australian artists and listeners have absorbed the tropes of American popular music just as completely as other non-American audiences, but Americans have yet to return the favour. I realised this not long after landing in New York, when I was turning in circles, searching for a familiar sky and missing everyone I’d just left. They were 20,000 kilometres and 14 hours in front of me now, across meridian lines, everyone I’d ever known and loved. On a day when the initial bout of homesickness had a particularly strong grip I went looking for Triffids records: I knew that buying stuff wouldn’t really help me to feel better but I wanted an object to hold onto in the absence of anyone to hold; a talisman of home. I didn’t have a record player but I figured that if there was anywhere in the world where I could walk in off the street and find the records that I wanted lying in the vinyl bins, it would be New York. You can buy anything here, right? About four stores into my search I summoned up enough courage to approach the counter – I’d barely spoken to anyone in a fortnight and American voices still sounded very, very strident to my ears, as if everyone was speaking at least ten decibels louder than was necessary.

“Could you look something up for me, maybe?” I hesitantly asked the shaven-headed young man behind the desk of a fashionable record store that was blasting out dubious 80s hair-metal ballads over the shop stereo, and which boasted a prominent wall display of vintage lounge music LPs depicting bosomy young ladies in states of carefree undress: long hardened against the casual sexism of the music business, I had proceeded with only mild disquiet to the second-hand vinyl racks. “What do you want?” he replied, sounding aggressively bored. “Er, do you have any old Triffids records?” I asked, with a premonition that this would not be a very productive conversation. “What?” the young man responded, his face folding into that contemptuous expression well-honed by record store clerks down the ages, an expression that communicates to you, the unworthy customer (a) I have no idea what you are talking about (b) because I’ve never heard of it, it must be so far off the radar of cool as to be utterly pathetic. “Um, The Triffids?” I tried again, trying to speak up just in case he’d misheard me, but knowing really that the endeavour was hopeless. “No,” he answered, not even bothering to pretend that they might have one old 12” tucked away in a box, waiting to be found if we both looked hard enough. I walked away. I sighed inside. It was the first time in years that I’d felt personally stung by a record store clerk who didn’t care and didn’t want to care about the music that I was searching for. Probably I would have had better luck in London.

The Triffids always had a much bigger audience in Britain and in Europe than they had in Australia – they got to play on The Tube, ‘Wide Open Road’ made Number 26 on the UK charts, and they were anointed with critical approval to such a degree that they not only nabbed themselves a Peel session but, for its first issue of 1985, the cover of the NME too, a feat not to be repeated by another Australian act – aside from Nick Cave – until The Vines in 2002. “THE YEAR OF THE TRIFFIDS” boomed the caption – sub-editors, eh? What larks! – with Jill Birt looking sullenly down the camera above a smaller headline: “MINERS! DESPATCHES FROM THE FRONTLINE.” In the end 1985 would be the year of the Miners’ Strike much more than it was the year of The Triffids, but just about every aspiring Australian indie band since then has been aware that The Triffids are the ones to beat. The dream of near-instantaneous critical acclaim in a foreign country, particularly in Britain, where people are still to be found who think that condescending jokes about scruffy convicts from the colonies are ticklishly original – more, that they’ll actually get a rise – has a strong hold on Australian artists across many fields: we worry a great deal about whether we’re any good or not. This sense of creative insecurity used to be called “cultural cringe”, and people argue that it’s dying out these days, which may be so; if it is then it’s not because we’ve gotten objectively any “better” at making music. Rather, the rise of internet-based music distribution has made it significantly cheaper to develop at least some foreign audience, as compared to the days when you had to up sticks and physically relocate for years on end, and this alone has doubtless helped to boost the confidence of young Australian musicians. Our almost comical distance from the rest of the world matters less and less, in economic terms. But I wonder at the long-term cost to our creativity; to any imperative that might exist for artists to try and figure out what an Australian music might actually sound like. The possibility of cultural homogenisation is not a new complaint, but I make it here if only to sound a small note of disquiet: maybe having instant access to the latest sounds of Brooklyn or Brazil, and being able to knock up a local variant before the MP3 blogs have done buzzing about the original, is not an entirely wonderful state of affairs. The global cutting-edge gets its blade a little blunted when everyone is striving to sound as instantly and profitably up-to-the-minute as possible.

I don’t think that the situation would be improved if only more Australian bands sounded like The Triffids. The point is not to look for the next Born Sandy Devotional but to bear in mind the circumstances that went into making it. Does voluntary, self-imposed exile even matter as an emotional state, anymore? What does homesickness mean when you can write emails home all day, if you want to?

Yet still, the email timestamps will tell you that Australia is as far away as it ever was – always half a day ahead of the rest of the world’s circadian rhythm, sometimes more. The virtual erasure of distance has not removed the real physical gulf that lies between Australia and everywhere else: the Indian Ocean to the left, the Pacific to the right. Having left, I still feel as if I’m living simultaneously in two time zones: always picturing to myself what the people I love might be doing during their hours; always with one eye on the clock.

It’s getting dark earlier now

‘Tender Is The Night’ – another literary reference amongst the dozens that would pepper The Triffids’ career – is the fade-out to Born Sandy Devotional, and the last voice belongs to Jill Birt. This couldn’t be a song about anyone else but David McComb; a song to himself – it’s transparently autobiographical in a way that the more hallucinatory songs on the album aren’t. But it’s written in the third-person and Birt sings it for him, and the deliberate distancing increases its emotional power. It’s a maudlin song, an appropriate enough mood with which to end a record that makes use of the word ‘maudlin’ on its very first track, but it could have well tipped over into self-pity if McComb had taken the vocal. Birt doesn’t emote – she might not even be able to, much less want to, with her high and colourless singing voice – and so the task of creating drama falls back upon the instruments. The key change just after the third verse, where she’s told us that “He made a point of losing her address” is the moment at which the whole song shifts. It’s not as if the discreet string section gets any louder, in fact it momentarily disappears: starker, the mood rises in intensity. And then the sucker-punch: “Well I spoke to a man who says he’s done it all/And the only thing that pleases or excites him now/Is hurting, hurting and hurting some more“. How can you be so young and want to write words of such damning finality? Because it’s entirely possible to be convinced at twenty-three or even younger that you are damned, and not beautiful to go along with it: just a sorry, ugly, hopeless mess. ‘Tender Is The Night’ doesn’t sound damned though, not like ‘The Seabirds’ or ‘Lonely Stretch’ or ‘Life Of Crime’. It sounds like its title says – tender, tender as that refrain – “It’s getting dark earlier now/But where you are, it’s just getting light” – that encapsulates so beautifully what it means to be living a long, long way from home, when you can’t even comfort yourself with the thought of lying down at the same time as an absent lover, because your night is their day, and their day is your night, and so the only hours when you might possibly be thinking of each other at the same time are the earliest and the latest ones, at midnight or at dawn. And so the song rises, pulling up and away into the air on a violin and a chime, and the album is gone before you’ve had a chance to prepare a goodbye. This takeoff is the musical equivalent of the aerial shot on the cover: the details disappear, and you’re left with an impression of sky and of light.

Let her run away

I’m glad now that thanks to stubborn curiosity I finally found something in The Triffids, after years of puzzlement. Glad is possibly the wrong word, thankful might be better: I can’t actually think what it would have been like to imagine my way into leaving Australia, and then doing so, without having The Triffids to listen to. Born Sandy Devotional helped me get ready to leave, and has comforted me since I did leave – on my second night away when I realised that I wouldn’t see the constellation of the Southern Cross in the sky anymore; during those early, exhausting weeks of trying to figure out everything new from the currency to the correct names of vegetables, while missing everything familiar from the format of newspapers to the texture of the pavement. And it still comforts me, in the way that you want to be comforted when you’re lonely and young enough to want something to inflame the loneliness a little bit more, needing the drama of it. “Remember, love songs don’t have to mention”, reads a sentence from David McComb’s notebooks for Born Sandy Devotional, and then it cuts off. Don’t have to mention love.

