Gazing on a Sunny Afternoon

Gavin Sawford 1996

Sunlight. That's where it starts, and ultimately, ends. If you really want to really understand the Go-Betweens and their music, then you have to understand sunlight. Not the physical, prismatic qualities of light, but the emotional nature of it as a means of defining a time and a place in England what sunlight there is is generally described as "dappled." It's filtered and more often than not the consistency of thin sickly milk. In Australia it blasts the landscapes, seeking out nooks and crannies, penetrating cracks in buildings and catching every particle of dust in the air. And somewhere in the middle were the Go-Betweens, stranded between continents, styles, cultures and landscapes, but always with their eyes focused firmly on the sun. When they were here they wanted to be there, and when they got there they cast their minds back here, but wherever you are, the sun is always overhead. Whether it's cold and dusty in here or the sun it finds it's warm beside me.

And so one sunny afternoon (naturally) John Mullen and I meet Robert Forster and Grant McLennan on Grant's back deck for Pernod and ice, percolated coffee and chilled water and an exhaustive overview of the Go-Betweens life, loves and art. The reasons are simple: MDS have repackaged the entire back catalogue of the Go-Betweens on CD, remixed and remastered and reissued with additional liner-notes, band photos and associated ephemera. And even if the jury is still out about the graphics used in the repackaging, there's no denying Robert and Grant's pride (and one suspects, relief) that all six albums have finally been released here on one label, even if, contrary to early reports, there are no additional b-sides and outtakes which seems the vogue these days for CD reissues ("Well, Highway 61 didn't have any additional tracks," reasons Grant).

Coinciding with the re-release of the albums in two batches of three during April, Robert and Grant are playing a series of shows next weekend which follows their sold-out Zoo gig late last year. After that they head to Europe for one show in Paris in June, after which they will resume their solo careers. Add to that the recent releases of Right Here, a tribute album, featuring twenty-one of Robert and Grant's finest sung by everyone from Pray TV and Snout through the Meanies to Frente and the Killjoys, and it's obvious that the Go-Betweens are finally enjoying a long overdue renaissance. So welcome then to the history of the Go-Betweens, a strange, funny and bittersweet tale spanning two decades and as many continents. And the Go-Betweens' move to England in late 1979, at the height of the viciousness of the Bjelke-Petersen National Party government is as a good a place as any to start. Given, in the light of the recent change of state government, that Robert intends to record his next album overseas, is this just a coincidence? Plus ça change…

Robert: "My brother pointed this out to me… No, it's just good timing. Well, the first one was a lot more serious. The late seventies, it was… I mean the city's changed so much, it's just extraordinary, which I think is great. I mean, there was just no encouragement for anyone, that was the thing that really hit me, it was just like there was a real dumb – this was the time when the Queensland Cabinet, half of them hadn't gone to secondary school, right? – and it was like nothing was fostered, nothing was encouraged, and even if you were doing photography, filmmaking, anything that was outside of real estate, selling cars or trying to get a mining lease somewhere outside of Charters Towers, or the demolition business, if you were interested in those things, then you were encouraged. But for anyone with even a fraction of any sort of artistic bent or any creative endeavour or anything, there was just no infrastructure, there was nothing. That's what I found the toughest. It was appalling."

How did you feel when 'independent' MP Liz Cunningham handed the Nationals the keys to the state?

Grant: "Well, these people are politicians, they don't operate with the same kind of moral or ethical principles that I operate on – I'm not talking about other people – but you know, unfortunately it's within our parliamentary system that a very marginal seat can pull down a government. I think in general the Goss government wasn't functioning as well as it was when it first started so they have to accept responsibility. I think it's a shame that it went that way, I think it's a joke. My politics obviously lie more to the left, it's just a shame that Gladstone has been besmirched, the home town of my brother."

The one thing that always struck me was that the Go-Betweens were never an overtly strident political band, they somehow engendered a political attitude through their very apoliticality.

Grant: "Well for me it wasn't a motivation, to me it was just the way it was, and the way Robert was when we first started the band. It was clear, I just knew from talking to him when I first met him that he was left and bent in many ways and at that stage in my life I was like that too. And the people who eventually played with us in the three piece and then the four piece and then the five piece all had similar leanings. Obviously, you're not going to have Nazis or Ku Klux Klan people in the band… and also we never made an issue out of the fact there were women and men in the band. We weren't interested in the political agenda and a class thing which all the English groups when we first started had this dividing line between things. Mainly it was just due to our attitude which came through in the songs and the way we played them and the way we presented ourselves…"

Robert: "And the way we walked."

