The 10 rules of rock and roll criticism
Robert Forster’s collected music writings 2005-09, The 10 rules of rock and roll has found its way here from Australia. The piece which gives the book its title is appropriately succinct, covering less than a page. My favourite of the ten are: o The second-last song on every album is the weakest. o Great bands tend to [...]
The 10 rules of rock and roll
There are two presents I would like for Christmas. The first is a McLennan Monkees t-shirt. The second is a copy of Robert Forster’s book, The 10 rules of rock and roll, which collects together the music criticism previously discussed here. There’s a new piece in the book called ‘The 10 rules’. That I can’t [...]
The friends of Rachel Worth
Just about living up to my promise of spending more time in the 21st century, here’s an edited version of my review of the Go-Betweens’ The friends of Rachel Worth, which mysteriously disappeared from the Tangents archive (probably during one of Alistair’s well-documented technological meltdowns). It was one of our three-way jobs, but the other [...]
Too much of one thing
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 [...]
Demon days
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.
The evangelist
‘Old age suits him. It suits him the way being young did. It’s a natural fit, for both are the traditional places where wisdom can flower: the fired minds of the young and the dusty, wily utterances of the old. It’s all the time in between that’s the trouble. Dylan, though, survived all the crashes [...]
Replica sun machines
In the spirit of the fifty word fictions currently being posted by Chan over at A wild slim alien, here are some reviews of exactly that length – tips of the hat to my long-player listening so far this year. With the odd hand gesture or wrinkled nose thrown in. The Shortwave Set – Replica [...]
Intermission
‘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. [...]