Epilogue (The long fidelity)

I immersed myself so deeply in The Triffids’ back catalogue during the six months before I wrote this piece that I feared I’d ruined my relationship with them forever. And then, a year later, during another northern winter, I began listening to Born Sandy Devotional all over again, walking lunch hours with my gloved hands in my coat pockets, stepping over icy puddles down under the Manhattan Bridge. I have to be near water to hear this record properly. And then, unexpectedly called home, suddenly swapping winter for summer, I walk into a record store and find a promotional 7” of ‘Wide Open Road’ pinned to the wall. A simple black and white portrait of the band on the front cover, taken at Primrose Hill, a place in London I walked not too many months ago, without realising that once The Triffids walked there too. Robert McComb standing perfectly at ease in a waistcoat, Jill Birt holding – is it a drumstick? – Martyn Casey staring level at the camera, David McComb tallest of all, half-smiling, and focused on a point quite distant, Alsy McDonald privately amused, as if he’s just about to lean in and tell you a great story, “Evil” Graham Lee with boffin spectacles half the size of his face. On the back cover, another black and white photograph: the Western Australian border, ‘COME AGAIN TO WESTERN AUSTRALIA’ partially obliterated by a wag vandal who’s sprayed “Marching Orders” across the bottom of the road sign. “WELCOME TO SOUTH AUSTRALIA” beckons a bit further down the highway, a BP petrol station further still. From Regents Park to the Nullabor – “no trees” – and back again, with the flip of a record sleeve.

The Eyre Highway runs west to east for 1,675 kilometres from Norseman in Western Australia to Port Augusta in South Australia, and the population of the Western Australian section stood, last official count, at 86. A good luck charm, this record will return to America with me and sit on my desk in Brooklyn – population 2.5 million – next to my vinyl copy of The Drones’ Gala Mill, another band originally from Perth who’ve travelled vast distances across the planet and who confront the Australian landscape and psyche with peerless vigour. It took me a long time to understand The Drones, too, though at least they return home on occasion, and to great acclaim and excitement. Have we learned something in the intervening decades, having lost The Triffids so early in their career? Hopefully yes, and yet musicians with the ambition to make Australia the subject of their music remain so rare – and it is ambition that’s needed, because this country is huge and difficult and unrelenting, and to respond in kind, to make work that is honest and unsentimental (because God knows we’re a sentimental bunch, despite the straight-talking reputation), is a task that requires no common amount of vision.

Blackeyes Susans demos

2010-03-07T01:14:00.000-08:00

Hey there

It's been a while. Very busy and interesting times for Triffheads.

Let's see what we have :
- the it's raining pleasure DVD from director Steven Levett : still for sale and a must buy
- the deep in a dream live CD
- the reveal yourself box by Blackeyed Susans
- coming up next month the Triffids 10 CD box issued by Domino titled Come ride with me and the best of 1 CD called Wide open road
- hopefully released very soon the Chad's tree 2 CD compilation of both their albums, their singles and some extras, issued by Memorandum recordings
- last but not least, concerts by The Triffids and friends in London, Hasselt and Athens

And also some demos by the Blackeyed Susans (so-called London sessions) to investigate and enjoy :

1. Spanish is the loving tongue
2. Anchor me
3. In the pines
4. Angel of uncertain times
5. Wee small hours of the morning
6. He'll have to go

http://rapidshare.com/files/360109582/susanslondon.rar

The Jackson Code - Who's watching who ?

2010-01-05T01:37:00.001-08:00

Earlier I posted the albums and singles by The Jackson Code but I forgot this one. So here it is now for you.

1. Who's watching who ?
2. Shadows in a mine
3. A one woman show

http://rapidshare.com/files/330605550/Who_s_Watching_Who.rar

Digging a hole

2009-12-31T04:03:00.001-08:00

Earlier I posted the David McComb penned tracks on the Takaways album sweet and sour. A second album, sweet and sour volume two, contains Digging a hole, sung by Cathy McQuade, originally on tape 6 (full tape here : http://rapidshare.com/files/48679072/tape6.rar).

Here you can find that version : http://rapidshare.com/files/328374026/Digging_a_hole.mp3

I must admit I like it very much.

Enjoy your holidays !

Blackeyed Susans : Some night, somewhere (updated)

2009-11-20T00:00:00.000-08:00

This live album was issued in December 1996 in a limited amount of copies. According to wikipedia it was given away as a bonus with a pressing of "Mouth to mouth", but at the time I bought it separately in a local record store in Genk. Now out of print.

1. Sheets Of Rain
2. Let’s Live
3. Mary Mac
4. I Can’t Find Your Pulse
5. I Need You
6. Glory, Glory
7. She Breathes In (She Breathes Out)
8. A Curse On You

http://rapidshare.com/files/309696159/Some_Night__Somewhere.rar (updated link !)

Deep in a dream

2009-11-08T11:52:00.001-08:00

Deep in a Dream: An Evening with the Songs of David McComb. Buy it here : http://loveinbrightlandscapes.com/new/store.

Description as found on this site : A live album of remarkable interpretations of the late David McComb's songs. Featuring The Blackeyed Susans' only available collection of live recordings, the previously unreleased costar song The Good Life Never Ends and a reading of the David McComb poem Behind the Garages of This Country by Sean M Whelan. Recorded at the overwhelmingly successful benefit show at Melbourne's Corner Hotel in June 2008. 100% of proceeds of the CD will be used for the making of the documentary on David McComb - Love in Bright Landscapes.

The description is not completely correct as of course a Blackeyed Susans live album exists and is posted here : http://triffidsbeach.blogspot.com/2008/01/blackeyed-susans-some-night-somewhere.html

Tracks on this album are :

1. Ocean of You (The Blackeyed Susans)
2. A Curse on You (The Blackeyed Susans)
3. Raining Pleasure (Charles Jenkins)
4. Spanish Blue (Shackelton)
5. 25 to 5 (Shackelton)
6. Red Pony (Diving Bell)
7. Tender is the Night (Diving Bell)
8. Behind the Garages of this Country (Sean M Whelan & The Mime Set)
9. Lonely Stretch (The Mime Set )
10. In the Pines (The Blackeyed Susans)
11. Blackeyed Susan (The Blackeyed Susans)
12. Jimmy (The Blackeyed Susans)
13. The Good Life Never Ends (The Blackeyed Susans)

As you should all buy it (highly recommended and must for all triffheads), I only post one song as a teaser and introduction (and highlight) of the cd.

http://rapidshare.com/files/304202689/Diving_bell_-_red_pony.mp3

Pet Sounds sucks

2009-11-06T04:12:00.000-08:00

Blasphemy ? Nope ! Brilliant tour cd by Lambchop.

http://rapidshare.com/files/303162875/pss.rar

1 The New Cobweb Summer
2 My Blue Wave
3 I Can Hardly Spell My Name
4 Flick
5 You Masculine You
6 Catapillar
7 Bugs
8 The Book I Haven't Read
9 The Puppy and the Leaf
10 Flub

Skyray - Mind Lagoons

2009-09-25T00:29:00.000-07:00

Skyray is a project by Paul Simpson (The Wild Swans). The now OOP Mind Lagoons album also features Bill Drummond (the KLF). Apparently it was Bill who contributed pedal steel guitar samples by "Evil" Graham Lee on some tracks of this album, i.e. samples that were not used on the KLF albums. So here you get your Triffids connection !

I really like Graham's contribution here, as well as his work with the KLF and with (more recently) All India Radio.

Sunset Love Drone
Jet Stream Summer
Bikini Atoll
Sunken Ships
Mind Lagoons (spoken word by Bill Drummond)
Marine Light Interlude
Ornate Flame Terminal
Girl in a Birdcage
Starry Dome Interlude
Jet Stream (Vapour Trails)
Aloha Sunset Lovedrome
High Viking (Hidden Track)

http://rapidshare.com/files/284699315/Mind_Lagoons.rar

Blackeyed susans boxset coming

2009-09-15T20:53:00.000-07:00

At the End of October, the Susans will start a short live tour in Australia. This is what I got from the liveguide website :

The Blackeyed Susans embark on their first national tour in over five years to celebrate the release of their new retrospective box set ‘Reveal Yourself 1989-2005’. Lush, dark and romantic, The Susans last album, ‘Shangri-La’, earned them their second Aria nomination and had Rolling Stone Magazine declaring them national treasures. Now they return to the stage with a show that spans their entire back catalogue, serving both the long time true believers out there and those seeking an introduction to the op-shop styings the band so beautifully twist into something uniquely their own. Featuring with The Blackeyed Susans will be pedal steel ace and part-time Susan "Evil" Graham Lee of The Triffids.