Grant: "…was one of, in no kind of big way, just one of tolerance, a kind of questioning, stuff like that. We never focused on one point of view where people would align you to something. We never played benefits."

There's the classic rock and roll story of how Mick Jagger met Keith Richards on a station and struck up a conversation purely on the basis of Richards' Willie Dixon records. How did you two first meet ?

Robert: "Friendship, I think, just looking for people I think. This was at Queensland University, just trying to find people to start something. It's a stage, and for me personally the big thing I had to realise was that I played with musicians, but I had to get past that. Looking for musicians was going to get me nowhere, and I had to find someone that was just entirely on the same wavelength, that was willing to learn the bass. And that was Grant. So once we got over that hurdle which at the time was a big thing, if you're starting a band, you've got some songs, and the immediate people that you start looking for don't play any instruments, it can be quite difficult. And then the next person we looked for was, we were looking for a woman to play drums and Grant and I were asking women at gigs that we thought just had a feeling, or looked the way, and we eventually had a girl that was learning to play the drums, that was just taking lessons. And the first ever photo of the band was with that other girl, who at that stage was just learning to play the drums, who wasn't playing with us. So the whole idea was if you were just communicating on this theme, the songs were quite simple, we'll just get there. And it wasn't also, well let's try and learn an hour and a half's worth of cover versions, it was just four songs, but the songs – Lee Remick and Karen and stuff – were so simple and so direct – that we got people… But to get to that stage where you're forming a band and you're looking for people who aren't musicians, to get them in, that was the major step."

How inspirational were The Saints?

Robert: "Well I think the fact they were from Brisbane was good, the fact they'd made such a great single, the fact that they'd recorded an album… the only other band before that were like the Railroad Gin, but they were real muso musos. And neither bands were making records. Like it's so different if you grew up in like Birmingham or Sheffield or Manchester or Liverpool, your uncle was probably in a band that made a record, you know. You'd go down to the pub, and the local publican had sung with someone, do you know what I mean? But here it was like no one had done anything. No one had ever made a fucking album! And so you never met anyone, you never met anyone who said 'I went to school with Mick Jagger.' It was like a whole… no one had made an album, and then The Saints just suddenly came through and just went Bang! Classic single, Bang! make an album in Brisbane, Bang! get out of Brisbane. It was like this triple punch."

Grant: "Yeah, we did our pilgrimage, we went up to Petrie Terrace and saw the fireplace before they tore it down, saw 'I'm Stranded' while it was written there."

Robert: "They should have taken that wall down, that should be in the Queensland Art Gallery. You just sort of cut it down, put it there, if someone had the foresight to do that…"

Send Me A Lullaby (1982)

Grant: "Send Me A Lullaby is to me an inauspicious debut. It's a record that I think if I'd heard – well, it's hard for me to say that, but if I'd heard that and I wasn't in the band, I think my comment would have been 'What the fuck is going on here.' There's great melodies but then there's changes which to this day I can't work out. There's lyrics to this day which I don't understand and when I actually summon up enough courage to get to the microphone, I sound like a choirboy with a mouthful of fruitcake. It's a very unusual record to me and I have to say it really wasn't… there were two albums before that which I think we should have made, and in hindsight that's why I'm so disappointed with the record, it's got nothing to do with the public because they haven't heard those first two.

The first album I always think of is an album of the first two singles and the songs that Robert had til 1979, and then I think of the record that was demoed in Brisbane for Missing Link, and I think we recorded one song or two songs off it for the record six months later or three months later and Missing Link just spewed, they preferred the first one. The first one, Very Quick On The Eye, was more melodic and straightforward; we get to Melbourne and start hanging around St. Kilda and The Birthday Party and…something happens."

Robert: "And also we were with Tony Cohen."

Grant: "We were familiar with Tony's… modus operandi."

Reminded of Very Quick On The Eye, which cropped up many years later in vinyl bootleg form, Robert says simply, "Yeeaaaah, let's just forget the whole period."

Before Hollywood (1983)

Robert: "Well that's a very good album."

