FILTER REISSUES
The will and the way
The final chapter of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan’s exquisite songwriting journey gets the definitive send-off across four LPs and seven CDs.
By Andrew Male.
The Go-Betweens
★★★★★
G Stands For Go-Betweens Volume 3
DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
THE PREVIOUS volume in this definitive career overview of Australia’s best-loved band ended in October 1989 when, for reasons romantic, emotional, and possibly financial, co-founder Grant McLennan informed fellow co-founder Robert Forster that he wanted to leave the band. However, while fellow band members Amanda Brown, John Willsteed and co-founder Lindy Morrison would never again be part of a band called The Go-Betweens, and though a band called The Go-Betweens would not release another LP until 2000’s The Friends Of Rachel Worth, McLennan and Forster continued to work together throughout the intervening decade. Grant McLennan may have left The Go-Betweens in 1989, but he never split from Robert Forster.
As a result, one of the many joys of this deluxe box set is that it allows the devoted fan to contemplate moments throughout the 1990s when a possible Go-Betweens could have re-emerged. It’s certainly the narrative Forster adopts as he eloquently retells the final stage of the band’s story, in the third person, in the meticulously assembled linernotes.
Recorded in Brisbane’s Willowtree Studios, in July 1991 when the duo were about to embark upon a support slot tour of Europe and the US with Lloyd Cole, and still believed they owed a Go-Betweens studio LP to Capitol Records, their first collaboration – entitled Love In Foreign Rooms – is described by Forster as “the loosest... lightest demo [we] ever made”. That’s true and on first listen the assembled tracks seem to lack a certain bite. But gradually these 14 languid sketches about love and loss (McLennan) or romantic elation (Forster) work their way under your skin, revealing two songwriters emotionally at odds but artistically simpatico. A number of the tracks ended up on McLennan’s Fireboy LP and Forster’s Calling From A Country Phone, but new discoveries include Forster’s cramped and tense Baby’s On Ice and the desperate optimism of McLennan’s near-perfect pop song, Perfect Beat.
Live collaborations continued throughout the decade, the duo appearing as either The Go-Betweens or Robert Forster & Grant McLennan, but the documented performance contained here is a 13-song acoustic set from May 1999, recorded in front of a live audience in Germany for Bayerischer Rundfunk’s Nachtmix radio show while touring Go-Betweens best-of, Bellavista Terrace.
A mix of solo songs and Go-Betweens numbers, it’s available as a vinyl LP alongside the three reunion LPs proper, which seems like an extravagance until you listen. Tight yet relaxed, joyful and harmonious, it’s one of the best live showcases of what made McLennan and Forster so special, and contains the only duo performance of McLennan’s dark domestic drama, Suicide At Home, Forster adding ironic little waltz-like patterns on piano. It was around this time that McLennan suggested to Forster the idea of restarting The Go-Betweens and you hear that harmonic confidence, that commitment to a common purpose here. Then, in Seattle, the duo found themselves with studio time at Larry Crane’s Jackpot Studios and with Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss volunteering her services as their temporary drummer. This is how The Go-Betweens’ second life begins.
Sam Charlton
“If The Go-Betweens had to end, there is no more fitting conclusion.”
Collected across two CDs entitled Stuck With Tape, the demos and rough mixes for what would become The Friends Of Rachel Worth show the duo with a surfeit of quality songs. This writer once criticised the resultant LP for sounding more like a set of Grant and Robert songs than the full Go-Betweens, but what songs they are – German Farmhouse, The Clock, He Lives My Life, Magic In Here – and to hear them evolve from intimate demos to final versions is a joy. Personal highlights include a grungy, sneering rough mix of Forster’s German Farmhouse and Grant’s Magic In Here, stripped of that curious accordion sound, but the real treat is three previously unheard McLennan songs – Bandages, Sign Of The Unicorn and Static – haunted tales of hopeful runaways, big city failure and sad childhoods that work together as some magical short story.
…Rachel Worth’s
warm sound always seemed tailor-made for vinyl so it’s a delight to finally hear it on that format, remastered by Barry Grint at AIR Mastering, and sounding raw yet intimate; fully alive.
For their second reunion LP, the duo developed a “more intense” (Forster) collaborative relationship in Brisbane. The resultant Bright Yellow Bright Orange has always sounded underpowered to these ears, its edges blunted by extra keyboards and syrupy backing vocals. The hope was that some spark of life might be found in the demos, and it’s there, but in songs that never ended up on the final LP, specifically Forster’s extemporised romantic B-side A Girl Lying On A Beach and McLennan’s inscrutable Night Time Rising, and a number Forster rightly calls a “lost masterpiece”, McLennan’s Ashes On The Lawn, a relative sequel to Cattle And Cane, in which the duo harmonise about a young boy trying to leave a small ranching town but never succeeding. The final band demo, augmented by melancholy Mick Harvey piano, but with somewhat intrusive drums from Glenn Thompson, is so close to perfection it’s painful. But that perfection would come.
Following almost a year of constant touring the band arrived at White Room Studios in the hills above Brisbane to record a nine-song demo for what would become the group’s final masterpiece, Oceans Apart. From the driving defiant opener, Here Comes A City, to the serene, Delphic leave-taking of The Mountains Near Dellray, Oceans Apart is an LP that has only ever had one flaw, its shoddy CD mastering. Perhaps with that in mind, original producer Mark Wallis has remixed it for vinyl from scratch. The result is sheer perfection, clear, punchy yet warm. In the many outtakes you will find yet more wonder, including McLennan’s enigmatic, faltering Survivors and an early acoustic version of Forster’s A Place To Hide Away, which would finally appear, in somewhat diminished form, on his 2008 LP, The Evangelist.