So apparently the long wait will be over. I haven't seen a tracklist yet. Maybe some reader of this blog knows more ?

As a teaser you can find here a live version of Spin the wheel. This track is on a lust for live 2cd set of triple j performances.

http://rapidshare.com/files/268641258/07_Spin_The_Wheel.mp3

And from facebook : tracklist
CD1:
Don't Call Yourself An Angel
Enemy Mine
Cripple Creek
Ocean Of You
Will's Blues
Glory Glory
Trouble
A Curse On You
Every Gentle Soul
Memories
Apartment #9
Dirty Water
This One Eats Souls
Let's Live
Mary Mac
Mouth To Mouth
By Your Hand
I Need You
The End Of The Line

CD2:
Smokin' Johnny Cash
Blue Skies Blue Sea
I Am A Singer
Bottle Of Red
You're A Good Doctor
Come Ride With Me
To Skin A Man
No Direction Home
Take Care
The End Of The World
Plastic Jesus
If I Can Dream
A Cat Needs A Mouse
End Of Time
Deliver Me
Lost Horizon
Endless Night

CD3:
Ocean Of You (Alt)*
Jimmy (London)*
You're My Flaw
You're Draggin' Me*
Reveal Yourself (Bedroom)*
This One Eats Souls (Bedroom)*
Take Me Down
Someone Watching Over Me
Moody River
Lonesome Town
Dive For Your Memory
State Trooper (Single Version)
Sheets Of Rain (Live)
You Rule Me
Make It Easy On Yourself
Four Walls*
A Song Goes To War*
Daughters Of Charity*
Zanzibar
*previously unreleased

DVD-Film Clips:
Enemy Mine
Trouble
A Curse On You
Mary Mac
Let's Live
Smokin' Johnny Cash
Spin The Wheel
To Skin A Man
Private Dancer
Shangri-La

The box set is released on Friday October 30, 2009. It includes a total of 65 tracks and retails for around $40. It will be available in all good music stores and from the merchandise desk at the upcoming Blackeyed Susans shows.

Tall Tales & true - Superstition highway

2009-08-31T03:12:00.001-07:00

5 track EP by Matthew de la Hunty's band.

Robert McComb plays guitar. Some sources on the internet even mention that Dave played guitar on the blistering title track. Does anyone know more ?

http://rapidshare.com/files/271312347/Superstition_Highway.rar

Sparklers : Don't go changing / overworking

2009-08-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

The last Sparklers one from my vaults, the brilliant Don't go changing. This ends my posts on the Melanie Oxley / Chris Abrahams combination.

Flipside is Overworking. I understand that one was issued earlier as a single as well but I don't have it.

http://rapidshare.com/files/268641251/sparklersdontgochanging.rar

Wide open road - The Panics

2009-08-24T05:21:00.000-07:00

The classic Triffids song as covered by The Panics, also from Perth. You can find this on the Like a version vol. 4 compilation.

http://rapidshare.com/files/269770413/03-the_panics-wide_open_road.mp3

Sparklers : Persuasion

2009-08-21T00:52:00.000-07:00

Well, this must be one of the most ugly LP covers - very eighties I suppose.

A1 Heart and Soul
A2 How Have You Managed
A3 Curiosity
A4 Persuasion
A5 Physical Game
A6 Sweet Love
B1 Truck
B2 I Want You to Know
B3 Money Honey
B4 White Pain
B5 Growing Tree
B6 Don't Go Changing

http://rapidshare.com/files/268641256/sparklerspersuasion.rar

Though sound quality is good for my ears, please note that I blew up the track incrementing when transferring it from my vinyl. For instance, track B2 is split over files 8 and 9. So if you transfer this to a cd, I advise you to have no pauses inbetween tracks.

Apparently this has also been issued on cd with two non album bonus tracks (can be found on the singles I uploaded before and one final single from my collection is yet to come next week). If anyone has it, I would be very grateful if he or she could upload that one.

Sparklers : Heart and Soul/Middle of time

2009-08-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

A third single by the Sparklers for you to listen to. Heart and soul also appears on the only album they made (Persuasion).

http://rapidshare.com/files/268641254/sparklersheartandsoul.rar

Too hot to move / On the street where U live

2009-08-19T04:30:00.001-07:00

With temperatures over 30°C it's too hot to move too hot to think (in Belgium).

Sweet and Sour was an Australian television series which screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in 1984. It was created by Tim Gooding and Johanna Pigott and was produced internally for the ABC by Jan Chapman.

The main storyline of the series followed the efforts of a fictional band, The Takeaways, to break into the Sydney music scene. Numerous Australian and New Zealand musicians and songwriters were involved in this TV series, i.a. David McComb !!!

What you get here are the The Takeaways versions of On the street where U live and Too hot to move, from the 1984 sweet and sour album.

http://rapidshare.com/files/269087923/Takeaways.rar

Sparklers : Merry go round / When you're alone

2009-08-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

Another single by the Sparklers.

http://rapidshare.com/files/268641255/sparklersmerrygoround.rar

Sparklers - So often dreaming

2009-08-18T01:55:00.000-07:00

As promised I dug into my vinyl for some Sparklers stuff, the Aussie band Melanie Oxley and Chris Abrahams played in. Here I have for you the single (from 1986) So often dreaming, penned by both, with its flipside Can't take anymore, penned by Melanie.

I hope you enjoy this one.

http://rapidshare.com/files/268641257/sparklerssooftendreaming.rar

Smile !

2009-08-13T02:31:00.000-07:00

Another nice Smile mix made from the originals

1. Prayer
2. Bicycle rider-Gee
3. Heroes and villains
4. Barnyard
5. Do you dig worms
6. You were my sunshine
7. Cabinessence
8. Wonderful
9. Look
10. Child is the father of the man
11. Vibrations
12. Vibrations
13. I'm in great shape
14. Holiday
15. Vege-tables
16. Earth
17. Wind chimes
18. Fire
19. Water - I love to say dada
20. Surf's up

http://rapidshare.com/files/266502310/Smile_Mono.rar

Day of my ascension

2009-08-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Here you get an interview on Australian radio with Matthew de la Hunty, known of the band Tall tales & true (Rob McComb used to play in that band - I might upload some stuff of 'em in the future).

Included is a cover of Day of my ascension, originally on the David McComb album Love of Will.

http://rapidshare.com/files/266602845/delahunty.mp3

Jason Penick Smile

2009-08-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

While we are "into Jason Penick", I present to you his mix of the legendary lost Beach Boys album.

1. Prayer
2. Gee
3. Heroes & villains
4. Do you like worms
5. Barnyard
6. Old master painter sunshine
7. Cabin essence
8. Wonderful
9. Look
10. Child is father of the man
11. Surf's up
12. I'm in great shape
13. I wanna be around Friday night
14. Vega-tables
15. Holiday
16. Air
17. Wind chimes
18. Mrs. O Leary's cow
19. Fire
20. Water chant
21. Love to say dada
22. Prayer - reprise
23. Good vibrations

http://rapidshare.com/files/266455216/SMiLE__Jason_Penick_.rar

Concert/Live in London

2009-08-11T01:08:00.001-07:00

And yet another Jason Penick deluxe edition. This time two live albums by the Beach Boys with extra's. Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/265799064/Concert_Live_in_London.rar

Another Beach Boys deluxe edition

2009-08-10T00:37:00.000-07:00

Another one compiled by Jason Penick : shut down vol 2 / all summer long. Enjoy !

1-12. Shut Down vol. 2 - stereo from 2fer
13-24. All Summer Long - stereo from 2fer
25. The Lord's Prayer
26. I Do
27. What'd I Say (live 01.64)
28. I Can See Right Through You [Go Away Boy] - backing track
29. Ganz Allein
30. Don't Back Down - alt. take
31. Let's Live [Before We Die] - backing track
32. The Monkey's Uncle (feat. Annette)
33. Honda 55
34. Little Honda - alt. take

http://rapidshare.com/files/265714478/Shut_Down_vol_2_All_Summer_Long.rar

Surfin safari - surfin USA

2009-08-05T04:14:00.000-07:00

Another Beach boys "deluxe edition" with bonus tracks as compiled by Jason Penick. Thanks go to him.