Grant: "Oh good, I'm getting the weird ones."

Robert: "That's a very good album. We're on form there, It's all starting to come together. But it's a leap, we had to… Send Me A Lullaby's like a complete deconstruction. We were a lot more straightforward band in the late seventies, and then we deconstruct, and then we start to put together what I guess is going to take us all the way through the eighties. We start to work in a different way, to write a lot more contemporary work. We could have kept on – well, I could have kept on – writing sixties sort of pastiche-type numbers for quite a while but we had to… I don't know, go on. We'd seen the Birthday Party, we'd seen the Laughing Clowns, we'd seen Orange Juice and we had to come to terms with that as opposed to trying to learn side two of that. We had to go on. And so Before Hollywood is the start of that. It's recorded in England at a seaside town called Eastbourne."

Grant: "It was a Christian studio."

Robert: "They were doing gospel on Sunday, Go-Betweens Monday to Saturday."

How important were your contemporaries in terms of feeding off each other musically?

Robert: (laughing) "I think we completely influenced The Birthday Party. I think they ripped everything they had off us."

Grant: "Oh yeah. The Birthday Party listened to our first record, then went out and did Junkyard."

Robert: "I think in terms of The Birthday Party and The Laughing Clowns, we were completely different, but I think that we were a lot more in awe of them than they were of us, definitely. We were just Brisbane bumpkins basically, but looked on affectionately. But they were at full strength, they were at full blast."

Grant: "They'd hit their second change in life…"

Robert: "…and we were still on the first step. But then by the time we hit Before Hollywood, we were competing, we were there with them. Some people would say surpassing them, I'd let those people say that."

Grant: "I never heard Nick say that."

Robert: "I'd probably go 'Well, if you want to say that, that's okay with me,' but I go 'No comment.'"

Spring Hill Fair (1984)

Grant: (groans) "I'm getting the tough ones."

Robert: "I'll take this one, you can go to Liberty Belle, you can go back to the bad ones if you want. Ummm, Spring Hill Fair… France, Robert Vickers in the band."

Was the choice of album title a reflection of a particular state of mind?

Grant: "No, I remember very clearly, I think we were at Marseille airport or some airport down there Cannes and we'd finished the record and we were sitting around and I remember very clearly sitting in a coffee shop or something and we were talking about what we were going to call the record, and I think it had dawned on us that both of the first albums had two 'L's in them and so when the name Spring Hill Fair came up, we were originally going to have an 'E' on the end of Fair, so it was going to be more a Renaissance/Pentangle sort of thing."

Robert: "A Pentangle vibe! Were we thinking that?"

Grant: "Well that's what you were thinking, you were going for that, you were trying to put the Fayre into it. Vickers was talking about Edmund Spencer, the little booky that he is. But Spring Hill Fair came from… it was generally not that we were homesick, I think we just wanted to have, after Before Hollywood, which was so obviously an American kind of thing, a regional home-town thing. And Spring Hill Fair is an annual festival, and that was the reason."

Robert: "It's also where we'd lived during the Send Me A Lullaby period."

Last week, David McCormack passed on Simon Holmes' definition of a band's first three albums as the first being naïve, the second as 'I hate being a rock star,' and the third being a balance of art and commerce. Is the latter a reasonable description of Spring Hill Fair?

Robert: "That's a fair comment, but don't forget we were on our third label for our third album, so art and commerce… at the moment we were also on our third label, so were pretty jaded. Art and commerce didn't come into it, we were on Sire so we thought Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids…"

Grant: "Madonna."

Robert: "Madonna, so we thought 'Let's give it a go', but we just weren't as burning and inspired. If you'd actually got the ten songs off Before Hollywood and put them beside the ten songs on Spring Hill Fair, I think the ten songs on Before Hollywood were better, and that really has nothing to do with art and commerce, it has to do with songwriting."

But there's definitely a production edge on Spring Hill Fair.

Robert: "Yeah, there is, which is the producer's fault – idiot! A complete and utter fool! We had a fraction of a budget in a groovy little studio; we get tons of money and he goes 'Oh, I can get a deal down in the south of France,' and we're going 'He did such a great job on the last album, it's the same guy,' but he sort of flipped out a bit. The only other point is we're now – which I think is important – we're the classic rock band: drums, bass, Grant and I on guitars. So we had to get that together, and now we've been going since 1978, it's now 1984, and suddenly six years, we're the classic rock band. So we had to reinvent that, which takes us to the next album, which is the reinvention."

