If The Triffids are the warm, sensitive Australians that their songs suggest, why is there a dead kangaroo stuck on the front of their van? And who is Sandy Devotional anyway?

It all began in Perth, Western Australia. An isolated city flanked by the Indian Ocean to the west and the desert to the east. For here it was that Alsy MacDonald and David McComb grew up together, took short cuts over the garden fence to the beach, ran down kangaroos and learned to play music — Alsy on drums and David on guitar. They started off playing at parties and school functions and then David's brother, Robert, joined them, also on guitar and Martyn Casey played the bass. Jill Burt came along with her keyboards and Graham Lee from Sydney completed the line-up on guitar, pedal and lap steel. The whole process took six years.

Two years on they find themselves in England with an album, Born Sandy Devotional, at number two in the independent charts and I find Robert and Martyn lounging in armchairs, while Graham sits perched on the front of the sofa in a terraced house in Whitechapel on a drowsy Friday afternoon.

They all seem to be perfectly ordinary people in everyday clothes and they all have a refreshingly dry sense of humour that can make a mockery of any serious quest for factual information.

The mood is relaxed almost to the point of unconsciousness and the long periods away from their homeland don't seem to get them down as they reflect on the origins of the band, the Perth music scene, the wine bar in the port of Perth where the entry fee was a mere 50 cents and the takings were high. Higher than here anyway. So why did they leave it behind? Why travel half way round the world to play places like Croydon? Why make it tough on themselves?

Graham: "Well if you're an Australian band you have two ways to go. You either stay in Australia and try to be really big in Australia and then eventually come over here and find yourself at the bottom of the pile, or you come over earlier on in your career."

Martyn: "It's pretty pointless being in a band if you don't want to push yourself further afield and get your records further afield. It would be pointless just to play to the same people three times a week."

In Perth the music following is just as keen as it is in London, the pubs are big and the venues are good but most of the bands just play top forty cover versions, a lot of them as soon as they're released; a 'here today, gone tomorrow' kind of entertainment.

Martyn: "Nobody takes any notice of them, they just come and go."

Robert: "There is a quite small, concentrated interest in bands that do their own songs.

Graham: "There's a lot of English stuff that gets there about three months later because that's how long it takes the music papers to get there."

Robert: "The point we always bring up about Perth is that it gets there a month earlier than it does the Eastern States so we're way ahead of the Eastern States."

However, for the time being they're getting the music papers right on time and as they check their position in the 'Indie' charts they notice that the distance between their chart and the 'Mainstream' chart is about as vast as the Nullabor Plain. But they intend to bridge the gap just like they crossed the Plain, leaving small-time restriction behind them.

Graham: "We want to maintain our independence but we don't want to be an 'indie band'. There's a danger of becoming slotted into this little pigeon hole and you can't get out."

Martyn: "I find it really humourous, like when we were in Holland we came across these guys who were really into lots of Australian bands and they were coming out with these bands that even we hadn't heard of from Australia and it was like they'd just got this competition to get into the most obscure band from the furthest place away."

Robert: "In Europe a lot of people who were interviewing the band, their very first question would be, 'So you are the new Jim Morrison. How do you wish to die?"'

Graham: "People reckon that if they looked through our record collections they'd find a lot of Doors records but that's not the case. When we travel around in a bus we carry this huge box of cassettes around with us and there has never, to my knowledge, been a single Doors track played in our bus."

Why do you think you get this Doors tag?

Graham: "I don't really know. We've got an organ. We've got a male lead singer."

But he does sing like Jim Morrison.

Robert: "I can maybe see what you mean but it's very hard to say who he sings like because he's developed his singing style quite well to be his style."

The thing is when you're actually in a band you see yourselves as being much more different than if you're looking at it objectively because you know exactly what's gone into it.

Robert: "I think that's the point. We don't really try and view ourselves from the outside. It's much better to just put your energy into a much more natural way than that. How does that sound?"

Graham: "You fucking hippy."

Robert: "It's impossible to be objective. That's why you need management."

And that's why you need producers, like Gil Norton for example, which leads me conveniently on to the subject of 'Born Sandy Devotional' and the making thereof.

Graham: "That was one of Gil's first real production jobs."

Martyn: "It was all done very quickly. He cancelled what he was doing at the time and raced down to London. We had one rehearsal. He came along to the rehearsal and most of the songs were already arranged pretty solidly before we went into the studio."

