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Remembrance and Visions of Hope

Clinton Walker / Frank Brunetti, The Next Thing

The sound of the Go-Betweens is the sound of rain, the sound of light – wide open skies – the sound of parched emotions, of longing, of remembrance and hope. Driven by a wound-up sort of calm psychosis, this contrasting yet compatible quartet unwinds like a country road or a railway, but not before negotiating the jostling city traffic on the Streets of Love.

In 1977, Robert Forster, who ‘just played guitar a bit’, met Grant McLennan at Queensland University and taught him what he knew about bass, and before long the pair were performing a few songs Forster had written. Assuming the Go-Betweens moniker, with transient drummers the group began gigging around Brisbane. They cut two singles for the label they conceived, Able. In 1979 they headed overseas, where in Scotland they found kindred spirits in the Orange Juice/Postcard Records axis. They cut a single for Postcard and returned home. Back in Brisbane they recruited a permanent drummer, Lindy Morrison, and set to making a national impression. Linking up with Missing Link Records, the group eventually moved to Melbourne, where they recorded their debut album in 1981. The album attracted the attention of Rough Trade Records in England, so in 1982 the Go-Betweens headed there again. Making a favourable impression early on, the group set about recording a second album late in the year. The result was Before Hollywood.

Obviously the Go-Betweens roots lay in folk(-rock) as much as they were inspired by punk. Their early material, written entirely by Forster, was naive, faltering, romantic and still attractive and engaging. The classic influences of Dylan and Lou Reed were by no means obvious. The Go-Betweens quickly established their unique sound, with Forster’s guitar playing a very rhythmic role to McLennan’s melodic, lead bass. When Morrison joined the group she introduced a personalised rhythmic base previously lacking. The Go-Betweens as represented on Send Me A Lullaby retained their sparse, intricate fragility. Part awkwardness, part grace, there was no group uplifting like the Go-Betweens. By this time, McLennan was also contributing songs – his were lush and romantic; Forster’s were quirkier, more obtuse. With the consummate Before Hollywood the Go-Betweens’ sound was thicker, more assured and even more resonant. The single Cattle And Cane was a classic and a (quintessentially Australian song, the most important hit-that-never-was of 1983.

Expanding their scope, the Go-Betweens added new bassist Rob Vickers, while McLennan moved on to guitar. After an immensely successful tour of Australia in mid-1983, the group returned to London, if only as a stepping stone to America.

Clinton Walker

The following dialogue is the result of four separate interviews with each Go-Between at the end of the group’s 1983 Australian tour.

Robert Forster

I’d love to go to Woodstock to record. I like Music From Big Pink a lot but I prefer The Basement Tapes. If you’re thinking along that way, it’d be great to grab Tony Cohen and a four-track, go up to Woodstock and get a barn. It could be great.

We enjoyed recording the second album a lot more than the first one. It’s quite an ordeal to record an album. I don’t know how people can make an album over six months in the studio, how anyone could spend six months in a recording studio is beyond me. Four weeks is alright. That’s how I like to record. Fast, but not rushed. We learnt so much from recording the first album. The main thing is being prepared. I didn’t realise that. because we’d recorded four singles before we did the album and there’s not much preparation involved in that. You pick two songs you like, play them a lot and then you go in. But with the second album we knew exactly what we were doing, the preparation was a lot better.

How did you meet Grant in the first place?

Grant and I were both at university. I was doing it part-time, living at home. Grant lived in a really good house with three other students. I was lonely, knew that Arts was absolute crap. University was good in that way, in that you’re accounted for, you’re doing something but you’re not really doing anything. Grant and I crossed on one or two subjects and became friends. He did a lot better than me, got far better marks.

Catcher In The Rye had a big effect on me. It was the first book that I’d really read and understood the character. Holden Caulfield, the character in the book, he was sixteen and I was sixteen, he was six foot and I was six foot. I liked that book a lot. It’s a really unconventional view of life but the great thing about it is that it’s pre-beatnik, it hasn’t got any beatnik crap about let’s get a car and drive a thousand miles and that’s how you become ‘wild’ because that’s the best or youth culture way of expressing wildness or discomfort or freedom.

Salinger’s become a virtual recluse since he wrote that book.

Yes, I can understand that. It would be complete and utter disgust, disenchantment with the twentieth century. I don’t know if he thinks like that though, but World War I, World War II, the way cities have become, the way people have become, violence, paranoia, crime, everything. The whole failure of what was going to come with the nineteenth century, the whole blooming…it just went crash.

