Alsy MacDonald
Australian musician
Alan MacDonald (born 14 August 1961) is an Australian musician and lawyer, best known as the drummer of the 1980s band the Triffids, where he performed under his nickname 'Alsy'.
He was born on 14 August 1961 to Bill MacDonald, a professor of child health at University of Western Australia, and Judy Henzell (AM), a well-known paediatrician. He was the youngest of the four children, with two older brothers and a sister. As a child he could not say 'Alan' properly so called himself 'Alsy'. He went to Hollywood Senior High School in Perth, Western Australia and was close friends with David McComb.
In 1976, partly in response to the emergence of punk rock, MacDonald and McComb formed Dalsy, later known as Blök Music and then The Triffids (from the post-apocalyptic John Wyndham novel, The Day of the Triffids). McComb and MacDonald wrote and performed songs with Phil Kakulas (later in Blackeyed Susans), Andrew McGowan, Julian Douglas-Smith, and later Byron Sinclair, Will Akers and Margaret Gillard. By Christmas 1978, they had released several home-recorded cassette tapes and been through many line-up changes.
In 1981, The Triffids released their first, 7-inch vinyl single, "Stand Up", as a result of winning a song competition run by the Western Australian Institute of Technology. Subsequent releases included the Reverie EP, "Spanish Blue", and the Bad Timing and Other Stories EP. They moved to Sydney, in 1982.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Alsy MacDonald” is australian musician. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Alsy, MacDonald and Australian, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4735894. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1976, 1978 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alsy MacDonald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.