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| DAVID McCOMB 17 February 1962 – 2 February 1999 |
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
THE TRIFFIDS
from the 1987 White/Hot + Island Records LP
Calenture
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
I have a letter, familiar paper
I keep a figurine in a locket
It's dedicated, engraved initials
Yellow photograph in a pocketbook
Well the rim of her mouth was golden
Her eyes were just desert sands
But that's not her
That's just the light
It's only an image of her
It's just a trick of the light
She sent me letters, gave me directions
Name of the street where I should turn
And then she stood out front, wrapped in her bath towel
Yelling 'Once you leave, boy, you can't return'
The rim of her mouth was golden
Her eyes were just desert sands
Ah but that's not her (That's not her)
That's just the light (Just the light)
It's only an image of her
It's just a trick of the light
See I was beating on her like an anvil
Beating her out of original shape
With the same old panic caught on her face
I copied the image of the ancient embrace
Now you remind me very much
Of someone that I used to know
We used to take turns in crying all night
Oh but that was so long ago now
The rim of her mouth was golden
Her eyes were just desert sands
But that's not her (That's not her)
That's just the light (Just the light)
It's only an image of her
It's just a trick of the light
No no no no no
That's not her (That's not her)
That's just the light (Just the light)
It's only an image of her
And it's just a trick of the light
Words and music © 1987
David McComb and 'Evil' Graham Lee
The middle years of the 1980s were an exciting time for Australian independent music, with many of its most talented and soon-to-be iconic artists –– The Go-Betweens, Ed Kuepper, Died Pretty, The Saints and Nick Cave to name but a few –– beginning to gain long overdue recognition not just at home but internationally as well. A country which had for so long viewed itself as an irrelevant cultural backwater was suddenly producing music that was as intelligent, dynamic and compelling as anything being released in North America, the UK or Europe.
No local act was arguably more deserving of the world's attention than The Triffids, a band whose lead singer and lyricist David McComb was writing songs that were as legitimately poetic as they were hauntingly atmospheric. McComb's music achieved the rare feat of being romantic in the way that all the most memorable pop songs are romantic while evoking the remote desert landscapes of his boyhood home in Western Australia without once resorting to the inane 'sunburnt country' clichés so beloved of the tourism industry and certain Hollywood-backed filmmakers. McComb created his own image-based musical vocabulary, one that owed much of its melancholic power to the place in which he was born and the impact that being geographically isolated from the rest of the country had on him both as a musician and as a storyteller. Unfortunately he became an alcoholic and a heroin addict, the former condition causing him to develop a serious heart ailment known as cardiomyopathy which saw him undergo a heart transplant in 1996 and, after failing to curb his drug and alcohol intake, die on 2 February 1999 at the age of thirty-six.
I find it difficult to describe the impact that hearing A Trick of the Light had on me when it was originally released. (It was the second single from The Triffids' fourth studio album Calenture.) I was immediately struck by its imagery, particularly by its frequently repeated tag lines 'The rim of her mouth was golden / Her eyes were just desert sands' which seemed, to the tyro songwriter of limited ability but no small ambition that I was in those days, to be poetic in the truest (as opposed to adolescently pretentious) sense of the word. To this day I can't hear the song without re-experiencing that same peculiar frisson of admiration mixed with envy that I experienced when I first heard it on 2JJJ more than thirty years ago.
There are many lyrical delights to be found in A Trick of the Light. Consider the middle eight which seems to hint at domestic violence when McComb is probably describing his narrator's attempt to impose some kind of emotional transformation on his temperamental, now lost lover:
See I was beating on her like an anvil
Beating her out of original shape
With the same old panic caught on her face
I copied the image of the ancient embrace
These four lines transform the entire meaning of the song, shedding unexpected light on the passionate but ultimately doomed relationship it so tellingly describes. The final line, of course, is a small act of genius: I copied the image of the ancient embrace. A line like that is very far removed from anything you'll find in (I've Had) The Time of My Life, Australia's most popular song of 1988 according to the ARIA End of Year Singles Chart. And that's because McComb's word and image choices were never those of an uninspired, cliché-reliant tunesmith. If you accept the definition of poetry as the artful manipulation of language to produce a heightened state of emotion, then A Trick of the Light is as poetic as pop music can ever seek to become without crossing the vaguely defined line that transforms it into chanson, lieder or some other type of 'art song.'
The internet offers many people –– the majority of them, I suspect, of my vintage or older –– a forum in which to express their shock at the fact that an artist as gifted as David McComb never became the international megastar he was so clearly destined to become. I find comments of this nature disappointing and more than a little ingenuous, given that the primary function of the music industry –– as any halfway honest A&R Executive will tell you –– is to make as much money as possible by reducing 'love' and its vicissitudes to tuneful, easily digested nuggets which can be swallowed whole in one sitting by as many people as possible. Not only is quality not a prerequisite when it comes to cranking out hits, it can actually be a disadvantage in an industry which strives to reduce the act of music-making to a slick commercial process in which uniformity of style and expression is paramount and the golden rule is that songwriters should never try to be too clever, particularly in their use (or all too frequent misuse) of language. This is why we have (or used to have) independent record labels –– so that artists of the calibre of David McComb can be discovered and celebrated by audiences that expect more from the music they listen to than the same tired old formulas endlessly re-hashed.
Today, the 20th anniversary of David McComb's death, is a sad day not just for Australian music but for music in general. There's no telling to what heights of poetic magnificence he might have climbed had he been able to conquer his demons before they cost him his life and robbed the rest of us of what, by any standards, was an astounding and genuinely irreplaceable talent.
Use the link below to visit the official website of THE TRIFFIDS which contains a wealth of information about its founder and lead singer DAVID McCOMB, including many samples of his music and his equally interesting poetry and prose:
Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube. Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.
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Words for the Music 002: TOWNES VAN ZANDT
Last updated 14 October 2021 §
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