1-12. Surfin' Safari LP (mono from Capitol 2fer)
13-24. Surfin' U.S.A. LP (stereo from Capitol 2fer)
25. Surfin' - rehearsal 1961 (GV box set edit)
26. One Way Road to Love 1962 (Wilson/ Usher)#
27. Beginning of the End 1962 (Wilson/ Usher)
28. Visions 1962 (Wilson/ Usher)#
29. My Only Alibi aka Human 1962 (Wilson/ Usher)#
30. Their Hearts Were Full of Spring - demo 1962
31. Mr. Moto/ Interview (live 1962)
32. Surfin' Safari from "One Man's Challenge" (live 1962)
33. Land Ahoy 1962
34. Cindy, Oh Cindy 1962
35. Surfin' U.S.A. demo 1962
36. Punchline 1963
37. Little Surfer Girl demo 1963
38. [When Summer Comes] Gonna Hustle You demo 1963
39. [Thank Him for] Our Love demo 1963
40. The Baker Man 1963
41. Side Two 1963

http://rapidshare.com/files/263655103/Surfin__039__Safari_Surfin__039__USA.rar

Beach boys deluxe edition

2009-08-04T05:30:00.001-07:00

Deluxe edition of Surfer girl / Little deuce coupe as compiled by mr. Jason Penick from the rockin beach boys forum. Enjoy !

1-12 Surfer Girl LP (stereo version from 2fer)
13-24 Little Deuce Coupe LP (stereo version from 2fer)
25 In My Room - demo/ mono
26 Back Home - Brian's 1963 version/ mono
27 Pamela Jean (the Survivors)/ mono
28 After the Game (the Survivors)/ mono
29 Be True to Your School - 45 version/ mono
30 The Things We Did Last Summer/ mono
**Live at the Hollywood Bowl 11.01.63**
31 Intro (live)
32 Little Deuce Coupe (live)
33 In My Room (live)
34 Be True to Your School (live)
35 Surfer Girl (live)
36 Outro (live)

http://rapidshare.com/files/263610671/Surfer_Girl_Little_Deuce_Coupe.rar

Coal - Melanie Oxley & Chris Abrahams

2009-08-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

This is within my knowledge the only other available album by the duo. I also have some Sparklers stuff, the band they played in, on vinyl. I will see if I can find time to rîp that stuff.

1 Light The Candle
2 Baby Baby
3 Belief
4 More Famous
5 Follow Me Down
6 I Know
7 Never Expected
8 Hole In My Head
9 Next World
10 Falling Star
11 Round
12 Let's Get Down
13 Follow My Heart

http://rapidshare.com/files/263174057/Coal.rar

Jerusalem Bay - Melanie Oxley & Chris Abrahams

2009-07-12T23:37:00.001-07:00

Third album by the duo, this time a more acoustic rendition.

1. So Fell You
2. Safe Journey
3. Wiseblood
4. Air
5. Time Of First Departures
6. Stolen
7. King Of Surfaces
8. That Animal
9. Jerusalem Bay
10. Cry Me A River

http://rapidshare.com/files/255225887/Jerusalem_Bay.rar

Welcome to violet - Melanie Oxley & Chris Abrahams

2009-07-06T06:56:00.000-07:00

The first full album of this duo (1992) including pedal steel contributions by Graham Lee of the Triffids ! A must for all Triffheads around.

Sweet Girl
Poppies
Breathe
Everything Is Made Of Wood
Smile
You Can' t See Anything I Do
Here Come
You' ve Got A Lot To Learn
Short Time In A Suitcase
Everything About You Is Unbreakable
Don't Try So Hard
Somewhere To Fly

http://rapidshare.com/files/252623385/welcometoviolet.rar

Resisting calm - Melanie Oxley & Chris Abrahams

2009-06-30T01:24:00.001-07:00

Melanie Oxley performed backing vocals on The Triffids classic mini-album Raining pleasure. At the recent "reunion" concerts in Australia she performed Embedded in a stunning way.

Together with Chris Abrahams she has recorded (within my knowledge) an EP and 4 albums. Here you can get that EP called Resisting calm. The most recent album Blood oranges can be found on this terrific blog : http://stripedsunlight.blogspot.com/2009/06/melanie-oxley-and-chris-abrahams-blood.html

http://rapidshare.com/files/250235192/Resisting_Calm.rar

1. Siren
2. He's So Tired
3. Benchtop
4. Happy Birthday

If you are interested I can upload the other albums too. In the meanwhile, enjoy your summer holidays !

Tim Ashmore Smile

2009-05-29T02:43:00.000-07:00

Sun is in the air and you need another smile ? here is Tim Ashmore smile ! Enjoy the Beach Boys.

http://rapidshare.com/files/238465939/tim_ashmore_smile.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/238465938/tim_ashmore_smile.part1.rar

Costar - part 2

2009-04-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

Here you get the second part. Enjoy !

1. She's An Angel (Will Akers vocal)
2. Victoria (Will Akers vocal)
3. Kiss Him He's History
4. I Want To Conquer You
5. Crucifixion Speech
6. Everything Is Fixed
7. Inside Of Your Heart
8. Trick Of The Light

A cleaned up version of kiss him can also be found at the main triffids website.

http://rapidshare.com/files/221596217/COSTAR2.rar

Turning point

2009-04-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of the ms forum, here you get a fake 2009 compilation called Turning Point.

Brian Wilson
"Turning Point"
2009 compilation
16 tracks

01 Concert Tonight (4:44 version)
02 Don't You Just Know It (with Jan Berry)
03 Let's Get Tonight (early version of "The Waltz")
04 Daddy's Little Girl (recycling "Sail Plane Song" bass line)
05 Goodnight Irene
06 Turning Point (early version of "You've Touched Me")
07 Save the Day (The Power of Love) (early version of "Fairy Tale")
08 In the Night Time (early version, no backing vocals)
09 Some Sweet Day
10 Christine (early version of "Barbie (Living Doll)")
11 Spirit of Rock and Roll (just BW, no band or Bob Dylan)
12 The Boogie's Back in Town
13 Sweets for My Sweet
14 Heavenly Bodies
15 This Could Be the Night
16 What a Wonderful World

http://rapidshare.com/files/223607021/Brian_Wilson_-_Turning_Point.rar

Costar !

2009-04-15T00:42:00.000-07:00

This is part 1 of a Costar concert from the Cherry Tree Hotel, Melbourne June 1998. This is the most recent recording I have of Dave.

1. I Kept My Eye On You
2. Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think
3. The Good Life Never Ends
4. Someone Watching Over Me (Will Akers vocal)
5. The Seabirds
6. In The Pines
7. Jerdacuttup Man
8. Devil Please (Will Akers vocal)
9. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

http://rapidshare.com/files/221517266/COSTAR1.rar

If there's enough interest, I will post part 2 as well.

zanzibar

2009-03-29T23:46:00.000-07:00

Another rare Blackeyed susans track, from the Stoneage cameos compilation, a tribute to the Hoodoo Gurus masterpiece Stoneage Romeos.

http://rapidshare.com/files/215215742/zanzibar.mp3

Glory Glory

2009-02-25T06:08:00.000-08:00

While we are awaiting the retrospecive box, here you get Blackeyed Susans from Live at the Wireless : Glory Glory !

http://rapidshare.com/files/201472057/bes_glory_glory.mp3

It's raining pleasure

2009-02-22T23:57:00.000-08:00

So Saturday evening the European (in fact it was the world) premiere of It's raining pleasure was shown in Hasselt, Belgium. Director Steven Levett was there to introduce his € 15.000 film.

It was a real treat for us Triffids fans, those Sydney gigs were amazing. Let's hope Steven manages to have this issued in the near future so that we can all buy a copy.

