"serious moonlight" - a series (#1 of ___ )

there's a category of mid-to-late Eighties aspiring epic-ness

singers and songwriters who take on the plainspoken yet weighty language of parable, who deliberately embrace the-reason-it's-a-cliche-is-because-it's-true, to the point of risking corny

at the risk of squandering any credit earned from my Aussie pals from the Antipodean Space post


here's the first entry in this series




Nick Cave was a - perhaps the - pioneer of this drift towards "some call it corn"

The Triffids originally were quite heavily influenced by the likes of The Birthday Party (and The Gun Club too I suspect). And being in those days a BParty junkie craving more of the same, I remember being very excited by their John Peel session, bits of which were like a postpunk "Celebration of the Lizard". Even bought a live tape of one of their shows at a stall in Camden Market - quite possibly the only live bootleg I've ever bought. Sound quality was terrible!





Then they duly followed Cave's post-Party trajectory into Americana  - with a bit of Waterboys-style Big Music thrown in there

Remember being taken aback by - and not at all engaged by - the country-rockish mellowness of the albums that followed, Born Sandy Devotional and Calenture (title comes from "Tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods away from land, who imagine the seas to be green fields and desire to leap into them"!)







Coming from the same sort of place as 10, 000 Maniacs

or even Lone Justice

That said

here's a good piece by  Anwen making a case for the specialness of the group in this phase