The going is still good

The Go-Betweens story is essentially one of friendship.” So says Grant McLennan, who, along with Robert Forster, has been the heart of the Aussie band since their first musical outpourings over 25 years ago. 1989 saw them disband, though. After spending most of that decade as next big things, they decided to call it a day. It was a day that lasted 11 years, until their magnificent comeback album, The Friends Of Rachel Worth reared its gorgeous head and The Go-Betweens were back, and winning legions of new fans into the bargain.

Three years on, and their latest opus, Bright Yellow, Bright Orange, is garnering rave reviews all over the world, another sumptuous slice of sun-kissed melody and classic songwriting. It was recorded in Melbourne and Sydney in a three-week spell in autumn 2002, the first time they recorded in their native country since 1988’s 16 Lovers’ Lane: “It was a joyous time, which I think does reflect on the record,” opines Grant.

To this listener, the album has a recurring theme of growing older more-or-less gracefully. Grant disagrees with my prognosis, though: “For me, lyric-wise the record is not about growing older – it is about trying to surrender to the whole process of the imagination, finding a sustainable thing. I guess, in some way, it’s about trying to put that into my life again.”

Robert is more considered in his reply to my perhaps ageist remark: “I think that [growing old gracefully] is what we’re trying to do. It’s not really said but I think it’s in the way we carry ourselves. I still think we’re capable of surprises and, with the band that we’ve got, it still feels like the start of something.”

Certainly, Bright Yellow, Bright Orange finds the two songwriters at the peak of their powers and seemingly a lot more content than they were in the 1980s, when they admit “there was a lot of pressure” to have a hit.

“That pressure has been taken away a bit,” Robert admits. “I still think Grant and I try to write pop-songs, and our songs do get airplay, but we are concentrating on the music a lot more, which is what I wanted in the ’80s anyway. I thought the hunt for the hit single was ridiculous. I thought we should have been more like REM or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I just thought, let’s keep making great albums. If we’re to have a hit single, it’ll come. If we try and manufacture it, anyone who likes us will see right through it straight away.

“Also, we weren’t really Top 40 people: we were a band. It was very hard in the 1980s for a band to record in any real way and get into the charts – it still is to an extent now – because it is so artificial. In a way, though, not having a hit single has become a blessing, because hit singles pin you to a time.”

Grant takes up the baton: “On one level, if you were born in 1957 or 1958, you don’t belong in the pop world. Even someone as iconic as Madonna has to constantly reinvent herself. We’re not that kind of artist. But I still think we’re a really good pop band. Because we’re so difficult to define, we get asked all the time to define ourselves and that’s the last thing I want to do. But I think Robert and I do have a belief in the idea of the classic song, whatever that means now.”

They have written a fair few classics in the past, and there are a couple of bona fide nuggets on this album, but they’re far from finished yet. Grant is enjoying life in The Go-Betweens enormously: “I get to sing with Robert Forster,” he says, his eyes lighting up. “As a kid, when we met each other, he was a marvel. I couldn’t play an instrument and he was coming up with these lovely pop short stories. So the fact that I get to work with him is great. It’s still fun. We’re not bored. The audience is not bored. The freaky thing is that in some way I can see us getting a Grammy nomination at some stage and turning it down.”

“We’re very excited about the band we have now,” Robert stresses. “It reminds me a little bit of Talking Heads in 1979. We can make any type of album that we want to make. We are aware of our strengths and we don’t want to do anything that’s silly, but we also want to keep things open and not keep making variations of the same album. We’re still ambitious and I think we’re still learning. There is always a chance that the thing we are going to be remembered for the most, we haven’t done yet.”