One of the many highlights to me (though not to others, I heard afterwards) was Steve Kilbey's contribution (Lonely stretch, Wide open road). Here you get his version of Wide open road with his own band, The Church.

http://rapidshare.com/files/201472058/churchWOR.mp3

Another highlight was Rob Snarski and This one eats souls. Here you find the live version as made available on the itsrainingpleasure.com website.

(link deleted by request)

Triffids live in Frankfurt, 7 June 1989

2009-01-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

One of the last Triffids things from my vaults. A concert of the last European tour in Frankfurt (Germany), not from the 6th of July as wrongly labeled, but from 7 June 1989.

A real treat as :
- it is an excellent show
- it is a complete show
- it contains some songs that they did not play very often like the Pet Shop Boys cover rent and the Gram Parsons cover Sin city.

1. Intro & Property is condemned
2. Trick of the light
3. Kelly's blues
4. Goodbye little boy
5. Too hot to move, too hot to think
6. Spinning top song
7. Rent
8. Falling over you
9. In the pines
10. One mechanic town
11. Wide open road
12. New Year's greetings (the country widower)
13. What goes on
14. Fairytale love
15. Unmade love
16. How could I help but love you
17. Billy
18. Jerdacuttup man
19. Sin City

Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/186976474/Frankfurt_6_july_1989.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/186976478/Frankfurt_6_july_1989.part2.rar

Blue ruin - Flame

2009-01-19T06:44:00.000-08:00

Second album by Blue Ruin, I think this one is their best known. Again, great stuff.

And again, what a helluva woman, this time even more powerful, and she appears to be on the album cover ;-).

1. Bad Gin
2. Kill Some Time
3. Cure
4. Lord's Calling
5. Slow Train
6. What a Helluva Woman
7. Heart
8. Calling You Out
9. I'm Down
10. Jealousy
11. Cherry Tree

http://rapidshare.com/files/185854106/blue_ruin_flame.rar

Blue ruin - such sweet thunder

2009-01-05T04:35:00.001-08:00

Blue Ruin were an Australian band. The singer's voice always reminded me of David Mc Comb. The musical style can be described as a more jazzy Nick Cave & Bad Seeds.

Such sweet thunder is their first studio album. I ripped it from my vinyl.

I believe Triffheads will like this very much.

1. Hey Bo
2. What A Hell'uva Woman
3. She's Murder
4. Kill Jaw
5. Waterhole
6. In The Mood
7. Same Thing
8. Love Me When I'm Low
9. Waterhole (Reprise)

http://rapidshare.com/files/180014201/such_sweet_thunder.rar

Merry Christmas

2008-12-14T23:40:00.000-08:00

I wish you a happy end of the year. Listen to the beach Boys Christmas album and add the SOT 3-disk to it. Here are the links.

http://rapidshare.com/files/46286389/christmas1.zip
http://rapidshare.com/files/46337929/christmas2.zip
http://rapidshare.com/files/46334950/christmas3.zip

In addition, here's a christmas track from one of my favourite bands, Belle and Sebastian. It's "O come O come Emmanuel" from the "It's a cool cool christmas" compilation. Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/173491445/08_O_Come._O_Come_Emmanuel.mp3

Triffids live in Amsterdam 9 June 1989

2008-11-05T04:32:00.000-08:00

As promised another Triffids concert. I taped this from a Belgian radio broadcast. Not the complete set but great nevertheless. Enjoy !

1. Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think
2. Goodbye Little Boy
3. Property Is Condemned
4. Personal Things
5. Trick Of The Light
6. Unmade Love
7. What Goes On
8. Spinning Top Song
9. Fairytale Love
10. Billy (incomplete)

http://rapidshare.com/files/160181614/triffidslive1989amsterdam.rar

I'm almost dawn

2008-10-31T06:39:00.000-07:00

You will have noticed a lack of updates. These are busy times.

Here you get "I'm almost dawn" a track written by David Mc Comb and James Patterson which is part of the "Darlinghurst demos" by Champagne Love Garden, the name of a James Patterson project.

Next month I'll put up another Triffids concert.

http://rapidshare.com/files/159329153/Champagne_Love_Garden.rar

Spanish blue

2008-09-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

Just noticed I hadn't uploaded this Triffids single yet, so here you go. It's the A and B sides Spanish Blue and Twisted brain.

http://rapidshare.com/files/148487734/spanish.rar

Underground Lovers - Takes you back

2008-09-10T05:35:00.000-07:00

1. Takes you back
2. Undone
3. A town called Presley
4. I waited to see you

http://rapidshare.com/files/128826094/Takes_you_back.rar

spector mix

2008-09-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

http://rapidshare.com/files/141798056/PSSM.rar

Splendid

2008-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

EP from 1995 by the Underground Lovers.

1. Beautiful world
2. Wonderful things
3. Terrific and free
4. Splendid she said

http://rapidshare.com/files/128826092/Splendid_EP.rar

Family name

2008-08-19T23:23:00.000-07:00

This track from Dungeon tapes is to my knowledge the only one that appeared on CD, on the Inner city sound compilation. Here you get that CD version. A very great track that shows the need of (at least) a CD compilation of the cassette tapes the Triffids made in their early days.

Fans will note that the first lines of the song were re-used in Personal things.

http://rapidshare.com/files/138668780/16_Family_Name.mp3

Underground Lovers - Your eyes

2008-08-19T00:18:00.000-07:00

1. Your eyes (Shaggy mix)
2. Your eyes (Scooby mix)
3. I'll be your mirror
4. Alien
5. In a memory

http://rapidshare.com/files/128826095/your_eyes.rar

Triffids live in Amsterdam - 7 december 1987

2008-08-10T23:45:00.001-07:00

This is the first Triffids concert I got, taped from Belgian or Dutch radio (can't remember which one) on a BASF 90 min cassette. Not the complete concert though, just 14 tracks, but it's all I have. It was the last concert of that tour.

http://rapidshare.com/files/136459835/7dec1987.rar

1. Wide Open Road
2. Property Is Condemned
3. In The Pines
4. Suntrapper
5. Trick Of The Light
6. Hometown Farewell Kiss
7. Bury Me Deep In Love
8. Raining Pleasure
9. Jerdacuttup Man
10. Kelly's Blues
11. Keep Your Eyes On The Hole
12. Rosevel
13. I'm a lonesome hobo
14. How Could I Help But Love You?

Triffids live in London

2008-08-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

London April 1989 Shaw Theatre
1. Too Hot To Move
2. A trick Of The Light
3. Goodbye Little Boy
4. The Spinning Top Song
5. Jerdacuttup Man
6. Lonely Stretch
7. I'm Beginning To See The Light
8. Fairytale Love

http://rapidshare.com/files/135306285/the_triffids_-_live_london_radio_1989.rar

I got it from this great blog : http://stripedsunlight.blogspot.com/. Check it out !

Underground Lovers - Get to notice

2008-08-04T02:12:00.000-07:00

By request, here you find the OOP first album by the Undies.

http://rapidshare.com/files/128826091/get_to_notice.rar

1. Get to notice
2. Yes I do
3. She draws circles
4. Girl afraid
5. Persistence
6. Wasted
7. Looking for rain
8. Sleep
9. Lick the boot
10. My american accent

Blackeyed susan

2008-07-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Alley did a one hour special (on Australian radio station RRR) on Dave's post- Triffids work.

You can stream it here : http://www.rrr.org.au/archive.php?archive=audio

Guests were Phil Kakulas and Bill McDonald.

In the show he did a cross fade of Blackeyed susan from the demo version on Black Swan disc 2 to the regular version from the album.

I made a litle mp3 containing a short introduction and an interview with Phil Kakulas and the new "mix" of Blackeyed susan. You can find it here :

http://rapidshare.com/files/126876516/DavidMcComb19062008.MP3

By the way, this will be the only post for July. Enjoy your holidays !

Brian Wilson presents smile instrumentals

2008-06-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

Here I present to you 4 instrumental tracks from the vinyl version of BWPS.

It's Heroes & villains, Cabin essence, On a holiday and wind chimes.

Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/126074870/smileinstrumentals.rar

Cold feeling - Underground Lovers

2008-06-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

Underground Lovers were an Australian hidden treasure for me for a long time. I heard from them on the Triffids forums and collected most of their material.

