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Exiles from the lost Australian Dream

Marie Ryan — RAM, June 24 1983

She shifts uncomfortably on a train making its infuriatingly fragmented and meandering way back from Melbourne to Sydney, ears firmly encased in Sony Walkperson ‘phones listening in amazement for the umpteenth time to the new Go-Betweens album, Before Hollywood. Staring out at the dark night drifting by, absorbing the sounds which seem to fit her country so well, she succumbs to the music; its alternative softness and hardness, its thick emotional content, massage her wornout traveller’s soul.

What was it that Franco Brunetti said in RAM about the Go-Bs connecting the inner landscape of the mind and the outer landscape of the (un)real world? He was right! With each song, they build a bridge over that gap, drawing you into a territory that dwells deep within – your past. But only rarely do you revisit it with such a clear and affectionate sense of being there again.

Four cheerful Go-Bs sit around a table in a Kings Cross coffee lounge and stare expectantly as I fiddle with my tape recorder. I’m feeling excited, enthusiastic, and not particularly relaxed.

"I thought the RAM review was a very perceptive piece of journalism," offers the laconic Grant McLennan, and lapses back into silence.

"I think he’d really listened to it, which was great," adds Robert Forster with conviction.

"It’s probably the best review that’s been written," says the spirited new bass player, Robert Vickers.

Critical response to the Go-Betweens’ second album, recorded in the Turneresque ambience of UK seaside resort Eastbourne, has been good, most reviewers falling captive to its gentle complexity and literate charm.

Melody Maker’s Allan Jones was a rare dissenter. His heart numbed by too much pub rock and too many drinking sessions with Nick Lowe, Jones carped on about the derivative nature of their songs, accusing them of plagiarising everyone from Cale and Can to Talking Heads and Tom Verlaine.

"I thought that review was poo!" declared Lindy Morrison, never one to beat about the bush. "Dusty In Here is nothing like Half Past France (John Cale). He says the rhythm from By Chance is out of a song by Can. I haven’t even heard of Can! I mean I have heard ‘of’ Can – there’s a revival of them at the moment – but I haven’t listened to their music, so how would I know?

"I mean, all that’s stupid. Even if some of the instrumentation is like some of John Cale’s, it doesn’t seem bizarre to me that people can go off on the same strands musically. People who may be alike in terms of their sensibilities towards the world – why don’t they go off on the same strand musically? All that means is that people think alike."

"While paying heed to many other musics, the Go-Betweens have uncompromisingly invented their own." – F. Brunetti, RAM #211

Robert: "I don’t have any influences. I exist completely on my own. And it’s ever-increasing. I think it’s the same with Grant – we just exist: completely within our own genre. We’re completely self perpetuating."

Grant: "The only thing that we get influenced by is our emotional response to a situation or a certain feel. I know there’s a whole sociological question that comes up now, of course – I mean, your response to a situation is determined by the events that have happened to you in your life. Of course if you live in a shuttered room and never talk to anyone you have very little influences, but when it comes down to it, we just write – we have our own language and we draw on that."

Before Hollywood is an intensely evocative collection of songs. It reeks of Australia, of growing up and growing apart from places and people. Its words tell tales of journeys and disillusionment, of conflict and trust. But at the same time it is a strangely affirmative album, which is the key to its strength.

The title track looks at the future in fear and wonderment from a point in the past. But the Go-Betweens rejected my inference that an aura of nostalgia permeates the album.

"Nostalgia’s like a sloppy return to a golden time. I don’t think that’s what we’re saying with the album cover or some of the feelings in the songs at all." However, Grant declines to provide me with a more accurate description.

The Go-Betweens are one of a growing number of Australian bands who express the substance and myth that is peculiar to life in this country. Their music is a synthesis of influences – a unique hybrid of the American and English sounds which soundtracked their lives when they were at formative stages. (Though Dylan, I suspect, was discovered by Grant and Robert at a later point.)

Along with the sorely missed Tactics, the Go-Betweens are the most perceptive and accurate reconstructers of the Australian experience. They have supplied us with a new self conscious definition of Australia previously missing from our pop music.