Grant: "Yeah it is, but also have to… Spring Hill Fair has to be put in perspective of what we came from with the first two records, having to pinch and save and beg for an extra ten pounds to use a bit of reverb or something, to going down to Jacques Loussierre's studio where Jon Anderson (Yes) sang in front of the mosaic window and 'Would you like some rabbit for dinner?" It's just like 'Oooh, I love France, and the last thing I want to do is go into the studio.'

I mean, we're young, we're impressed by it, but Robert's point about John Brand, the producer, he did change between the second and third, which we did as well, but he went and made a very produced 1984 English pop record, which in a way… well, that's not what we were. We were the band from Before Hollywood, but now a four-piece, and it should have been done that way."

What effect did changing of record companies for the first three albums have on the band?

Robert: "It made a huge difference, because Rough Trade was going bankrupt basically, and they decided to put all their pennies… like when we first arrived there was like twenty groups on the label, and a year and a half later it's us and The Smiths, and they quite wisely decided to put all their pennies in The Smiths, who were already in the charts with This Charming Man. So if Rough Trade had more money, and imagine a label… a band puts out a great album, it made the top twenty of all the music papers, Before Hollywood, and they haven't got enough money to make the next album, it's a crime. It's a crime against art and humanity. They couldn't give it to us, and if we'd been able to stay there, if we had have stayed in house we'd have had Jim Travis and everything and it would have been a lot better, but instead they go bankrupt, somehow we get flipped over onto Sire, suddenly they go 'Okay, here's eight to ten times the budget they'd had before,' and you just go, well, now it's a whole different system. And we go 'Well, no, we don't want all that money, we just want to go back to that little Christian studio?' You don't do it. You go upwards and onwards."

Grant: "And also some of our friends in some of those bands that we mentioned, they were recording in similar studios with similar budgets, which were fair to the project and so we felt 'Okay, here's a chance.' But to me what came out was a good record when it could have been a great record."

Robert: "Yes, but the other thing was, it was the south of France, go down there and a big studio, okay let's do it, but we were never like, you know 'Grant, you've got to write Cattle And Cane part two, I've got to do something and let's go back to the same studio, we've got our acre of success with Before Hollywood, now let's just keep it there and clone it, let's keep it there and diddle a little with the formula, 'it's never been our way. It's like, these are impulses – go! And often it worked, occasionally it stalled or got halfway there, it was always interesting. And that's the way it ended up."

Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express (1986)

Grant: "And then we put out Spring Hill Fair and it gets great reviews, we tour–"

Robert: "We were always getting encouragement."

Grant: "–we tour, things are getting better, London's getting more bearable, our friends are successful so we can go around and see them and drink their champagne, and we find ourselves in a position of having to find a new label. It was English Elektra, and Elektra is once again a label Television was on! The Doors! We're fans, and Robert will tell you the same thing, it was like 'Great! Elektra! Fuck!' One of my favourite records ever made is on Elektra. It was a great label, and an actual great label on their record too, and we were talking about putting the original Elektra label on it, not the new one. And so it's all very serious and we go into the studio and it's cold and we rehearse a lot for it and I just know straight away that the songs that we've got a real together more than Spring Hill Fair. On Before Hollywood, the songs just kind of flow into each other whereas on Spring Hill Fair they jump from song to song. Whereas when you listen to Liberty Belle it just kind of flows. And there were problems with the record because the label that we were doing it for…"

Robert: "Well, that one collapsed too."

Grant: "Yeah, it collapsed, in the middle of the record."

Robert: "Fourth album, fourth label, bang!"

Grant: "That label collapses in England so in the middle of the recording Beggars Banquet stepped in and we've been with them ever since, so that was very nice of them. But also we used another person on that record, like we had on Before Hollywood, a kind of keyboard-y dude called Dean B. Speedwell, and he was such a musician that we could say 'Well, we want vibes like Lionel Hampton' and he could do it, or we wanted a bassoon part and he could play it."

Robert: "A very talented man."

