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Mediating Health Information: The Go-Betweens in a Changing Socio-Technical Landscape edited by Nadine Wathen, Sally Wyatt & Roma Harris. Palgrave Macmillan, August 2008.
Don’t know about you, but I’ve always got the information most important to my health from Forster and McLennan. And their longevity certainly makes it meaningful to talk about them in the context of a changing socio-technical landscape… I like to think that one of the editors was up against a wager that she couldn’t get the name of her favourite group into a book title.
While we’re on the subject, there’s a great version of ‘Right here’ from the Barbican show in 2004 downloadable from the Go-Betweens’ library, strings and all. You can also pick up ‘He lives my life’ from the same night there, though owners of the double CD edition of Oceans apart will have that already. I wrote about that night in a somewhat uneven fashion for Tangents, but at least I got one thing right:
‘The consistency of their song-writing as a pair is staggering. Every song has something about it that lifts it far above the ordinary: a sun-dappled pop melody, a lyric you might like for your gravestone or your screensaver, a guitar figure which illustrates exactly what music means to you, time shifts which make you want to take up drumming, a chorus that fills your heart, instrumental shading that fills your eyes. Frequently their songs have all of these, and more.’
The best piece that Robert Forster has penned for the Monthly is ‘A true hipster’, about his friend and song writing partner Grant McLennan. But there’s also this Sunday Times piece which appeared around the time that The evangelist was released – Robert on how he finished off the songs that Grant left behind.
Apologies for trying to set the record for the greatest number of post titles utilising Go-Betweens songs, but The Clientele’s cover of ‘Orpheus beach’ can now be heard on the Rare victory tribute to Grant McLennan site (as previously mentioned here).
You might also want to get yourself over to Bradley’s Almanac, where the full Clientele set from Boston Museum of Fine Arts earlier this year is available with a quality of sound that anyone who’s seen them in London will not be entirely used to. On the subject of covers, there’s a great, concise rendering of Television’s ‘The fire’ for one of the encores.
At best, tribute albums are hit and miss; at their worst they are a train-wreck of cherished songs, carriage after calamitously mauled carriage. I’m hoping that when Love goes on! A tribute to Grant McLennan appears, it has at least some selective repeat play potential. The Clientele will tackle ‘Orpheus beach’, while Paul Handyside of Hurrah! is attempting – with greater inherent risk – ‘Bachelor kisses’. No-one appears to have been brave or foolhardy enough as yet to take on ‘Cattle and cane’, but I guess there’s still time for someone to entertain us with that error of judgement. On the Rare Victory site you can hear what the Orchids have made of ‘Magic in here’ and no less than five competing versions of ‘Love goes on’, the winner being Private Eleanor, although I think the Bank Holidays can count themselves unlucky. Best of all on current display is ‘The Devil’s eye’ as performed by GB3 and Angie Hart. GB is Glenn Bennie who recorded with Grant in the year before he died, while Angie Hart was the singer in Frente! who worked similar magic on New Order’s ‘Bizarre love triangle’ back in 1994. The timbre of her voice is not unlike Grant’s and yet of course it has the advantage over the male interpreter of bringing something other to the song. Couple this with her perfectly judged phrasing and you have a cover that even the Clientele may struggle to better.
‘I read about your death in the paper, when I was buying tomato seed’. It’s hard not to turn a lyric like this in on its singer when you know he’s gone. Grant McLennan’s songs often suggested an unusually acute awareness of mortality, but he always threaded them with what it meant to be alive. ‘Been waking up early on Sundays watching my soil breathe.’
Intermission: the best of the solo recordings 1990-1997 is the result of Robert Forster and Grant hand-picking a baker’s dozen songs each from four times that number. The character of each disc is striking – if you knew nothing of Robert and Grant, you would never guess from this evidence that they grew up in the same group. Of course, those characters were already long-developed and contrasting by the time the first phase of the Go-Betweens came to an end, but the bond then was stronger than the difference, so that one could easily drop a vocal into the other’s song.
Had the solo works been songs on four extra Go-Betweens albums, Robert’s might have been softened and harmonised by Grant’s presence. Owing to Robert’s greater editorial and conceptual clarity, Grant’s songs could have been more focused, less affected by the sheen of a commercial production. I think Robert survived better than Grant as a former Go-Between, allowing looser inflections of country and country rock to infiltrate his music, and each album (bar the less than successful covers set) has a distinct feel. But throughout his attempts to produce the perfect song for FM radio, Grant retained his poetic sensibility, mourning the fragility of love, or celebrating its greatness and perfection.
Will Robert go on to make more solo records, inspired rather than haunted by the memory of his friend and foil? The signs are that he will. Meanwhile, he has become a prize-winning critic in Australia, writing about Dylan and the Shins for the Monthly, which also published his tribute to Grant, ‘A true hipster’ two months after McLennan’s death in May 2006. In it Robert says that when they met he was ‘falling into music’, while Grant’s obsession was film. ‘We became Godard and Truffaut. Brisbane didn’t know it at the time, but there were two 19-year-olds driving around in a car who thought they were French film directors.’
The ‘acoustic stories’ part of the That striped sunlight sound DVD also illuminates their partnership, with conversation between the pair and great untreated versions of some of their best songs. Grant begins to lose his voice halfway through the session, recorded the day after the Brisbane show also filmed for the disc. You feel for him, a man forever stretching, yearning, reaching for artistic highs and heights. A man very much alive.