Cold feeling is the 6th studio album and has a lot of electronica on it. And pedal steel by Graham Lee ! A great album that now is out of print.

http://rapidshare.com/files/124420505/Cold_Feeling.rar

Can't wait

2008-06-16T05:53:00.001-07:00

http://www.blackeyedsusans.com.au/latestNews.htm

Triffids - Field of glass

2008-06-02T05:04:00.000-07:00

The Field of glass EP was one of the first recordings by the Triffids I bought. Actually, it's three songs from the first Peel session. Now you can find it in full glory again on the Beautiful waste and other songs CD.

Did you know that they actually remixed FOG for the record ? Well then, now you can verify this as I have here the original Peel session version as broadcasted on the radio. Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/118285974/Field_of_Glass.mp3

Triffids third peel session

2008-05-26T03:07:00.001-07:00

Unlike the previous sessions, this one has never been officially issued.

1. Kelly's blues
2. Wide open road
3. Kathy knows
4. Keep your eyes on the hole

http://rapidshare.com/files/117709293/peel3.rar

Paul Kelly - Raining pleasure

2008-05-18T23:48:00.000-07:00

This is from the promo of Paul Kelly's latest offering.

"On September 20th, 2007 Paul Kelly performed at The Empire Theatre in Toowoomba, Queensland in front of an adoring crowd. The show took place at the tail end of Paul's 6 week national theatre tour in support of the album "Stolen Apples" where he performed his latest album in its entirety before playing some of his most loved songs during the second half of the show.

The show was filmed by Melbourne's Renegade Films and directed by Paul Drane. After several months of mixing and editing under the watchful eye of PK himself, "Live Apples: Stolen Apples Performed Live in its Entirety Plus 16 More Songs" is ready to see the light of day.

As the title suggests, this 2 hour show includes Paul's latest gold selling album 'Stolen Apples' performed from stat to finish and a selection of other classic songs spanning his entire career such as: 'To Her Door', 'Deeper Water', 'Dumb Things', 'Sweet Guy', 'Before Too Long' and 'Careless'."

This promo doesn't mention the excellent cover (with New Buffalo) of Raining pleasure. You can listen to it here : http://rapidshare.com/files/115968650/14_Raining_pleasure.mp3

Mike Love - Looking back with love

2008-05-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

Argantonio asked for this one. I see that it's available on the legendary masked summer blog. Grab it while you can : http://legendarymaskedsummer.blogspot.com/2008/05/formula.html

And saves me the upload.

Busy busy busy

2008-05-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted in a while because I'm so busy I haven't got much time to upload stuff. I'm nog giving up yet, but posts will be more irregular than they used to be.

As my time is limited, feel free to request some stuff and if I have it, it will be handled first.

And for BB fans who haven't noticed it yet, Jakob (Lightman) is posting tons of stuff on his re-opened blog. Go there !

Triffids tribute in Hasselt

2008-04-29T23:51:00.000-07:00

This is the concert of 23 June 2006, the first of the short tribute in Hasselt (two shows) and Amsterdam (posted already earlier).
1. Too hot to move
2. Trick of the light
3. Place in the sun
4. Good fortune rose
5. Raining pleasure
6. Jerdacuttup man
7. Go home Eddie
8. Goodbye little boy
9. Property is condemned
10. "Handsome Steve Miller" speech
11. Personal things
12. Life of crime
13. Lonely stretch
14. Stolen property
15. Tender is the night (the long fidelity)
16. Once a day
17. Field of glass
18. I kept my eye on you
19. Wide open road
20. Bury me deep in love
21. Fairytale love

tracks 1-11 : http://rapidshare.com/files/111443064/triffids23-6-06p1.rar
tracks 12-21 : http://rapidshare.com/files/111468854/triffids23-6-06p2.rar

Smiling in Liverpool

2008-04-21T00:15:00.001-07:00

This is Brian performing Smile in Liverpool on 7 March 2004. I got this from the Project Smile group. It was posted as wav files, here you can get it in mp3 at 256.

http://rapidshare.com/files/109175438/Smile_live_in_liverpool.rar

yet another version of Raining pleasure

2008-04-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

This time by Charles Jenkins from Aussie band Icecream Hands. Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/107705266/charles_jenkins_raining_pleasure.mp3

Triffids live on Blah Blah Blah

2008-04-07T00:23:00.000-07:00

This is a recording of a TV show in Australia in 1985 with a live performance by the Triffids. Enjoy !

1. Bury me deep in love
2. Interview with Andrew Denton
3. Trick of the light
4. Hometown farewell kiss
5. Kelly's blues
6. Once a day

http://rapidshare.com/files/105508854/BLAH85.rar

David Westlake

2008-04-03T07:15:00.000-07:00

David Westlake (maybe known to you from the band the Servants) recorded a 6 track LP in 1987, assisted by Luke Haines (guitar and piano), known from The Auteurs and his humble self, and by Marty and Alsy (The Triffids rhythm section).

This has been re-issued on cd but seems to be unavailable. I have ripped my vinyl copy.

I like this record with VU oriented pop very much.

1. The Word Around Town
2. Dream Come True
3. Rings On Her Fingers
4. Everlasting
5. She Grew And She Grew
6. Talk Like That

http://rapidshare.com/files/104545216/Westlake.rar

Triffids - beyond the southern cross

2008-03-26T03:53:00.000-07:00

Beyond the southern cross is a 2 LP collection of tracks by young Australian bands (1979-1984), on which the Triffids appear with two tracks recorded April 1983 in the Dream Studios : MGM and My baby thinks she's a train.

You can get these tracks here.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?dxc2ytlrhi3

That lucky old sun

2008-03-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

These appear to be studio demos of the forthcoming (?) album by Brian Wilson. I liked it very much.
Presented to you as flac-files. Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/102244691/TLOS_Studio_Demo_FLAC.part1.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/102248739/TLOS_Studio_Demo_FLAC.part2.rar

edit : if you prefer mp3's, go here : http://doyoulikeworms.blogspot.com/2008/04/that-lucky-old-sun-demos.html

David McComb - Clear out my mind

2008-03-25T01:01:00.000-07:00

This is the second single from Love of will.

1. Clear out my mind
2. Song of no return
3. Lullaby
4. Casino light
5. White nights / Born this way

http://rapidshare.com/files/102170860/Clear_Out_My_Mind.rar

BB - Smile !

2008-03-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

Here you get the grooveblaster mix !

http://rapidshare.com/files/101008428/grooveblaster_mix.rar

Raining pleasure

2008-03-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

This is the version by the Paradise Motel, as released on their EP Some deaths take forever (limited to 2.000 copies). Apparently, their live version was a cracker and this version was regarded as a disappointment. If anyone has it, please feel free to share.

I think you shouldn't see this version as a real cover as it became something very different from the original.

http://rapidshare.com/files/99055991/Raining_Pleasure__1_.mp3

Chad's tree - Sunday's bells

2008-03-10T01:24:00.001-07:00

from the perfect travelling companion cassette. Great track. Enjoy !

http://rapidshare.com/files/97570131/Chad_s_tree_-_Sunday_Bells.mp3

Jackson Code - The things you need (single)

2008-03-03T05:38:00.001-08:00

This is the final Jackson Code posting. Enjoy.

I will see what to do next. There are so many BB blogs around now that there isn't much that I have and is not posted elsewhere.

I still have some Triffids thingies and some related stuff. I will see what to do with it. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

1. The things you need
2. Let me down easy
3. Hold your head high
4. Yesterday's here
5. Kathleen

http://rapidshare.com/files/89866260/The_things_you_need_CDS.rar

Chad's tree - sweet jesus blue eyes

2008-02-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

This is the 12" combining the singles sweet jesus blue eyes and crush the lily. Enjoy !

1. Sweet Jesus Blue Eyes
2. To the highest bidder
3. Crush the lily
4. Toll for Josephine

http://rapidshare.com/files/92813448/SJBE_CTL.rar

Mike Love - Unleash the love

2008-02-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

By request this unreleased album. What shall I say. It is not great and maybe should stay unreleased. But judge for yourself.