Sometimes I feel… I don’t think about this much because it’s such a big subject that I shy away from it… I’m feeling an increased guilt being an Australian. The attitudes that were prevailing around the time that this country was settled which justified the destruction of the black population here, that was the way people thought then and that’s the way this country came to be settled. There’s just nothing that can be done about that.

I just don’t feel attached to this country. I don’t relate to any of its symbols, crass symbols that a fair amount of people relate to. People get emotional about Ayers Rock, about the Sydney Harbour Bridge, about Channel 7. I see those things and I feel absolutely nothing. I know that’s no big thing because they aren’t much anyway. I just enjoy the sunny days, it’s a relaxing place.

Being in a rock band at the moment is a really strange situation to be in. I sometimes feel I’m in a trade of which the peak of its creativity has passed. I mean I’m right at the end of it. Really I’m here under false pretences. It’s like you’re making silent movies in 1940. No, that’s a bad example. It’s like something that I think was really built to last for twenty or thirty years and so much momentum’s built up on it that it won’t stop, it can’t stop.

I’m trying to think of an example that would make it clear. Other things like movies and literature I can see going on and on and on and I’d be quite happy being in that because I’d know that it’s built for a long time. I just think pop music, rock music, was built on a few simple ideas and those simple ideas had built-in time spans in them and, frankly, it’s all passed. But I still think we’re doing something valid, something interesting, something exciting.

I think what it comes down to is someone’s got to come up with a new way, a redefinition of the popular song. Take jazz or ragtime. In the twenties there was a song on the hit parade and that’s what the popular song sounded like – the verse, chorus, middle eight, the instrumentation, the arrangement, the way the people in those bands looked. Then it evolves to Sinatra or whoever in the forties redefining the popular song. Then rock music came along and that was the new popular song. Now there’s got to be something after rock music, that’s obvious.

The way it’s going to come about is someone redefining the popular song by writing something that is Top 40 yet doesn’t sound like anything else. The people that are doing it don’t look like anybody else. The sound of it doesn’t sound like anything before. I guess that’s what’s got to happen.

I can’t see it happening because I can see the way the redefinition of the popular song has often come through a force outside music itself – like war, economic collapse, history in general, something that reshapes everything. If Australia was bulldozed and we were still all left here, I think we’d start writing different songs, I think we’d have different attitudes. It’s just that fermentation of things around you changing quickly which is what war or anything does. Then you need new things and one of those things which could be needed is a popular song.

I’d imagine it would be incredibly hard to be an artist now, because everything builds up to an extent, like art, where you can see it develop and develop and develop and then around the turn of the century people just went pow and just chucked everything at the canvas and it was just broken down, fragmented, and the whole ideology of art was just exposed. There isn’t anything more you can do, so it seems, except become a good stylist in a certain mode of painting.

Isn’t that all the Go-Betweens are? Good stylists in a certain mode?

I think that’s true, but it’s something I don’t think about much, our place in it all. At times I think we’re always incredibly serious about it. I think there’s going to be more jokes on the next album.

Don’t you think you are a bit pompous occasionally?

(Long, long pause)…We do take it very seriously. Partly for the reasons we were talking about before: being in a rock band at this time I think you do have to take it seriously to justify your existence as a band. But look at the video we did for Cattle And Cane in England. That’s not serious, it’s very lighthearted. I think we are an informal group. I think the greatest area to become pompous in is the business area, you can become pompous with your money. But I do know what you mean. Sometimes I realise we’ve been onstage and during the entire set I realise I’ve said about ten words to the audience and that does annoy me. I would like to say more things to the audience between songs. But it’s very hard to say something that gives people more information without sounding condescending.

I think we’re becoming more flamboyant and that came about for the sheer reason that, although we’re a Brisbane band, we learnt so much in Melbourne before we went overseas it’s unbelievable. That six or seven months before we went over, that’s what Melbourne did for us. It gives you a flamboyance, a sense of character. When we came down, I don’t think people really had a notion of the band. You know, we were a ‘light-sounding Brisbane band’ and all that, but coming down to Melbourne, that stopped. Melbourne taught us to be more outgoing. I see us very much as a Melbourne band now. Going back there and playing there, I feel such a sense of homecoming, and I think the audience feels that as well.

