The Black Swan turned out to be the last studio album The Triffids made. The title is apt. It's often been considered a stylistic mess but we thought it just our kind of mess. What's the matter with mess anyway? I've gone out on a limb with this one, at Dave's request. He had hoped this record could be a double album when it was recorded - he knew it was so varied that it sounded like nothing else anyone was doing at the time and he thought you shouldn't do things by halves. It wasn't to be but he did write to the band members in '92 or '93 with a list of projects. One of these was to restore TBS to "the sprawling, messy masterpiece it promised to be". Those are the exact words he used. So it's presented anew with the songs we recorded at the time but didn't include, slotted in to the original running order. Viewed from a world of MOR sampling, iPods with every song ever recorded in the known universe on shuffle, mashups, ten year old boys who can play guitar like Muddy Waters and teenagers crazy about the banjo it doesn't seem so strange. Sure - there's an opera singer on a few of the tracks, some of them are heavily influenced by hip hop, one of them would be perfect for Van Morrison and another one is a perfect pop ballad with an incisive narrative sung by Jill Birt, and there's even a banjo or two. That was Dave's creative world at the time. I think he'd like to see it all on the one CD, well he said so didn't he? Disc two contains demos of songs on TBS and a number of songs that never saw the light of day. The demos show how fully formed the ideas were and the songs that didn't make it are of a very high standard. We recently played some shows at The Sydney Festival with guest singers singing Dave's songs. When I tried to make a list of absolutely essential D Mc songs I came up with 53. We ended up rehearsing 44. His output really was of such astonishingly high quality that I'm...erm...astonished. And I hope anyone buying any or all of these will be too.

- Graham Lee

Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think
2. American Sailors
3. Falling Over You
4. Goodbye Little Boy
5. Bottle Of Love
6. Go Home Eddie
7. The Spinning Top Song
8. Butterflies Into Worms
9. I Can't Help Falling In Love With You
10. New Year's Greetings
11. Good Fortune Rose
12. Shell Of The Man
13. One Mechanic Town
14. Jack's Hole
15. Black-Eyed Susan
16. You Minus Me
17. The Clown Prince
18. Fairytale Love
19. How Could I Help But Love You

Disc 2:

1. Too Hot To Move, Too Hot To Think (Demo)
2. American Sailors (Demo)
3. Why Don't You Leave For Good This Time (Demo)
4. Bottle Of Love (Demo)
5. The Spinning Top Song (Demo)
6. Butterflies Into Worms (Demo)
7. New Year's Greetings (The Country Widower) (Demo)
8. Good Fortune Rose (Demo)
9. One Mechanic Town (Demo)
10. Jack's Hole (Demo)
11. Black-Eyed Susan (Demo)
12. You Minus Me (Demo)
13. The Clown Prince (Demo)
14. Fairytale Love (Demo)
15. (You've Got) A Funny Way Of Showing You Love Me (Demo)
16. No More After You (Demo)
17. In The Dark (Demo)