Together again, together again

“WE WERE a very great, but weird-looking band,” says Grant McLennan. This is true. If there is a Go-Betweens video that sums up the essence of the band best, it’s the one for ‘Head Full Of Steam’.

Robert Forster, if you recall, lollops around the set sporting a ridiculously tight cropped black top, red trousers so low-waisted they barely reach above his ankle, and some kind of industrial size metal chain around his neck. Grant, demurely strumming his guitar in the corner, is resplendent in leggings and a blouse, lovely shoulder-length wig, and full make-up complete with false eyelashes, making drummer Lindy Morrison look completely under-dressed. Bassist Robert Vickers throws shapes in the background, as if he just wandered out of 1963 and into the wrong studio.

And all the while, Robert Forster is singing (just) lyrics like “Her father works, her mother works in exports but that’s of no importance at all,” and “She’s never had a nickname, but then, nor have I.”

And all that is topped off with a chorus that could bring you to your knees.

That was nearly ten years ago. I’d like to say that the video made such a mark on me as an impressionable teenager that it accounts for the determinedly individualistic dress sense I’ve exhibited ever since but I can’t, firstly because anybody who knows me would laugh merrily at the idea of me exhibiting anything like ‘dress sense’, and secondly, because I never got to see the video until later. Much later. Just this year, in fact, when No Disco did, as always, the decent thing and hosted a sort of Go-Betweens fest.

The weekly No Disco binges might have seemed excessive to some, but it’s worth noting that there were a hell of a lot of other Go-Betweens fans who never got the opportunity to see the videos when they were released. Even later, blindingly commercial singles like ‘Streets Of Your Town’ were lucky to get airplay – Grant remarks on the sleeve-notes to the band’s compilation album that Radio 1 played it ‘only on sunny days’, and you don’t get many of those to the pound.

The Go-Betweens, along with Husker Du and our own Stars Of Heaven, occupy a cosy place on that shelf in pop history reserved for bands who sold bugger-all records and whose influence only became apparent after their demise. Their profile has subsequently been raised by Grant and Robert’s solo careers – twice the number of releases equals twice the reviews – and perhaps by the fact that, of those who did hear their records, an unusually high percentage went on to become music journalists. I don’t know why this should be true. It just is.

Between 1978 and 1990, The Go-Betweens released a batch of singles that are so melodic and so special they should be compulsory listening for anyone even contemplating a career in music. And best of all, whatever about the pretentiousness of those of us who waffle on about them, there was nothing pretentious about The Go-Betweens. All of which should go some way to explain why, ten minutes before I’m due to interview Grant and Robert, I’m sitting on a bench in Hyde Park scared shitless at the prospect of meeting them. I’d have stayed there longer if it hadn’t been raining.

As it turns out, as I should have known it would turn out, they are friendly and charming. They’re here to play a reunion concert in Tower Records, to celebrate the anniversary of their record label Beggars Banquet, and to publicise their new solo ventures. Robert’s album of cover versions, I Had A New York Girlfriend, has just been released, while Grant’s new double album Horsebreaker Star, is due at the end of October.

“The last time we played together was about October last year in Melbourne. It was for a friend who was getting married, we were down in Melbourne together and it seemed like a good thing to do,” explains Grant. “We’d done that tour with Lloyd Cole at the end of 1991 of Europe and America, and we did a little festival in Brisbane in ’92. We haven’t played in Britain together though since the Go-Betweens, at the beginning of 1990.

“I got up and did something with you once when you were on tour,” he continues, nodding towards Robert. “It’s going to be great. The rehearsal in Australia last week sounded pretty good.”

Like the Grant and Bob pairing that formed the basis of Husker Du, the two Go-Betweens mainmen were, and remain, very different characters. Even leaving vocal idiosyncrasies aside, it was never very difficult to figure out who was responsible for which song. Grant concocted deceptively simple melodies that housed peerless choruses, and seemed to play the straight-man to Robert’s bookish, preening oddball, especially in a live context.

Grant’s no Jarvis Cocker, but he’s not exactly Mr. Stodgy either; the trouble is, that when Robert Forster’s around, everyone else looks a little staid. “It’s Robert as the artsy, eccentric one and me as the diligent craftsman . . .” concurs Grant. “Which is fine. It’s an easy thing to say but there’s truth in it. I’d say after all the years of being connected with the big man, there’s going to be bits rubbing off back and forth. But there’s more Liberace in Robert than in me and I mean that in a good way.”