Graham: "It was recorded in a studio in London and we wanted to get a really live drum sound like a big room but this studio didn't have a live room that we could set the drums up in so we had to actually set the drums up in a tool shed next to the studio."

Robert: "It was an abandoned house. We just broke in if the truth were known. We just went out the back of the studio and we found we could take the leads round the corner and set up in a completely open space. It was a part of Farringdon and you'd be outside in the park having lunch with all these office workers and you'd hear these drums bashing across the park and massive guitar solos."

Graham: "We had to stop at seven o'clock doing drums because of complaints from the local residents."

Robert: "It wasn't sound-proofed at all but it made the drums sound a lot better."

Are you all very particular about the sound you get out of your instruments?

Robert: "Yeah, within reason. We are emphatically to some degree when we know what we want but at the same time we can't necessarily afford some of the things."

Martyn plays a Fender Precision.

"That bass... I bought it off a graphic arts teacher at high school for 300 bucks or something (about £100). He used to be in a band called the Valentines who were sort of Perth's biggest pop band in the 60s. They had Bon Scott from AC/DC and they used to back a guy called Johnny Young who was a really horrible TV personality. It's got a dent in it where someone threw a rock at Johnny Young and it missed him and hit the bass. It's a piece of rock and roll history.

Robert: "Graham wants three new pedal steels."

Graham: "No I only want one."

Robert: "He's got little levers for his feet and legs and he changes all the notes in the strings as well with his hands... no he doesn't use his hands to change the notes... well except sliding up the steel of course. It's very good though."

Graham: "It's an instrument that has a lot of possibilities. I use it in a fairly rudimentary way really. I think what I do is good for the band but when I'm sitting around at home I play lots of other stuff."

Robert's not terribly forthcoming about his guitar but the bottom line is that they all want better instruments although for the time being their financial priorities lie elsewhere.

"That's part of why we wanted to get a major label deal so that we can get a bit of money up front and take a gamble, I guess, at selling some records."

You must be making some money now out of the success of the album.

Graham: "We won't see any of that money for a long time."

Robert: "You see we spent so much money on the album in the first place compared to the other records we've done.

"The first album was done in twelve days including mixing: midnight to dawn sessions."

Graham: "We actually made an album for fifty dollars called Lawson Square Infirmerie".

Robert: "Well it's a mini album. It was done in a big ruin with basically acoustic instruments. It's not under the name of the Triffids that record because we had another guy and Graham hadn't in fact joined the band at that stage.

"We've also done a recording in a woolshed recently. We spent a week and we went down to a farm and stayed on the farm and ate and drank copious amounts. In fact we spent more on alcohol than we did on food and we spent more on food than we did on recording. We got an 8 track tape recorder with a mixing desk. There was this guy who wanted to do it basically, a young engineer, so it worked out we could do the whole thing fairly cheaply and have a good week while we just worked on new songs and made recordings of them."

Was it set up as a studio?

"No it was just a shearing shed."

Martin: "There weren't any sheep in it though."

Why do you choose such strange locations?

Robert: "Well, see the whole idea is that it was good fun, that's why we wanted to do it essentially. Not just fun but we thought it would be good to see what sounds we could get in a wool shed as opposed to a recording studio. In a woolshed you've got latticed floors and 6 foot under the floor and a really high tin roof and it's just a massive room. If the rain had been a bit heavier one night we could have had some really good rain on the track as well."

Graham: "The next album we're going to record in a shit-house on Bondi Beach."

David McComb the writer is absent so I opt for an appraisal of the man rather than his lyrics.

Martyn: "He's a bastard."

Robert: "He's a sweet, kind and loving bastard."

Graham: "A lot of people used to think he was a junkie. When people look at Dave they think, junkie. He's a very clean living boy."

Robert: "He enjoys writing so he's been developing ideas through writing that don't have to portray what he is personally which is part of the reason people write I think."

What interests does he have?

"Windsurfing."

"Waterskiing."

"He goes to the gym three times a week. He's very keen on staying fit."

"And he's a founder member of the Samantha Fox fan club. That sums him up I think."

"Beer and darts."

"He does have an all consuming interest in music."

"That's a serious answer, the one before wasn't."

"None of them were."

"Well the ones before were, only in an inverse way because those are all the things he hates."