The important thing about these two bands is that they observe both the good and the bad aspects of our lovely infuriating country. They are bound by the fatal draw of the physical landscape from which none of us really free ourselves – that combination of shimmering heat, the heady smell of the bush, its chattering sounds, the red earth, the endless blue sky. But they also see the brash, defensive culture in which mediocrity is elevated to an art form, as in ocker TV advertising, and the lost Australian dream entombed in the sprawling, deadening suburbs.

Both bands uncover our ‘buried country’ with horror and affection, although the Go-Betweens do it more instinctively. Many of the songs on Before Hollywood ‘pull back the curtains and let in the dark’ in a very personal, diffused, almost hidden way. Their themes are universal but their history and genesis lie in the lives of the songwriters.

But can we really claim the Go-Betweens as our own? With no real allegiance to any place, the GOBS are stateless. Having felt themselves outside of Australia even when they lived here, home to them must be wherever they happen to be.

"To tell the truth, I feel alien. in most places – apart from Sydney," says Lindy. "In a few days I might say something different, but at the moment I’ve got a cup of cappuccino (more bitterly missed by Australians in London than Vegemite ever was). That sense of alienation is present in our music, and always has been. There’s really no need to make a point about it."

"Yes," agrees Robert Forster, "I think we tend to stand outside the scene that we’re in and just observe, and it forces us back into ourselves and we discover these horrible things about ourselves and write about them. I really feel alien in Europe but I don’t see feeling alien as a depressing thing. In Europe it’s great because you’re away and you’re completely cut off, and you don’t think about anything except what catches your eye."

The stimulation that comes from being in a foreign country partly arises from the lack of familiarity with its cultural figures, its rituals and the largely unspoken, taken for granted assumptions that people build their lives upon. It puts uncertainty into your life and makes it that much more unpredictable. Life becomes a process of discovery again, as in childhood.

The Go-Betweens are as susceptible to the lure of unfamiliarity as anyone else (indeed, it’s the essence of their music). They don’t particularly want to return here to live, despite a certain comfort in the familiarity which greets them each time they return here.

"You just get really used to people like, say, the television presenters here," muses Robert F. "You can understand them – like, even someone like Bert Newton. You can understand where you are by the people, you can recognise characteristics on television.

"In England I find it really hard to understand a lot of the celebrities there, how they’ve become celebrities and why they’re celebrities and that makes me feel that I don’t totally understand where I am, because I don’t understand those people or how they got to be on TV."

Before Hollywood was made when the Go-Betweens were a threepiece. Last February they took another person into the closely knit fold – bass player Robert Vickers, a fellow ex Brisbanite. Apart from confusing matters (and interviewers) with the presence of two Roberts in the group, the addition of Vickers means that Grant and Robert F. can now recreate live that tantalising, honey sweet blend of rhythm and lead guitar that makes Hollywood so seductive.

Robert Vickers is small and looks very young – I didn’t ask his age – but he secretes confidence like one who knows his own value and speaks the vocabulary of a man who’s seen and done it all, or at least a large part of it. He’s very likeable.

Originally a member of Brisbane band the Numbers (later to become the Riptides), he left Australia in ‘79 and his travels led him to New York where he joined up with local aspiring pop band, the Colors. After limited success the band disintegrated, but then fate stepped in with the news that the GOBS were looking for a bass player, and "he applied and got the job". Vickers responds to questions addressed generally to the band as if he had been a Go-Between all his life, and I can’t help remarking upon his rapid and complete assimilation into the family.

"It’s all because we come from the same home town," explains Lindy with one of her enigmatic smiles. "We don’t have to learn any new references."

Vickers’ return to Australia with the group has not been without its problems (for him). Requesting ‘a beer’ one night recently at a crowded Sydney Trade Union Club bar, he was asked to stipulate the brand of beer he wanted. Vickers looked at the barman in surprise. He didn’t know any of the brand names! The barman impatiently moved on to the next customer – Robert pushed his way out of the throng, emptyhanded, angry and confused. Ha! So this was Sydney.

Lindy Morrison’s drumming is the base on which the Go-Betweens ride as they head off in a much more assertive and self confident direction than that found on their first album, Send Me A Lullaby. Lindy is still the idiosyncratic, inventive drummer she’s always been, but she’s pared down, tightened up and pushed the GOBS towards a simpler, harder sound.

"Sometimes in the past," recalls Grant "I thought that there was too much drumming there, but Lindy’s learned – this is an argument we often have – Lindy’s learned the beauty of simplicity."