“To me it’s show business, and I really don’t see that what I do in terms of rock and roll is all that different from what a lot of people do that’s a lot more Las Vegas, do you know what I mean?” suggests Robert. “I’m not defending blatant bad cabaret, it’s just that to me there’s a stage and there’s an audience, and it always comes really naturally.

“Some people in our home town in Brisbane were quite shocked because they had perceptions of the band. People were used to seeing Grant and I sort of, not scared, but quite static. We were a three-piece band, after all. A lot of the performing thing came about because we got more members in the band, and once we did that we started to get a sound that didn’t depend completely on me playing rhythm guitar all the time. It opened up a whole bed of sound, especially when we got Amanda Brown in.

“I think that’s when I started performing. If you saw a video of the band in 1983 or ’84, I’m just standing there, and I really am pretty much singing and playing.”

“And then a year later came the dresses and lipstick and flares,” laughs Grant.

You weren’t averse to a bit of cross-dressing yourself . . .”

“Well, you’ve got to shake it up every now and then, haven’t you?” he laughs. “I always thought if the band hadn’t worked, I could just get a job in ‘Les Girls’ in Sydney.”

I Had A New York Girlfriend is Robert Forster’s third solo album. The songs are culled from disparate sources – Keith Richards, Grant Hart, Neil Diamond, Martha And The Muffins, Guy Clark, Heart even – and seem to have little in common except for the fact that Robert was able to sing them.

“It came to me in Germany when I was there, and I woke up one morning and thought, this would be a good idea to do, because I wanted to go back into the studio and do some singing. I’d been through Melbourne and seen a lot of musicians there, and I just put them together; the musicians in Melbourne and the idea of doing a few songs.

“It was hit or miss really, because the rehearsal time for the record was very, very short and there was a lot of pressure on me. But the songs aren’t like, twelve songs that when I was eighteen or nineteen I was listening to, mainly because a lot of them weren’t around then. It’s mainly songs from the last four or five years, that I listened to when I was in Germany.”

“And there’s another one you wanted to do,” prompts Grant.

“There is one, ‘The Lady Don’t Mind’ by Talking Heads,” nods Robert. “But that one didn’t work.”

Why not?

“Because he couldn’t sing it.”

“Well, I could sing it,” counters Robert, “but it didn’t really fit in with the concept, the sequence in the tracks when you’re listening to it.”

Were there any others that got left by the wayside? “Do you know a band called Tindersticks? I tried to do a song of theirs called ‘For Those’. I liked that song a great deal, and when I was making lists, endless amounts of lists, for this record, ‘For Those’ was always there. We tried in the practice room for a couple of hours but it really wasn’t going anywhere. I just couldn’t get into the skin of it.

“There was another one called ‘Important In Your Life’ by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers that we also tried and that one didn’t work. It would have been nice to have a Jonathan Richman track on it.”

Was he a particular hero?

“He was at the start. I don’t like him much now, it’s become a little bit too kindergarten-ish for me. It ‘s a shame, because his first album was full of teenage angst, and then he got more, for want of a better word, puerile. And he stuck there, except for one time he made an album called Jonathan Goes Country. He sort of hasn’t developed as he’s got older. He must be forty, forty-five now or something. I’d really much prefer songs from a mature forty-five-year-old.

“Or, the only other thing I can suggest for him,” he continues, getting into his stride as career guidance counsellor, “is that he market his whole self to children, do you know what I mean? It’s like people that write, some people write children’s books and that’s their career and that’s their life, and some people make a lot of money at it. Maybe Jonathan could follow that one.”

Grant’s new double album, Horsebreaker Star, will follow Robert’s at the end of October. It was recorded in Athens, Georgia though he’s keen to stress that Stipey and the gang were not directly involved with the project.

“I was even thinking of leaving the name Athens off, and just putting ‘Recorded In America’,” he says. “But it is through them that I knew of this studio. When the Go-Betweens did a tour with REM for the Green album, Peter Buck was telling me about this studio where they recorded and still did lots of things. And at the beginning of the year his name came up when I was thinking about studios and producers and all that sort of rubbish.”

His intention was to go off “by myself and take one guitar and play with local people,” and perhaps it’s this back-to-basics approach that has led to the album being classified as his most ‘countrified’ to date.

