I Had A New York Girlfriend

Robert Forster: “I Had A New York Girlfriend” (Beggars Banquet)

It happens all the time. A songwriter runs dry and immediately begins to panic. Some turn to charitable deeds. They start performing in hospital wards because it’s the one venue in which they can still be sure that their audience won’t get up and run away.

Others reheat past glories and call them retrospectives or reinterpretations. This is a bit like belching in someone’s face and calling it a reinterpretation of yesterday’s dinner. The lucky ones rustle up a Van load of admirers and assemble a tribute album to themselves. However, not everybody has the unique artistic vision to lead the applause for their own standing ovation.

By far the most regularly tried route from the basement of the writer’s block is the recording of a collection of covers. In theory, these intensive courses of version therapy can sluice free the creative juices. Too often in practice, however, they’re merely one more drain on the Money For Old Rope cashpoint.

The news therefore that Robert Forster’s third solo album was to be a collection of covers was not auspicious. In The Go-Betweens, his writing partnership with Grant McLennan gave birth to many of the greatest and most under-rated pop songs of the ’80s but, operating separately, neither of the two had yet produced anything that was truly unforgettable. Against all the odds though, I Had A New York Girlfriend is precisely that.

The choice of material is, at first, head-scratchingly eclectic. It’s not every day, for instance, that we’re confronted with an album which deposits Martha And The Muffins’ ‘Echo Beach’ alongside Bob Dylan’s ‘Tell Me That It Isn’t True’ or which features consecutive tracks by Keith Richards (‘Locked Away’), Neil Diamond (‘Look Out Here Comes Tomorrow’) and, gulp!, Heart (‘Alone’).

Nevertheless, the ardour for a great chorus that characterised the best of TGB very quickly emerges as an unifying factor here. As, to an even greater extent, does Forster’s own inimitable fondness for the sombre, lovelorn, entreating lyric.

There’s no irony here, no sending up, no putting down. Forster’s brilliant take on Guy Clark’s classic ‘Broken Hearted People’ is as true to itself as his very different take on Grant Hart’s ‘2541’ or even his rendition of that barstool conker, ‘3AM’. With the help of such distinguished henchpersons as Mick Harvey (Bad Seeds) and Graham Lee (The Triffids, Dave McComb), these loosest of threads are drawn together with seamless elegance.

I Had A New York Girlfriend is not a stop-gap. It’s a statement of intent. Robert Forster has outlined the size and shape of what he believes makes a great album. He must have something damn good up his sleeve for his next original outing or he wouldn’t have dared set the bar so high with this fine piece of work.

• Liam Fay