The very first time we went to London there wasn’t anyone like us. The bands that were around then were bands like the Slits, Wire. There wasn’t anyone we could really connect with. There weren’t any records that sounded like we sounded. Going up to Glasgow and meeting Orange Juice, they were a band that was similar to us and that was the first one that I saw. Now, with everything that Postcard’s done and a whole stack of other things, there’s more bands that sound superficially like we sound, but I still think we’re fairly different to most bands.

I definitely feel within my own songwriting, hearing those bands (Patti Smith, Television, Jonathan Richman, Velvet Underground, Richard Hell) was a way of stimulating and forming a style. Now I’m completely content with the way that I write songs. I’ve got my own genre. I don’t need stimulus to write now because I’ve got it within myself.

That was the most important thing about playing with Grant. Even though he couldn’t play at the time, I knew he was an intelligent arrogant person and a creative person. I played with him as much just to be around him as for his bass playing. I just needed someone else who believed and liked the same things I did. That’s why I didn’t get some idiot that would just come in and play bass. I knew Grant was a dynamic person and he’d start writing songs and singing. I knew that would happen.

Robert Vickers

I went to New York in 1979 because of boredom after spending a year and a half in Brisbane. Saw quite a lot of Canada, United States, Mexico.

I went to New York, met a whole lot of people, went out to Max’s and CBGB’s. CBGB’s seemed a lot friendlier and a lot more people I liked seemed to go there more often. The night I came the Colors had played. They didn’t have a bass player so they played without one, just guitar, singer and drums. So I started talking to them and went down to the guitarist’s flat which was disgusting but interesting and just started playing with him and joined the band within a matter of a week.

What I was aiming for with the Colors was more along the lines of the Rascals and the Lovin’ Spoonful, that sort of New York brightness which is sometimes confused with California. With the Colors I wanted to do a very commercial sort of thing which isn’t what the Go-Betweens are doing, but I still wanted to get subtlety into the Colors which they eventually lost but which the Go-Betweens have. I wrote a lot of songs for the Colors but I won’t be for the Go-Betweens. Robert and Grant have been doing this for five years and for me to come in and do something different would be really messy. I’m very happy with the situation as it is because it’s really positive and what I’d been doing for the past year with the Colors was really negative.

I hope we sound better since I joined the band. I really liked the Go-Betweens as a threepiece. Even when they were really bad, like really bad, I liked them. So I would hate to change them in a way they wouldn’t want. They wouldn’t put up with me if I did anyway. I want it to be commercial, successful, and I think they do too.

Lindy Morrison

The first band I was in was called Shrew seven years ago, ‘76 to ‘77. We were an acoustic girls’ band with saxophone, clarinet, double bass, drums, piano and a singer. We did covers of songs like In The Mood, Chattanooga Choo Choo, Forties pop songs.

We were a political women’s band. The reason we were playing our instruments together was because we found that boys would never take us seriously as musicians. We were never given the advantages that boys were given when they were younger to learn or get involved in playing instruments. In the late 60s, early 70s, there was an attitude amongst musicians that one is born an artist and artists were men. In many ways that was reinforced by the whole hippie syndrome because hippies did nothing for feminism. They stifled it because they really sanctified the earth mother and the raising of children. That was why I hated the hippie movement when I was growing up, I could see what they were doing to women.

We were different from the main feminist political groups because we saw ourselves as artists always. I know that sounds really pretentious but that was the way it was. We were women artists, we used to have lots of all girl dances. There’s a very, very strong feminist movement in Brisbane but the feminist movement means nothing now. No more theorising, you just go out and do it.

Shrew went up to 1978. I was living in a house with these boys and they said ‘What the fuck are you doing playing with acoustic instruments?’ I could hear the Sex Pistols and the Slits and the Gang of Four and I could hear those drummers doing what I could do but the boys were still years ahead of me in playing skills. So I started asking around town who wanted to play with me.

I’d thought that rock’n’roll would never have any relevance for me because of what I’d heard in the early 70s. Then I heard this stuff and I couldn’t believe it. It was everything that I would have hoped to have done. Songs like the Slits’ Typical Girls, it was everything I was then thinking. Anarchy in the UK, Blank Generation, I was just so fucking lost as to what my direction should be until I heard this stuff.