1. Unleash The Love
2. Cool Head
3. Anything For You
4. Happy Birthday
5. Pisces Brothers
6. Everyone’s In Love With You
7. 10,000 Years
8. Glow Crescent Glow
9. Daybreak
10. Too Cruel
11. Brian’s Back
12. I Don’t Wanna Know
13. Love Foundation
14. Only One World

part 1 : http://www.mediafire.com/?tk1f0tjqige
part 2 : http://rapidshare.com/files/94731890/Unleash_the_love.part2.rar

triffids - next re-issues

2008-02-22T02:31:00.000-08:00

Domino has announced 7 April as the release date for the next re-issues. I laid my hands on the 3 (promo) cd's.

"Beautiful waste and other songs" consists of :
- Raining pleasure mini album
- Lawson Square Infirmary mini album
- Field of glass EP
- Wide open road 12 " exclusive B-sides
- Beautiful waste

"Treeless plain" has the original album plus an interview and live takes from JJJ.

"The black swan" is a double CD and the real treat to me. The first consists of the original album with the B-sides to Goodbye little boy and Falling over you mixed in between, plus the surprise "Jack's hole", sung by Jill and unknown to me, as well as a studio version of How could I help but love you. The second CD has demo versions of most Black Swan tracks, plus some demos of songs that are unknown to me.

In the rar file you will find a live version of Hell of a summer and Jack's hole, encoded at only 128 as you should all buy these albums.

http://rapidshare.com/files/94731891/reissues.rar

Chad's tree - Stroller in the attic

2008-02-20T07:46:00.000-08:00

Great non-album single by Chad's tree.

1. Stroller in the attic
2. The orchard

http://rapidshare.com/files/92813450/stroller.rar

Chad's tree - Kerosene

2008-02-19T08:35:00.000-08:00

This is the second and final album by Chad's tree. Ripped from my vinyl version that I recently obtained. Enjoy !

1. Take Away Their Blue
2. Crossing Of The Miles
3. Of The Clay
4. North To South
5. The Flood Johanna
6. [Untitled]
7. There's A Turn
8. Rosebed Baby
9. Mercy How The Paths Getting Darker
10. Pale Messenger
11. Come Thursday Midnight

http://rapidshare.com/files/92832627/Kerosene.rar

Triffids - Lonely stretch

2008-02-18T00:24:00.000-08:00

This is some kind of a rarity I suppose. Taken from a cassette called "The perfect travelling companion" here you will find The Triffids performing Lonely stretch live "at the Red Parrot".

http://rapidshare.com/files/92813447/Lonely_stretch__red_parrot_.mp3

Jackson Code - The second greatest story ever told

2008-02-13T00:09:00.000-08:00

This is a 2cd compilation. First CD consists of tracks from the four studio albums (you can find these in earlier posts), the second disk is full of rarities.

(1) She's got you
(2) The polka dot song
(3) What's that burning?
(4) I'll let you down
(5) Just how dark are your nights?
(6) Jessica's tree
(7) Yesterday's coffee
(8) Who cares anyway?
(9) You are my skin
(10) Slow cookin'
(11) Nail it (you better get your voodoo right)
(12) Crawfish
(13) Helpless
(14) Blue valentines
(15) Silks and roses
(16) Flaming star

http://rapidshare.com/files/90118349/Rarities.rar

Pacific Ocean Blue

2008-02-12T01:26:00.000-08:00

So this will soon be re-issued with lots of bonus material including the Bambu album (for more details look e.g. at Dutchie's blog).
What I have here is a rip of the vinyl, as a teaser and an introduction if you don't know this terrific album.

http://rapidshare.com/files/87306966/POB.rar

Jackson Code : Bring yourself home to me

2008-02-11T02:35:00.000-08:00

1. Bring yourself home to me
2. Summerwine (Lee Hazlewood cover !)
3. Here I go again
4. The driest season

http://rapidshare.com/files/89866258/Bring_Yourself_Home_To_Me.rar

Jackson Code - The things you need

2008-02-08T03:14:00.000-08:00

This is the fourth and final regular studio album by the Jackson Code.

1. Bring yourself home to me 3:56
2. Yesterday's Coffee 3:14
3. Who cares anyway ? 2:26
4. Do you feel the pull ? 3:24
5. Any of the above 5:06
6. A line to cross 3:30
7. Unless we throw the scissors out 3:45
8. You've got it all over me 5:31
9. Those lips are no longer mine 3:13
10. The things you need 4:24
11. Consolation prize 3:59
12. Helpless 8:25

http://rapidshare.com/files/89821234/The_Things_You_Need.rar

BB - Live in Sacramento disk 2

2008-02-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

Memorial Auditorium, Sacramento, CA, August 1st 1964, 2nd show
1. Intro
2. Little Honda
3. Fun, Fun, Fun
4. The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
5. Hushabye
6. Hawaii
7. Let's Go Trippin'
8. The Wanderer
9. Wendy
10. Monster Mash
11. Surfer Girl
12. Be True To Your School
13. Graduation Day
14. Surfin' USA
15. Don't Back Down
16. Don't Worry Baby
17. I Get Around
18. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
Bonus Tracks
19. Fun, Fun, Fun
20. I Get Around
21. The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
22. The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
23. Fun, Fun, Fun
24. Hawaii
25. Johnny B. Goode
26. Johnny B. Goode
27. Honda '55'
28. Honda '55'

http://rapidshare.com/files/89866255/Live_In_Sacremento_-_2nd_Show_1_.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/89911230/Live_In_Sacremento_-_2nd_Show_1_.part1.rar

Jackson code - Poison Berries

2008-02-07T02:49:00.000-08:00

This is a CD single by the Jackson Code.

Tracks are :
1. Poison Berries
2. Keep yourself for yourself
3. What's that burning
4. Dumb Tourist
5. Kerosene

http://rapidshare.com/files/89821235/Poison_Berries.rar

Jackson Code - Draggin' the river

2008-02-04T23:56:00.000-08:00

Third album by the Jackson Code. Enjoy.

1. Till our teeth got sore
2. The shiver waiting to crawl up my spine
3. Who's watching who
4. Blood and bones
5. A blessing for one is a curse for another
6. Poison berries
7. Nail it
8. Everybody's got something to lose
9. Let them hang
10. Her's fell upon me
11. I snuck up on you
12. All this damage reminds me of you

http://rapidshare.com/files/89088262/Draggin__the_River.rar

P.S. : this is the 100th post.

BB - Live in Sacramento disk 1

2008-02-04T05:15:00.000-08:00

Memorial Auditorium, Sacramento, CA, August 1st 1964, 1st show
1. Intro
2. Little Honda
3. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
4. The Little Old Lady From Pasadena
5. Hushabye
6. Hawaii
7. Let's Go Trippin'
8. The Wanderer
9. Surfer Girl
10. Monster Mash
11. Be True To Your School
12. Graduation Day
13. Surfin' USA
14. Don't Back Down
15. Don't Worry Baby
16. Wendy
17. I Get Around
18. Fun, Fun, Fun
Concert Rehearsals
19. Louie Louie
20. Little Honda
21. Surfin' USA
22. Wendy
23. Wendy
24. Wendy
25. Don't Worry Baby
26. Little Honda
27. Little Honda
28. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
29. Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
30. The Little Old Lady From Pasadena-Don't Back Down

http://rapidshare.com/files/89034861/BB_-_Live_in_Sacramento_Vol_1.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/89028747/BB_-_Live_in_Sacramento_Vol_1.part1.rar

Triffids in Sydney - third part

2008-02-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

Here you find the third part of tracks Steve recorded of the Friday show. I just copy/paste his comments on the Triffids forum.

"Here's the rest of the tracks I recorded of the Friday show. Sorry for sound quality on many of them. They are bundled up in a RAR file. Tracks are In The Pines (Rob Snarski)/Hell Of A Summer (Rob Snarski)/Life Of Crime (Mark Snarski)/Wide Open Road (Steve Kilbey)/Trick Of The Light (Toby Martin)/Spanish Blue (Toby Martin)/Tender Is The Night (Jill Birt)/Property Is Condemned (Steve Kilbey)/Fairytale Love (Graham Lee).

http://www.mediafire.com/?bunttnbitlg

Trivia - the woman laughing during Handsome Steve's intros is Judith Lucy."