But Lindy’s simplicity is unlike any other drummer’s. It’s the key to that which characterises the Go Betweens’ sound – the unexpected, the element of surprise, the abnormal.

Lindy Morrison gazes at you with eyes that seem to see everything. I’ve never seen her show any signs of discomfort, which, coupled with her uncompromisingly direct gaze, can have the uncanny effect of making you feel uncomfortable. She likes Elvis Costello the Stranglers and Henry Miller, describing the latter two as "sexy rather than sexist."

Lindy listens mainly to other drummers – of every musical persuasion. Like Jeff Wegener of the Laughing Clowns, (the only modern pop drummer she admires), the art of drumming totally absorbs her. She seems totally dedicated.

"It’s not dedication, it’s obsession! It just obsesses you."

In common with Claire of the Moodists, Lindy’s size doesn’t match the power of the beat that surges out of the speakers.

"I really think we play a little bit too loud," she laughs. "I think we overcompensate. It takes so many years to learn to get strong, and then we’ve got to go back again."

Grant McLennan (ex bass player and now additional guitarist) is the writer of Cattle And Cane, one of the best songs of the last ten years. In a band made up of four very strong personalities, Grant appears the most imperturbable. There is a calm detachment in the way he looks on at life, but an indefinable sadness frequently pushes its way up through his songs.

"When I was at primary school," he remembers, "I wrote ballads in the Australian tradition – like Banjo Patterson, and as I discovered other poets I just mimicked their style, just working trying to find some kind of voice.

"At school I had an experience which almost turned me off poetry. I had written a poem and the housemaster accused me of stealing it from someone else, and said that I’d copied it out. I said that I hadn’t. I insisted on this and I was punished – corporal punishment.

"When I went to University, that was my main interest; studying literature and drama. I was fortunate in that I met Robert and I didn’t have to pursue that career anymore – I could just play in a band."

His experience growing up in Cairns near the cane fields, and later visiting his mother on the cattle station she moved to after remarrying, yielded the haunting imagery of Cattle And Cane.

Robert Forster’s songs are angular and desperate, the bitter foil to the soft sweetness of Grant’s melodies. He sings a little like Tom Verlaine and plays the sort of guitar lines that melt hearts. Robert is given to making outrageous statements ("I have no influences!"), and his answers to my questions are often charged with emotion. Robert F. has strong feelings which he doesn’t attempt to hide.

It’s Robert who talks about wanting the band to be successful. "I think it’s important for us to appeal to 13 to 15 year old girls!" he declares as we discuss the band’s impending appearance on Countdown. "If they can see us on Countdown and like it, then that’s great."

A look of disgust begins to creep over his face. "We arrive back here and find that Skyhooks and Dragon have reformed! That strata from the late 70s is still so entrenched, I’m amazed. The bands here are all so old – like the Radiators are still going! I can’t believe that. That’s why I say if we can get onto Countdown and just establish ourselves, and if it saves Dragon or Skyhooks getting back into the Top 20 or if it saves Australia from having to see Skyhooks one more time on television, then that’s fantastic in itself."

With shows like Countdown settling further into a morass of predictability, self congratulatory exercises like the Rock Awards and the mainstream record industry still wallowing in the conservatism that they’ve inherited from their parent American record companies, I can’t really see the GOBS blasting their way to the top of the Aussie charts. Neither can they, and they accept this with no evidence of bitterness. But I can’t help wondering whether Cattle And Cane would have got its just recognition had it been released in the sixties. And conversely, I can’t help pondering whether the Byrds would have ever got onto AM radio had they been an Australian indie band in the eighties.

The next, obvious step is for the Go-Betweens to tour America, in many ways their spiritual home. They don’t see a tour as a viable proposition as yet, a fact which Robert Vickers puts down to their lack of notoriety and saleable image. Bands like the Birthday Party and the Virgin Prunes (a fellow Rough Trade act) have been able to visit the States on the strength of their Sex and Death images. "We’re a little too normal," laments Vickers.

"Actually," says Robert Forster, "I think we’re the weirdest of the lot out of all those bands in the fact that we do appear normal."

The Go-Betweens are as normal as an Australian suburban home. And they contain just as much weirdness within. It’s that which makes them so subversive and so unsettling. And although the likelihood of it ever happening seems remote, in the hearts of middle Australia is where they ultimately belong.