I'm not surprised, I can't imagine Eric Bristow coming up with a song as intense as the haunting 'Lonely Stretch' which describes getting lost while driving through the desert at night, apparently a common occurrence in Oz. A friend of mine who recently returned from a nine month stint down under told me that while he was there twenty people got lost in the desert and died. And I thought the M1 was hazardous.

Martyn: "It does have a strange effect on you driving these long distances. It's sort of nerve racking but boring as well."

Robert: "If you break down you don't leave your vehicle because it gets really hot and it's just hundreds of miles to the next town. Dave said an interesting thing about that song. He said he reckons that listening to music and driving at night is better than anything. I said, 'what anything?' 'Yeah anything.' I don't believe him."

Martyn: "The last time we drove across the Nullabor, or the last three times in fact, we hit a kangaroo every time."

Robert: "Well twice. Twice in a row."

Graham: "The Nullabor is the plain between Western Australia and South Australia."

Robert: "They get blinded by the light and they just freeze in the middle of the road. But the trouble is, you see, you can't really go slow because it takes another day if you go slow so you're trying to push 70 miles an hour and at night you start to see kangaroos jumping out of the road or just standing still at the side of the road. The other one is the wombats which are even worse to hit, I reckon, although I haven't hit one. You see them hit by a car and they're upside down and they look exactly like a live wombat except their feet are sticking up in the air."

Martyn: "It would be like hitting a boulder. A classic headline a few years ago was, 'Family of five killed by a wombat.' Apparently they hit this wombat and because they're only about that high (2ft) it hit the front of the car and the car just sort of rolled down the road."

Graham: "In fact 'Born Sandy Devotional' was almost called $2000 Kangaroo because of one of the kangaroo incidents."

Robert: "We really wanted to get a photo of the front of the van. It had this really nice soft crumpled look unlike hitting another car because the body compresses into the sheet metal in a soft way. It looks like no other form of accident. It would look good on the cover of an album."

Martyn: "I hate the animal. All these environmentalists go around saying it's terrible what they do to the kangaroo. Shoot every last one of them!"

My recently returned friend also told me some sickening tales about spiders the size of dinner plates.

Graham: "I once wrecked my car hitting a spider."

Robert: "We had this British engineer last year when we were travelling round Europe and we just spun tales about Australia."

Graham: "And he was terrified. I'm sure Tommy would never go to Australia because of all these stories we told him... and they're all true."

Robert: "Yeah sharks just come flying out of the ocean."

Do you find it boring coming over to England where there's no hazardous wildlife?

Robert: "No, I mean you've got other things here. You've got nuclear fall out and Trident missiles."

Graham: "And Sounds reporters."

Robert: "It's quite different, of course, but then again it's probably one of the easiest places to come and live for an Australian."

Graham: "I think that in Australia there's more of a chance for a really individual band to come up because you are at a distance from those influences. I can't really see a band like the Triffids emerging from England."

Robert: "I feel that we would probably have had a much shorter career."

Graham: "You mean I'd be on my country estate in Sussex."

Robert: "That's it. Either that or we would have had to break up, you know, it would have accelerated things. We wouldn't have put out so many cassette albums before we put out our first single."

Graham: "I think in Australia there is a true indie scene whereby people just do a recording, pay for the whole lot and put it out on cassette and they sell them at gigs and take them around to record stores. Just do the whole lot themselves. There's a band that I know in Sydney that actually made quite a lot of money doing that."

Robert: "There's a definite market. It's not really big, you probably couldn't sell more than a thousand that easily."

Graham: "But you've got to remember that there are only 15,000,000 people in the country."

Robert: "We have to have something because the mammoth size of the mass media and the big record companies is more pronounced than over here."

Graham: "In Australia there is one program which is the equivalent of Top Of The Pops and if you want to have a hit then you've got to get on that program, there's just no other way."

What are the radio stations like?

Robert: "There's so many community broadcasters which you don't have here."

Graham: "If you sit around in London and flick across the dial more often than not you just find nothing that's worth listening to but in Sydney you flick across the dial and there's bound to be something."

Robert: "But then again at least you get good doccos here, we really appreciated the BBC's documentaries.

A valid excuse for demicircumnavigating the globe? Maybe. Navigating the mainstream charts could prove a more hazardous venture but 'Born Sandy Devotional' carries all the chart-cracking evidence I need to predict that The Triffids will have their day. Beware!