“There is one out and out country song on it, but then, with the Go-Betweens we had a country song, a punk country song I guess you’d call it (‘Don’t Call Me Gone’). This time the players were jazz players, and I think they were just happy to be playing a lot of three-chord rock and roll. So I thought I’d throw in a bunch of other things that I had. There’s some banjo and pedal steel on a couple of other tracks and a lot of English people hear that and immediately think it must be country. That’s only a portion of it. There’s still folk on it, and rock, and a bit of pop, and a bit of R’n’B . . .”

Anything else?

“A bit of Fleetwood Mac maybe?” he laughs. “Actually I would have thought Calling From A Country Phone (Robert’s last solo album), and I Had A New York Girlfriend had more of a country tinge.”

Both Grant and Robert have now settled in Brisbane. The band relocated in London during the mid-eighties, but returned to Australia in 1988 to record the last Go-Betweens album, 16 Lovers Lane.

“It was time to go back,” says Grant, “and after that we never really left. We’d got to a point where we really didn’t need to live here any longer. We had a record label that put up with us longer than the other ones had, and also we had played a lot around the world so we could play in England every year, but why live in London and get depressed and see no sunlight?

“We did a tour and went back to Australia to do the next record at the beginning of 1990 and things just kind of fell apart. Robert went back to Germany. But he’s originally from Brisbane and loves it very much, and Karin (Robert’s wife) had not seen it before so it just fitted in.

“I was too lazy to do anything else,” he grins. “But I eventually got out of Sydney and now we’re back in the same town. It’s good, it’s really good. Brisbane’s alive again.”

And they’re working together again, not on songs this time, but on a film script.

“It’s a feature film, a comedy, with a bit of action in it. Very Australian,” explains Grant. “It’s going great. When we finish with our commitments over here we can go back for the Australian summer, and just get out the typewriter and the martini glasses and the Billy Wilder scripts.”

What’s it about exactly?

“It’s a comedy thriller. We can’t give anything away,” says Robert cagily. Ooh, go on!

“There’s two wonderful twists in it, and no-one’s thought of them before and we don’t want Hollywood stealing them, ’cos you know what they’re like,” laughs Grant. “It’s men and women doing true but funny things, and it’s contemporary – not one of those ‘Australians in long dresses’ kind of films. Where it’s set and what’s going on and the characters, especially one of the characters – we understand one of those characters very well,” he adds, looking meaningfully at Robert.

The inevitable question is, are you going to work on the soundtrack together?

“A couple of people have said that to us, and it’s something to think about,” says Grant. “At the moment it’s just, get it written first. It’d be nice to have some sort of song through a film as our first recorded work together.”

“We’ve also got this other guy who can contribute who’s doing a soundtrack course at the moment down in Sydney,” says Robert. The other guy turns out to be former Go-Betweens bassist John Wilsteed. “He might be coming around.”

Hearing ‘Cattle And Cane’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’ and ‘Spring Rain’ and ‘The Wrong Road’ at the concert later that evening is one-of-a-kind wonderful, like getting drunk with an old friend you never thought you’d see again. Robert picks his way around the stage looking like a kind of self-absorbed heron, while Grant stands and strums and smiles. They could have played half a dozen encores, but there’s only time for one, ‘People Say’. “I wrote this song in 1978,” says Robert. “My mother still thinks it’s the best song I ever wrote.”

With songs like these, you have to ask, why didn’t they make it big?

“It’s a question of promotion,” says Robert.

“And bribery,” adds Grant.

“You’ve got to do the right thing. Have you seen a band called Shampoo? They’re doing the right thing,” continues Robert, oblivious. “They’re talking about setting up clothes stores and playing in gay clubs, and they’re going to stop as soon as they don’t feel the anger and the energy. I don’t know if they believe it, but that’s what gets them in the charts. I could never do all that shit. It’s not in my blood.

“You have to choose one thing,” says Grant. “You see a lot of people and they choose one, not even image, but one little hook line that the press and the public can get and they do it and that’s showbiz. They do one thing and sometimes they do it damn well. But if you kind of jump around a bit and go all over the place and don’t come out looking the same all the time, unfortunately people don’t know how to deal with that. With us, there were men and women in the band, cross-dressing, make-up, two singers, we were Australian, lyrically different. And the next song would never be just part two of the one before.

“It’s a shame though. The country would have been richer for it. I’ve always thought we belonged on Top Of The Pops, ’cos when I first saw TOTP as a kid all the bands used to look weird, you know?”

“Like Wizzard. Actually we look more like Wizzard now,” laughs Robert.

Grant: “Did you say wizened?”

Robert: “No, Wizzard. The Roy Wood band. Good band. Great band.”

Yeah, well, he ought to know.