WHAT COMES TO MIND … DAVID MCCOMB AND THE MALE GAZE
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, David McComb is the butterfly among the moths.
Just before you read further, a preface or pre-emptive admission/defence: this may or may not have happened. That is, I am certain parts of this definitely did happen, but maybe not with everyone mentioned, maybe not even where I thought it happened with everyone mentioned, maybe not with the people I thought I was with. Memory is slippery, mine especially, but feeling remains, so I’m going with that. Take that as you will.
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THE MOFFS FANS were earnest, dedicated, and long-suffering as not the coolest crew in the yard, regularly lightly mocked by the big kids of the guitar pop/psych pop/60s pop scene. Which is not always fun, as you might guess, but does build up a thick skin if you survive.
(As one of the paisley-shirt-and-suede-boot-wearers who followed bands like The Church, Flies and Crystal Set around and turned up for visitors like The Stems while pining for a Three O’Clock or Bangles tour, had a few Moffs records on my shelves while devoting myself to R.E.M. and the Rain Parade, and never fully got on board Sydney’s post-Birdman bandwagon, I may not have been the full Moffer, but I was Moffs-adjacent, and I understood.)
Maybe because of that thick skin they were impervious to mere side-eye or grumbles from the likes of me and others who’d not been here at least an hour before the doors opened at the Paddington Green Hotel – in a multi-space room my far better informed friend John tells me today had been called Brownie’s but at this point was known as Players.
Why might we have been grumbling? Oh, did I mention they were also fixed – no, rooted – to the spot on the floor they acquired early, acquired often and acquired with extreme prejudice, like squatters with sidearms? Plonked there not just during the Moffs set but through the rest of the night, so that you had to stand practically on top of them, or if you were not exactly a bluff brash type (see above reference to being Moff-adjacent), you’d have to apologetically shuffle in front and try to make yourself invisible to get somewhere near the stage. You wanted to see the headliners?, their Moffy eyes said, well deal with it.
Yes, I did want to see the headliners. Was very keen to see the headliners, Perth’s The Triffids. A few months later we would see them again up the road at the bigger Paddington Town Hall – and John would catch them a year later, in 1985, at St George Sailing Club (of course he remembers), their reputations here and overseas burgeoning – but this was like a living room by comparison. A house party, though with no communal punch, more discreet drugs, not completely unreasonable toilets … and squatters.
I remember Alsy MacDonald’s drums being lighter, less precise, more intuitive, than most people I was seeing, and like Lindy Morrison did with The Go-Betweens, making standard forms seem disconcertingly off-kilter enough to make me work a bit harder and wonder if this was how it was supposed to be. But yet he’d not feel out of place in songs that suggested blues or country or occasionally almost bubblegum pop. A weird mix that sat just right with me.
I had loved the Treeless Plain album from the year before and the Beautiful Waste/Property Is Condemned single in its silver-sheathed packaging, was almost as fond of the Raining Pleasure mini album, so I knew they could punch if needed, but mostly they hovered somewhere between that “Melbourne” black-on-black cool and a simultaneously less and more theatrical bent that maybe was a Perth thing, maybe was an outsider thing, but definitely was a David McComb thing.
“Sand in your eye, sun upon your back/Next to you my love, all colours turn to black.”
But what was that McComb thing exactly? In retrospect there are any number of explanations which do make sense: that musical flamboyance even in small packages and the openness and yet opaqueness of his lyrics. The way MacDonald’s lightness and bassplayer Martyn Casey’s nimbleness conjured rhythm where it wasn’t always expected, and how Robert McComb’s violin or guitar and Jill Birt’s voice and keyboard could spirit in a kind of non-drug-touched Velvets and innocence sometimes smudged. The intensity of feeling that maybe recognised a long life was not likely but a full one was, perhaps summed up by another musician in a documentary years later who said of McComb, who would die aged only 36, that “rock ‘n’ roll to him was as important as anything, art was his religion”. And yeah, the hair.
Actually, that last one isn’t entirely joking.
I can’t say I had intimations of a shooting star career or expectations that they would be a globe-bestriding band – though they did seem more likely to vault over radio resistance than my beloved GoBs – and I was certainly not up to speed with all his literary and musical influences or lyrical references that night at the Paddington Green, no matter how I might have postured. But the charisma was unmistakable: the hair thrived and the paisley shirt lived, the voice sucked me in but didn’t dominate, he seemed tall, dark and unbearably handsome but also flawed, and he wasn’t a dick.
Even the lounging Moffs fans looking through our legs could see it. And we’d all take that.
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