Then just towards the end of 1978, I met these two girls called Deborah and Nicki. They were 16, 17, lesbians, and they didn’t give a fuck about anyone. They stood up to everyone. Like men used to say rude things to me and I just used to say ‘Fuck off!’ and run away, but these girls would fight. They’d hit men! I’d never seen girls be so tough, they lived by shoplifting. They were lovers and they were playing together and their stabiliser was Irena who was a lot older than them and had two kids. She was playing with them in Zero. I met them at a party and said ‘Look, I’m a drummer and I want to play with someone, I don’t want to play with men because I can’t find any to play with. I wanna play with women.’ They were real snooty and just said ‘Oh, you think you can play drums. Well just come around tomorrow and see what you can do.’

So I turned up in my little car with my drum kit and as soon as I arrived they gave me about four seconds – I’d never used barbiturates before – and I set up the drum kit and we just played for five or six hours, just the two girls on guitars and me. Irena turned up during the afternoon with her kids and just stayed for about ten minutes and listened and went away. From then on it was every day. Irena started singing and we did songs like Oh, Bondage Up Yours, Patti Smith songs, It’s Her Factory, Anarchy in the UK. Irena and the girls started writing as well. I left the band about May 1981 after two years. They wanted drum machines and synthesisers. Zero became a musical band and demanded musical perfection. I can’t deny that it did me a lot of good, I became much more musically ambitious, obsessed with becoming a good drummer. The audience even accused us of selling out!

One reason I joined the Go-Betweens was because they were so ambitious. I knew they were going to get out of Brisbane and I desperately wanted that. Also by this time I’d been playing with Robert quite a bit and a companionship had built up between us that was really important to me.

My drumming was very influenced by Robert because he used to sit there just playing songs over and over again while I tried out new rhythms and patterns. The last year Zero worked on the business of doing bizarre drumming styles and bizarre rhythms. Really bizarre.

You mean they became progressive or arty or something?

Yeah! We used to have gaps in songs that you had to count seven beats in, then play four beats, then have a gap of six, then play three, then a gap of five, then play two. All mathematically worked out.

So then I joined the Go-Betweens and started playing a backbeat and not having to do silly things. The trouble was it had become a part of me to do silly things, which is why my drumming is idiosyncratic with the Go-Betweens in many ways. On Send Me A Lullaby there are lots of strange drumbeats, things that a normal drummer wouldn’t play. It was a pleasure to return to simplicity. I now find an incredible enjoyment in simply holding a beat. Like the beat in Cattle And Cane, it’s just cyclically beautiful and sometimes I get hypnotised by it when we play it live.

You told me once that you wanted to stop playing pop music when you got to your mid-thirties…

No, no. It’s not that I don’t want to play in a pop band when I’m thirty-five. I’d like to be playing in the Go-Betweens if they’re still going. But I do think there’s a real age thing with pop. I know Charlie Watts is in his forties and that’s sort of confusing. I guess what I’ll do eventually is play drums in musical theatre. I’d like to work with a good theatre company that uses music.

I like following drummers. Gene Krupa, Al Jackson junior, who plays with Al Green, Benny Benjamin who did early Motown, Charlie Watts I love, Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Slits, Robert Gotobed from Wire, Jeffrey Wegener from the Laughing Clowns.

We’ve never aimed at the charts. We are now but, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t give a fuck if we didn’t make the charts. All I’m saying is we’re having a go. The thing is the Go-Betweens are so idiosyncratic I think it might be impossible. God, we don’t even look right!

Grant McLennan

There are certain rules and structures to music that we work in but I don’t consider those restrictions daunting at all. I consider those boundaries provocative because I think you’ve got a greater area to move in knowing the fixed perimeters that have been established. I find it provocative. Just because we play two guitars, bass and drums and sing, there’s endless combinations of that. Anyway I don’t think the way we write, especially lyrically, has been done before. I don’t think we play and sing in any way that connects to anything that’s been done before.

What? Isn’t it just a combination of your influences filtered through your particular consciousness or personality or whatever?

That’s an area I don’t know about, Frank. I can’t possibly…I’m not going to hypothesise on that. I grew up listening to a certain type of music and I suppose, deep down in my subconscious, that influences me. But I’m not aware of those influences when I come to write a song or when I listen to the band.

But you’re essentially traditionalists, aren’t you?

A lot of what we do might strike familiar chords with people but we’re not traditionalists. But also we’re certainly not a new-wave band and we never were even when we started.

I think rock and pop music are making a big resurgence. You just have to look at the success of Echo and the Bunnymen who are a straight rock band and there are a lot of other bands in England who are returning to rock now. You just have to look at the propensity of pop bands in the market-place now – Orange Juice, Duran Duran, Yazoo – pop and rock have really come back.

