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 "A gung-ho Candide with a taste for places it is wiser to avoid. . . the reports collected in 'I Wouldn't Start From Here' are graphic, comic, bemused and properly contemptuous of faith and ideology."
- Jonathan Meades, Books of the Year, Evening Standard
"An utterly sui generis report from the world's plague-spots."
- Michael Bywater, Books of the Year, New Statesman
"I can think of no more entertaining companion on a perilous journey than the ever hopeful, wildly optimistic yet clear-thinking Andrew Mueller."
- Rory MacLean, The Guardian
"A tour-de-force of hilarious, harrowing and ultimately enlightening reportage that will remind readers of the work of P.J. O'Rourke, Jon Ronson and David Foster Wallace."
- The Washington Times
"Unafraid to portray the world's warring people not just as victims and sufferers of legitimate grievances, but also as bloody-minded bastards and ill-informed fools."
- The Kathmandu Post
"A mix of dark humour and incisive political discourse."
- CNN Go
"His sardonic, self-deprecating perspective makes for unstuffy company."
- The Los Angeles Times
"Peppered with trenchant observations that reflect a nimble, cut-to-the-chase practicality, Mueller's interviews with everyone from terrorist warlords to international peacemakers are refreshingly irreverent yet astute."
- Booklist
"Travel writing in the danger zone that maintains its hipness and humanity."
- George Dunford, Books of the Year, Readings Monthly
"An addition to the genre founded by P.J. O'Rourke's 'Holidays In Hell', but it is one that pushes the boundaries."
- The Australian
"Mueller is the embodiment of what can happen with a fire in the belly and a desire to write out loud."
- Australian Book Review
"Mueller's travel writing is as incisive and entertaining as anything he's ever written about music."
- TNT
"A joy."
- Financial Times
"Delightfully laconic."
- The New Statesman
"Alternately chilling, funny and surprising, there's some great reportage here as Mueller struggles to reach an understanding of the world, quizzing the highest minister and the lowliest peasant."
- The Glasgow Herald
"His acerbic wit is matched by true empathy. . . we need this kind of gonzo journalism more than ever."
- Wanderlust
"Mueller spins what could have been the grimmest geopolitics into the finest black comedy. Like a print version of 'The Daily Show'."
- FHM
"Lively reporting from a gently humorous narrator."
- Chris Ayres, The Times
"Touching, often blackly comic reportage."
- GQ
"Brilliantly observed, articulate, often funny and immensely readable."
- The List
"Snappy, self-deprecating and sometimes outright hilarious."
- The Age
"Indelibly humorous and heartfelt."
- Sydney Sunday Telegraph
"An instructive ricochet between cities and continents and war zones."
- Time Out
"He brings to his material the mixture of rage and earthy irony that is the mark of a great satirist
. . . rewarding, thought-provoking and ludicrously funny."
- PopMatters
"Mueller's book is an excellent example of why today's brave, lucid hacks are forced to admit fear and confusion."
- South China Morning Post
"His reporting is sharp, his experiences terrifying and funny."
- Melbourne Herald-Sun
"If you enjoy your international affairs and politics with a good dose of cynicism and black humour, then this book is one to read."
- Brisbane Courier-Mail
"Often laugh-out-loud funny, the writing is utterly engaging."
- Launceston Sunday Examiner
"Mueller's irreverent reportage from abroad is fundamentally a clever cover for the author's ruminations on race, religion, revolution, rock'n'roll and other important issues since September 11, 2001."
- The West Australian
"As hilarious and sardonic a host as this ridiculous world of ours demands."
- Shortlist
"Mueller busies himself with finding the odd, the surreal and the laughable as much as the shocking and upsetting."
- New Zealand Herald
"A real eye for surreal moments of black humour. . . Mueller's work here digs much deeper than the standard newspaper travel essay."
- Sydney Sun-Herald
"His best story, about his brief, bizarre jailing in Cameroon, reads like a 21st century 'Goon Show' script."
- Good Reading
"A rollicking ride through some of the world's scariest scenarios."
- Kalgoorlie Miner
"A strikingly funny book about some seriously unfunny places."
- Perth Sunday Times
"Not bad for a guy from Wagga Wagga."
- The Wagga Wagga Advertiser
 "Andrew Mueller's piece about my band's tour with The Hold Steady is my favourite thing ever written about us. The fact that he is a war correspondent (though he claims otherwise) and music journalist and
approaches both with a similar slant makes him one of the most interesting
writers out there to me."
- Patterson Hood, Drive-By Truckers
"The most important critical anthology on popular music from a single author in a long time, its humour and insight equal with collections by Nick Tosches or Robert Palmer."
- KEXP Seattle
"Take one part P.J. O'Rourke, a healthy dose of Lester Bangs and a dash of Hunter S. Thompson, and you've got Andrew Mueller."
- Bookgasm
"Sharply observed and wittily constructed."
- Honolulu Star-Advertiser
"New edition of the rock classic."
- NY Press
"Mueller's humour makes for some enlightening reading."
- Biloxi-Gulfport Sun-Herald
"Sharp, witty and sarcastic."
- Chicago Tribune
 "Really rather good, in a barnstorming, country-punk sort of way. . . a highly capable ensemble."
- The Quietus
"A more than capable debut - allusive country-tough songs."
