The Triffids
Treeless Plain

If today, having crossed the threshold of the "…forties", someone mentions Australia in my presence, Radio Birdman, Saints, and other heroes who between 1976 and 1986 assaulted the sky with deadly punk and garage blows immediately come to mind; in my childhood, however, thoughts quickly turned to the Triffids.

«Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now», you would say, good old Bob, reading these lines of mine.

And surely you will be doing so, as I well remember when you confided in me that you particularly appreciated the version of «I'm A Lonesome Hobo» that the five proposed in their debut album, "Treeless Plain," considering it on par with «All Along The Watchtower» covered by Giant Sand, the most beautiful cover of one of your songs performed in the Eighties.

Fully agree with you, but twenty-eight years later, I am more than ever convinced that in that album there are 11 original tracks that match the beauty of «I'm A Lonesome Hobo», in some cases even surpassing it.

They match the tracks that follow, primarily «Place In The Sun», placed at the end of side A (and theme of the successful fiction of the same name broadcast on Rai Tre), which theoretically should be a pop song, but if this is pop, I instantly renounce my garage faith; and the entire side B, starting with that «Plaything» for which the same considerations expressed above for «Place In The Sun» apply, up to the concluding «Nothing Can Take Your Place», crossing along the way the ghosts of Joy Division, Cure, and Echo & The Bunnymen.

They surpass the preceding tracks, in order «Red Pony», «Branded», «My Baby Thinks She's A Train» and «Rosevel», boulevards of a splendid labyrinth, strewn with folk, rock, wave, post-something, and touched with jazz aromas, in which to lose oneself hoping never to find the way out.

Also because the company is of those good ones, that you would want by your side until death and beyond: the versatile and eclectic voice of David McComb, the enchanting violin of his brother Robert, the sinuous organ of Jill Birth, and the rhythm section perpetually oscillating between linear wave and oblique jazz of Alsy MacDonald and Martin Casey.

A difficult album to define, "Treeless Plain," for its constant alternation of moods and sensations: revealing in this sense is the opening with the classical «Red Pony» - doors-like evocations with codeine - yet closely followed by the fast rock of «Branded» - almost like the Saints, once the teenage ardor cooled - one of those tracks destined to go down in (my) history for the drum and guitar intro and for the line «Who breaks a pure heart will be damned for eternity».

And then there are, indeed, «My Baby Thinks She's A Train» and «Rosevel», two tracks that anyone, like me, who left their heart in the Eighties cannot help but know, listen to, and ruefully miss.

It took three years before "Treeless Plain" had a successor called "Born Sandy Devotional," in many respects even more beautiful than the debut, yet decidedly darker and more melancholic; the album of maturity and the one for which some still remember the Triffids today.

But the innocence, the passion, and the charm that resided in "Treeless Plain," those could not be repeated: the pure heart had been broken.

So, dear Bob, you may want to repeat that "Treeless Plain" bases its beauty only on the happy reprise of one of your songs... you will never convince me that this is so, also because, if you really want to know, their version of «I'm A Lonesome Hobo» is far superior to yours, deal with it! And anyway, no hard feelings, I take this opportunity to wish you - albeit with a guilty delay, but I had several commitments that prevented me from calling you, and an email or an SMS did not seem appropriate for the occasion - another seventy years like those just past.

PS: Why then a soap opera set in Naples today would have as its theme a song conceived in Sydney in 1983 remains a mystery to me. Just like if Biutiful had «Bella» by Giovanotti as its theme... it wouldn't make any sense!