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Robert Forster, Grant McLennan and the Go-Betweens canon

Grant McLennan

The Go-Betweens canon. You must be very proud. Do you like the fact that's it's an undiscovered treasure?

"I think it's fantastic. It's just there, like this beautiful seam of melody and sound, waiting for a boy or a girl or someone from another planet to walk in and be dazzled by it. And the love affair begins. It's great. I feel the same way about music I discovered. You feel fantastic. But we are immensely proud of it. Of course, me and Robert had to listen back to the songs and compare them to the previous pressings and stuff. Just hearing all the songs in a row, you can hear the development. I still dig a lot of the songs."

But no hits. It's still unfathomable.

"I know what you are saying . Looking back and seeing that none of it is charted, a lot of people would say that's unsuccessful. But 'Marquee Moon' sold nothing, and I know much I still enjoy listening to Television. It doesn't really matter. To me the things I like, and that a lot of my friends like, are the things that maybe have fallen under the floorboards a bit. Our music was never connected with any kind of movement. There's a guilelessness to our music which I'm happy with."

Failure must've been galling at the time.

"I always thought to myself, what are we doing wrong? But by extension, what are we doing right? We were thinking, God, what's wrong with melody, what's wrong with guitars, what's wrong with ambition? I agree, it does say more about the 80's than it does about us, but then out of the '80s have come some good things today."

What's your favourite Robert Forster song?

There are some many! I'll just say at the moment — 'Rock & Roll Friend'. But then I could go back to 'People Say', the second single, which is a fantastic piece of pop music, or 'Karen' — a great individual slice of liberation of R&B. Then I could go through every album...I enjoy all his songs."

Robert Forster

The Go-Betweens canon. You must be very proud. Do you like the fact that it's an undiscovered treasure?

"(Excitedly) It has enormous plus sides. I tell to Beggars Banquet all the time. We are going to become the Velvet Underground, starting now until the year 2010. It's going to happen! I've read it in the papers: there were three groups in the 80's — the Smiths, REM, and the Go-Betweens, and that's it! I just assume this will become aperient over time. (Laughs) It's definitely not known yet. But I'm very very happy because this is the first time that you can go into a record store and order all six albums together."

But no hits. It's still unfathomable.

"I guess something that held us back was this two-pronged thing. We didn't have somebody who put down their guitar for most of the set and moved around the front of the stage. You look at Jarvis Cocker or the guy from Oasis or Blur, they're working in that way, down the front. It's an age-old formula, but it helps. We didn't have it. We thought, have two songwriters you double your chances of success. How wrong we were. Now it really doesn't bother me. I really wouldn't want it any other way."

Failure must've been galling at the time.

"Things like the Top of The Pops didn't make any sense at all. It was another universe, it might have well been The Max Bygraves Show. It was quite freeing to suddenly realise, our group is so good, and we are getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd, it was funny. Having been very uptight, I let myself go.

What your favourite Grant McLennan song?

"I really like 'Love Goes On'. There's nine chords in a row, which he doesn't repeat. It's so him. A lot of his best songs are on '16 Lover's Lane'. And 'Cattle & Cane' is a really good song. It was like 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' or something — a quantum leap, a break-through song."