Chad's tree - Buckle in the rail

2008-01-31T23:56:00.000-08:00

A few posts earlier I kindly asked for some Chad's tree and Steve (Weasel from the Triffids forum) was so kind as to send me a link for the Buckle in the rail LP.

Sure I like to share this link with you. Other Chad's tree stuff will follow later on !

http://www.mediafire.com/?cmwumvtifd2

A1 Sweet Jesus Blue Eyes
A2 Heatwater Train
A3 The Magician
A4 Entangled Vines
A5 The 31st Lie
B1 Tread Softly
B2 Carve It In Wood
B3 The Vintage Of St Helen's
B4 On My Blind Side
B5 Calendar

Jackson Code - Strange Cargo

2008-01-30T02:11:00.000-08:00

1. Paris Bay
2. Sophie's Torch Song
3. Angel Of Uncertain Times
4. What's That Burning?
5. Trap The Light
6. Doesn't She Look Beautiful Tonight?
7. Pull The Heart Out Of The Night
8. 'Til The Last Diamond Falls
9. Lucifer's Polka
10. Butchersville
11. Strange Cargo

Musicians:
Mark Snarski - Vocals and Guitars
Kenny Davis Jnr - Piano Accordion, Organ & Keyboards
Jason Kain - Slide, Acoustic & Electric Guitar
Kathy Wemyss - Vocals & Trumpet
Barry Turnbull - Bass
Mark Dawson - Drums & Percussion
Amanda Pearson - Vocals on track 1
Glad Reed - Trombone
Nick Elliot - Tenor Sax
Mark Townsend - Tuba
Sarah Peet - Cello
Rudi Crivici - Viola
Romano Crivici - Viola

Produced by The Jackson Code
Engineered by Guy Dickerson
Recorded at Megaphon Studios Sydney
Mixed by Tom Colley at The Vault

http://rapidshare.com/files/87223671/JC_Strange_Cargo.rar

David McComb - The Message

2008-01-28T04:53:00.001-08:00

This is Dave's first solo single, Dave's "disco" song.

The first 4 tracks of the rar-file are the complete CD-single. The 5th track is the 12" exclusive KSDS Club mix, ripped from my vinyl.

1. The message (KSDS mix)
2. The message
3. Song of no return
4. I've heard things turn out this way
5. The message (KSDS Club mix)

http://rapidshare.com/files/85382516/The_Message.rar

BB - Leggo my ego 3

2008-01-28T04:49:00.000-08:00

Sessions Part Two:
1. Sloop John B
2. Sloop John B
3. Sloop John B
4. Sloop John B
5. Sloop John B
6. God Only Knows
7. God Only Knows
8. God Only Knows
9. God Only Knows
10. Hang On To Your Ego
11. Hang On To Your Ego
12. Here Today
13. Here Today
14. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times
15. Caroline, No
16. Caroline, No
17. Medley Mr. Sandman-The Syncopated Clock-The Chipmunk Song-God Only Knows
18. Brian Raps About L.A. Smog

http://rapidshare.com/files/87230043/Disc_3.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/87241498/Disc_3.part2.rar

BB - Leggo my ego 2

2008-01-28T04:47:00.001-08:00

Sessions Part One:
1. Wouldn't It Be Nice
2. Wouldn't It Be Nice
3. Wouldn't It Be Nice
4. Wouldn't It Be Nice
5. Wouldn't It Be Nice
6. Wouldn't It Be Nice
7. You Still Believe In Me
8. You Still Believe In Me
9. You Still Believe In Me
10. You Still Believe In Me
11. You Still Believe In Me
12. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder
13. I'm Waiting For The Day
14. Let's Go Away For Awhile
15. Let's Go Away For Awhile
16. Let's Go Away For Awhile

http://rapidshare.com/files/86524574/Beach_Boys_Leggo_My_Ego_2.zip

"las Blackeyed Susans" en La Mascara

2008-01-28T00:24:00.000-08:00

Ari asked for this EP, released in 1998, so here it is.

1. To Skin A Man
2. Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah, Oh No
3. Come Ride With Me
4. No Direction Home
5. Be My Medicine

http://rapidshare.com/files/87223670/La_Mascara.rar

BB - Leggo my ego

2008-01-27T23:46:00.000-08:00

This is disk 1 one of a 3CD-set. I will upload the other two later.

Part One: The Alternate Pet Sounds Album
1. Wouldn't It Be Nice
2. You Still Believe In Me
3. That's Not Me
4. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
5. I'm Waiting For The Day
6. Let's Go Away For Awhile
7. Sloop John B
8. God Only Knows
9. Hang On To Your Ego
10. Here Today
11. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times
12. Caroline, No
Part Two: Instrumental Pet Sounds
13. Wouldn't It Be Nice
14. You Still Believe In Me
15. Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
16. I'm Waiting For The Day
17. Sloop John B
18. God Only Knows
19. Hang On To Your Ego
20. Here Today
21. I Just Wasn't Made For These Times

http://rapidshare.com/files/86510128/Beach_Boys_Leggo_My_Ego_1.zip

Hoodoo Club reunion

2008-01-25T01:06:00.000-08:00

A one time affair at the M.O.D. in Hasselt Belgium on the 9th of February and absolutely free ! Read more about it for example here : http://www.deben.be/wp/?p=37(in Dutch) or here : http://thetriffids.com/forum/index.php?topic=1840.0.

Hoodoo Club is the band lead by Harald Vanherf, a genuine Triffids fan and singer of Property is condemned on the Hasselt and Amsterdam concerts in June 2006.

Here you will find their only full album "... A just temporary loss of masculinity" from 1997.

1.I know
2.Hit
3.The cash song
4.Beercans & spoons
5.The hissing lawns
6.Way down south
7.Dear Beth
8.Voodoo street
9.Locksmith' blues
10.Sad thing
11.Nothing is good enough
12.The weirdo walks

http://rapidshare.com/files/86444810/HOODOO_CLUB.rar

You can still buy this album second hand if you want CD quality, for example here : http://www.amazon.com/Just-Temporary-Loss-Hoodoo-Club/dp/B00000B8SA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1201252625&sr=8-2, and read that review by "a customer".

I don't have their EP Jugstories, so if anyone has, feel free to upload.

The Jackson Code

2008-01-24T01:38:00.000-08:00

The Sydney gigs made me listen to some of my Jackson Code cd's, Mark Snarski's former band.

Here you will find "Del Musical Del mismo nombre" their debut album. If there's enough interest, I can post some more Jackson Code. And if anybody could upload some Chad's tree stuff (Rob en Mark Snarski's earlier band), I'd be very pleased 'cos I haven't got anything by them.

http://rapidshare.com/files/86182450/del_musical_del_mismo_nombre.rar

1. Joe's Flame (Mark Snarski) (3:40 m:s)
2. It's Been Too Long (Mark Snarski) (4:13 m:s)
3. Kerosene (Mark Snarski) (3:11 m:s)
4. Bringer Of Light (Mark Snarski) (4:04 m:s)
5. Hotel Stationery (Mark Snarski) (2:39 m:s)
6. Time To Heal (Mark Snarski) (1:36 m:s)
7. Strange Lullaby (Mark Snarski) (3:30 m:s)
8. Hold On Tight (Mark Snarski) (4:34 m:s)
9. Setting Johnny Free (Mark Snarski) (4:18 m:s)
10. Blame The Weather (Mark Snarski) (4:07 m:s)
11. Don't Let The Flame Race Near The Water (Mark Snarski) (4:27 m:s)
12. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (H Martin/R Blane) (1:21 m:s)

Musicians:
Mark Snarski - Vocals, Guitars, Piano
Kenny Davis Jnr - Piano Accordion, Organ, Keyboards & B. Vocals
Jason Kain - Acoustic & Electric Guitar
Kathy Wemyss - Vocals, Trumpet, Piano
Barry Turnbull - Bass
Mark Dawson - Drums & Percussion
Amanda Pearson - Vocals on track 12
Glad Reed - Trombone
Bevan Reed - Baritone Saxophone
Richard Armstrong - harmonica

Technical Details:
Produced by The Jackson Code
Recorded at United Sydney Sound Recording Studio