Grant: "And it was downstairs in the basement, so it was completely different from the huge chateau that we were in the previous year, so it was back to garage recordings. And then Robert got sick after we'd done the record and he couldn't do his vocals, so we went to a mixing studio and Robert did his vocals there. So it was a strange thing. Robert and I didn't get the chance to experiment with the vocal, he didn't have a lot of time. But Tracey Thorn (Everything But the Girl) sang on a couple of tracks (Head Full of Steam, Apology Accepted), we put strings on the record, which we had a little bit on Spring Hill Fair – just to go back a bit, we had two versions of Part Company, we actually had a version with strings on it and we never used it, we used the Jacques Loussier version. I was very interested through the pop thing we were talking about before, and then we did a tour not long after that and when we were in Australia we met Amanda Brown who played violin, so that's that record. I still think it's a great record. And the actual remastering for Liberty Belle is brilliant. It really is."

Robert: "That's the one thing that shines up, that's the one that everyone's going to talk about."

Grant: "We were never able to – well, to my ears – have it sonically the way I wanted it, and remastering hasn't affected any chord changes or anything, it's just brought it closer to how I originally heard it, and it's brighter and richer and fuller. It's great."

Tallulah (1987)

To me the muted colours of the cover of Tallulah, the orange hues and even the fruit used in the group shot on the cover, suggest a lushness and mellowness after the crisp sparkle of Liberty Belle.

Grant: "Well, it's good that you get that because the first version of Tallulah, if you'd have heard that, you wouldn't have thought that. We'd have had rotting fruit on the cover…"

Robert: "Again, we were sort of cursed. We had the engineer that we were using on Liberty Belle, Dicky Preston, and working with Dicky was good. We then went on to the next one and we were put into this horrible studio–"

Grant: "Was it Camden or something?"

Robert: "Yeah, it was over a practice room or something, I don't know…"

Grant: "Holloway, Holloway. You could see the prison."

Robert: "And so Dickey didn't do a good job I think on Tallulah, so it had to be rescued and remixing a little but which always sounds horrible but it actually worked out okay with Mark Wallis who went on to do; we'd sort of meet people and they'd go on to do the next album, because Dickey had done demos for Spring Hill Fair, that's how we met him, which actually sounds better than the actual album does. And then we were doing the next one and we liked the engineer who had done the demos so he comes on, and then we remixed Tallulah and we meet Mark Wallace who does the remixing and we bring him down here to do 16 Lovers Lane. But our last London album… you see talking to Grant and I, we're very tough on them. And really, you'll talk to us and we'll point out all the things we don't like about them, and all the little things, the could-have-beens or whatever. Really we should be actually praising the shit out of these albums and going 'Masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece! Buy, buy, buy! They're at Toombul Music now, get there in a Kombi bus as fast as you can!' Grant and I should be saying that…"

Grant: "Get some for Mother's Day."

Robert: "But Tallulah really could have been the big, dark masterpiece, and I don't know, we didn't… really…hit it. But it's good."

Grant: "It's also having a new member in the band, there were more instruments to use, there was another voice to use, the songs once again jump around, no track ever falls into the next like Liberty Belle and Before Hollywood. Tallulah gets named after some friends of ours' baby in Melbourne, we find out that Tallulah means – what was it? – God of some American Indian theme wasn't it?"

Robert: "Oh really, I never knew any of this."

Grant: "Yeah it means something. Lindy I think discovered this or someone told her. But it was a record which I originally wanted Kate Bush to produce. I remember us sitting down and talking about it."

Robert: "That was very realistic of you."

Grant: "Yes it was. Well, we tried for John Cale with Spring Hill Fair if you remember rightly."

Robert: "No, we never tried for John Cale with Spring Hill Fair, he got foisted on us at every opportunity."

Grant: "It was going to be a thousand pounds a track, which was…"

Robert: "We were going to do it on a cassette player a someone's house – he'd still get the thousand pounds!"

Grant: "So when we hear it back, it definitely had to be remixed, and the record's better for that reason. But I listened to it a couple of weeks ago and it is a very good record. Songs which at the time escaped me, like a song like You've Never Lived, I listened to that this morning and it's great… I mean, You Tell Me."