- Uncut
"The Blazing Zoos are undoubtedly fun, but they also have depth. . .
everything from Mueller's extensive use of brackets to the band's loving
recreation of classic country riffs bespeaks sincerity."
- Americana UK
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The Triffids' "Born Sandy Devotional", remembered
Uncut, June 2006
THERE are parts of Australia you could drop a medium-sized European country on without hitting anybody. To drive the roads that lace these empty immensities is to confront an enormity of landscape, and a concomitant insignificance of humanity, difficult to explain to inhabitants of the northern hemisphere. Much Australian art has tried to describe this remoteness, and complete successes are unusual. Only two Australian albums have truly dared stare back into that awesome emptiness: Midnight Oil’s “Diesel & Dust”, a global hit in 1987, and The Triffids’ “Born Sandy Devotional”, which sank with little trace in 1986. This re-release, accompanied by nine b-sides and demos (including the title track, which didn’t make the album) is the first in a series of Triffids reissues. While all those will be worth having, The Triffids never got better than this – but nor did anybody else, much.
It isn’t coincidence that the two definitive albums of Australian dislocation appeared in the late 1980s: at that time, the approaching duocentenary of the British invasion of the continent in 1788 was inspiring fervent navel-gazing in all media. Midnight Oil went for the grand themes, the dispossession and genocide on which their country had been founded. The Triffids, holed up in London, looked back across the planet and focused on the tiny stories, the disregarded, deranged people adrift out there – The Triffids were, possibly, thinking slightly of themselves. The six-piece from Perth – the most isolated major city on Earth – had released one unrealised album (“Treeless Plain”), and two mini-LPs (“Raining Pleasure”, “Lawson Square Infirmary”). They had a decent critical profile, and a reputation as a potent live band, centred on singer/songwriter David McComb’s impassioned performances. What they needed was a record that redeemed the promise, and in “Born Sandy Devotional” they dug a dazzling treasure out of themselves.
It’s all there in the non-hit single, “Wide Open Road”. It begins with a dim buzz of keyboard and a shuffle of electronic percussion, like wind whipping sand against a radiator. McComb counts in “two-three-four” in an unmistakably Australian accent, before clanging guitars ring in his yarn of an abandoned lover, driving anywhere as long as it’s away. “Wide Open Road” is a desolate Antipodean inversion of the raging American optimism of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run”. The bitter drifter narrating McComb’s song, like Springsteen’s New Jersey tearaway, also has a burning heart inside and an empty highway in front, but where Springsteen thinks of the road as a tarmac rainbow, leading to a pot of gold or some equivalent thereof, McComb knows there’s no destination, no angel named Wendy waiting on her porch.
Though desperately intense, “Wide Open Road” is, in the context of “Born Sandy Devotional”, a mid-album comedown. The first thing to confront the listener, the unintroduced opening lines of “The Seabirds”, are a deceptively elegant, but aggressive, reminder that you’re not from round here, and you don’t know what you’re getting into: “No foreign pair of dark sunglasses,” warns McComb, “will ever shield you from/The light that pierces your eyelids.” The music that follows McComb’s stentorian voice into the speakers is also indicative: it’s as panoramic as the views McComb’s lyrics are contemplating, while somehow as claustrophobic as a cold car on a wet night. “Estuary Bed”, “Chickenkiller” and “Tarrilup Bridge” – the latter a stark suicide note, crooned by keyboardist Jill Birt with creepy blankness – accelerate the momentum into the album’s, and The Triffids’, finest moment.
“Lonely Stretch” is a staggering study of white-line fever, exuberantly declaimed by McComb. He is, once again, a man gone mad, gone driving, gone bush, going nowhere: “Land was so flat, could well have been ocean/No distinguishing feature in any direction.” Behind him, The Triffids summon a five-minute opera in several acts, sounding in some respects like The Band, The Velvet Underground and The Birthday Party, but mostly (still!) like nothing else you’ve ever heard. As it builds to a frenetic crescendo, there’s a palpable sense of an accelerator foot pushing to the floor, and hands lifting off the steering wheel. “You could die out here,” roars McComb, “of a broken heart”.
The rest of “Born Sandy Devotional” is a succession of aftershocks: the gentle, rueful “Wide Open Road”, the Cave-ish country of “Life Of Crime” and “Personal Things”, the knelling epic “Stolen Property”. The sign-off, “Tender Is The Night”, delivered in Jill Birt’s plaintive lilt, is a gorgeous I-can’t-be-with-the-one-I-love-so-I’ll-love-the-one-I’m-with lament. At the end of this most Australian of albums, recorded in London, it sounds as homesick as it does lovesick: “Where you are,” sighs the last line, “it will just be getting light.”
The Triffids, like contemporaries and compatriots The Go-Betweens, became famous only for failing, despite a scrapbook bulging with ecstatic reviews, to become famous. They released two further albums, “Calenture” and “The Black Swan”, then in 1989 took a temporary break which became permanent. The band’s members embraced middle-class professional life, aside from bassplayer Martyn Casey, who joined Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, and McComb himself, who recorded with The Blackeyed Susans, and made one astonishing solo album (“Love Of Will”, now outrageously deleted). McComb lived as hard as the characters he sang through; he underwent a heart transplant in 1996, and died in 1999, aged 36, from complications related to the operation.
In that short life, David McComb assembled an astonishing body of records – but “Born Sandy Devotional” is the one most resembling the monument he deserves.
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