I don’t consider rock’n’roll an art. There are times when it’s an art but most of the time it’s just been amateur craftsmen making their first pot or whatever. In the hands of really good artists, rock is a very powerful art. Jim Morrison. Buddy Holly. Bob Dylan. Iggy Pop in a modern art way. He’s a real conceptualist, he plays gut music but he’s quite intellectual in the way he goes about doing a song. David Bowie on the other hand is a complete intellectual. There’s not a piece of gut in his music and that’s a big drawback. He’s just become like a public servant.

I heard Starman by Bowie in ‘72 which brought me back into pop music which is interesting because that was the first song in the 70s which really grabbed Robert Forster too, and Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera and Martin Bramah from the Blue Orchids told me that as well. A pivotal song. Also a reaction against the status quo at boarding school because everyone was listening to Deep Purple. I bought Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane and the response within the boarding community was ‘Oh, you poofter!’ Of course I revelled in it because I’ve never rejected the feminine side of my character. . .

Anyway, I’d always really liked melody. I started listening to folk music, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Jackson Browne. Then when I went to university my favourites apart from Bowie were Ry Cooder and Mott the Hoople. Then I met Robert who shared my interest in Ry Cooder. Also I’d heard a bit of Bob Dylan but never really liked Dylan because of his voice and then one day, just talking to Robert, he said listen to this and Dylan then became a huge obsession with me as he was with Robert. I wanted to dress like him, look like him. There’s moments in performers’ lives when they transcend their sexuality and become male and female at the same time. Dylan did it in ‘66. Bowie did it in ‘72, Morrison did it in ‘67, Lennon had it to a certain extent, Presley in ‘56. There’s no one now that’s got that appeal. They don’t have the emotive punch that those guys did.

Robert was the only person at uni that I knew who I could talk to about music. And we knew that’s what we wanted to do. People like Jonathan Richman, there was a certain normality to that music that we could identify with, being quite normal really. When I met Robert music had never entered into my conception of my life. I loved it, listened to it all the time, had a feeling for it but knew nothing about the craft. I was daunted by it because I always thought you had to start young and have a feeling for it and stuff like that. Robert just put all that to rest when I saw him playing the guitar and he was bold enough to get up on stage and play like that. I’d heard those records and I thought OK. I had nothing to do at the time. It was an emotional and creative area that I hadn’t worked in or even entertained thoughts of. I’d been writing short stories and poetry. So I was prepared to humiliate myself on stage for the first few months and then began to love it. I found that it was an avenue of expression that I enjoyed.

I’d seen other bands in Brisbane at that stage and none of them interested me. I wouldn’t have joined any other band except one that Robert was in because, spiritually, we were incredibly close. I can’t underestimate the actual connecting thing that Dylan made between Robert and me. Even the look. We never wanted to have torn t-shirts, we were interested in flannelette shirts like Creedence, we used to wear those. Everyone in Brisbane at the time was drawing from English beat music or punk bands.

What it comes down to is my vision of the world and the way I see and respond to it is unique and I want to express that uniqueness of view in what I do. That’s why we might play in a traditional style but the way Robert and I write lyrics, the way the four of us play our instruments is unique. I don’t think anyone else has played like that. I’m not inferring that we’re huge innovators, I just think we’re unique and you can never classify us. If you ask what are the Go-Betweens like, narrow-minded people or people who make quick statements might have said at one stage Jonathan Richman or Talking Heads or Television, I think that’s just a very trite initial observation. I’m not saying we’re great for being unique, being unique isn’t in itself good.

A lot of bands who have two writers can’t sustain that tug for a long time. I hope the fact of having two songwriters in the band won’t tear us apart, come between us. If it hasn’t after five years I don’t think it will. With us the only trouble you could ever have is when it comes to doing singles. But the song usually announces itself without us ever having to actually choose it.

We would be nowhere near as good as we are without Lindy’s drumming because the way she drums is as unique as the way we write songs and now Rob Vickers’ bass playing is an integral part of the band as well. I don’t think we’d be as good without them. No-one is expendable. Once I did use to feel that Lindy drummed too much, was frightened of using repetition or a beat. Coming out of Zero she was still experimenting with her instrument as well.

Right from the start we had our own style. You just have to look at the first two songs we played. Eight Pictures and Lee Remick. That to me sums it up perfectly. Sums up the band. There’s a pop element but there’s also something indefinably imaginative there which goes outside the boundaries.