Robert: "I was surprised, I think it was in the J-Mag, but Stuart Coupe had that as his favourite Go-Betweens album, and he's listened to them, he knows them. But that's what I like, people have their favourites. And that's what I was saying before, we've done enough albums for people to say that. It's not like Television – Marquee Moon, or with certain groups you go 'That's definitely the best, the other two are crap or okay.' It's like so many people have different favourites, and that's when I know you've done enough work."

16 Lovers Lane (1988)

And on 16 Lovers Lane you almost sound like you're musically and lyrically resigned.

Robert: "People say this and they get it wrong!"

Grant: "Resigned to what?"

To life, love and the end of the band. After all, the last song is Dive For Your Memory.

Robert: "I think that's true. That song, which I wrote and which was placed there was in no way placed in terms of any forward thing which we couldn't have had."

Grant: "But it is brilliant, isn't it?"

Robert: "It was a good way to go out. I think to me 16 Lover's Lane was the perfect combination between – and this is just my perspective, it's going to sound horrible – it's the perfect combination between London melancholy and Sydney sunshine, recording, being there. So it's like taking all this stuff that's been done in a dark place, and then taking it to this… well, we'd spent five years in London – blackness, darkness, greyness and poverty – and suddenly for some reason we seemed to have more money in Sydney, and we all had places to live and being in a city where after five years we can go to the beach in ten minutes. And just sitting around the back of people's houses just writing, playing guitar, like this. But the songs were from this sort of thing, and our feeling somehow just burst into sunshine suddenly. And this time instead of the Spring Hill Fair – huge studio, we fuck up – somehow we get someone who goes 'Huge studio' and knows how to use it – Mark Wallis – who goes 'Okay, we've got the songs.' And like you say, bang! And it works."

Grant: "Yeah, exactly what Robert is saying I think is illustrated by the last song from the previous record, which I think is Hope And Strife, and the first song on 16 Lover's Lane is Love Goes On. So it was exactly what he was talking about. The last thing you heard was that, and then the next thing you hear is Love Goes On.

It's also a record which we worked on very differently to the other records, because Robert and I demoed all the songs together and then showed them to the band and the producer, so that was a fundamentally different way of working. And in a way it meant that the songs structures were already down, there was less discovery in away, so it is a very homogenised kind of… It's like, have you seen when holes are in windows and sunlight's pouring in through holes like that in a dark room? That's what the record is like to me."

So did the Go-Betweens break up at the right time?

Robert: "Yes, definitely. I think breaking up right at the end of 1989, I think that was right. I mean, look! (he grabs the six album stack) That looks pretty thick to me, do you know what I mean? That looks like a good body of work, and if we'd broken up after two or three albums, I'd have gone, 'A lot of unfulfilled promise, a lot of avenues we didn't do.'

We could have gone on for three albums, we could have gone on for two albums – four albums – but by the time we got to six, I think that was exactly right. There's a lot of moods, a lot of ups and downs and time periods and everything encased in that and it's like, two more albums than the Velvet Underground did. It is a solid body of work, so yeah, I'm happy with it. Especially right at the end of 1989, I thought was good."

With the advantage of six years hindsight, is it easier now to see it as a logical time to end the band?

Robert: "No, it was a lot more emotional ending at the time, as you can imagine. So it felt right at the time and it felt a lot more emotional. Now you can be a bit more dispassionate about it and I'm just as convinced it was the right thing. I was very happy after the band broke up, I was very very relieved and I woke up…I've just started a new song called German Farmhouse and it goes 'I was living in seclusion for a couple of years in a German farmhouse and drinking beer/Every day I'd wake up with a smile from ear to ear.' And that's what I'd think. I'd wake up happy, not knowing that there was a band meeting and I had to be somewhere, or worries about who's producing the record, tours, getting money for wages, all that… I was very happy that was over."

Grant: "Oh yeah, it was the right time. It was interesting because we were rehearsing another record and we did play a couple of shows with a new bass player and sometimes I think about what that record might have been like because we were talking about Mick Harvey producing it and maybe Berlin we were using, what… Perfumed, Poisoned and Dangerous were the three words we had, so that would have been interesting, but in retrospect I think there perhaps should have been a little more… maybe we should have put a little more distance at the time on it, like actually think about our decision a little more. But the band was always run on coincidence and serendipity and things like that, and the fact that Robert and I were both thinking it at the same time kind of meant that it was a spiritual reason, and that was the reason why we started the band in the first place."