Relaying his youth in Brisbane’s deep north, Robert Forster – the supposedly angst-devoured half of Australia’s Go Betweens – sounds amicably debonair.
He’s like a man serenely lazing on a porch sipping beer, rather than one troubled with preparation for an imminent European tour. “Culturally and politically, Brisbane then was a very conservative place, stuck somewhere in the mid-50s,” he recounts. “When I was growing up I didn’t have an uncle in a band or anything, I just loved to listen to the radio. When ‘Starman’ by David Bowie came over the radio in 1972 I was struck dumb. It was so good as to be intimidating.”
Meeting his Go-Betweens foil Grant McLennan while “buying time” at Queensland University in the late 1970s was almost overwhelming. The Queensland campus rumbled with political fervour and the DIY punk ethic. Local miscreants The Saints had been playing Brisbane since 1973 and their blasting ‘I’m Stranded’ EP pre-dated the Sex Pistols’ first release by 12 months. “They didn’t fit in anywhere,” Forster remembers. “They left early – you never saw them walking around the streets.”
Sprightly with the bravado of youth, they recorded what would have been “the first LP if someone had given us the money to make it,” on a two-track in Forster’s bedroom. They then moved to London in November 1979, acquainted with no one bar “one person who worked in the Rough Trade shop. We were comically naïve – we thought we could just come over with our guitars and somehow people would just fall in love with us,’ he remembers. ‘It was laughable. The easiness of life here in Brisbane was all stripped away. The only thing that you can get happiness from in London is your career.”
Yet enduring the six-month winters paid off, creatively at least, with a slew of unfeasibly consistent LPs – from the early brusque folk of Send Me A Lullaby (1981) and Before Hollywood (1983) to the shimmering mid-period of 1984’s Spring Hill Fair and 1986’s Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express.
The fact that the spangly exuberance of Liberty Bell single ‘Spring Rain’ didn’t break into the mainstream – indeed, the fact that it did not reach number one and does not remain there even now – belies logic and belief in a benevolent universe. As Forster spat in the sleeve-notes to 1999’s Go-Between’s primer Bellavista Terrace “We were too good for the bloody charts.” How did it feel to make records as giddy with pop- hooks as Tallulah (1987) and 16 Lovers Lane (1988) and to see them barely scrape the charts?
“You almost get this surreal attitude that you can’t believe it yourself. You start to get really cynical about the music industry, which can be a good thing – you can channel all that negative energy through music,” Forster philosophises, surmising that, “perhaps success means writing good songs.” The partnership, deflated with a lack of commercial success, split during sessions for the follow-up to 16 Lovers Lane. “Grant and I looked at each other across the practise room and just thought, ‘it’s not happening.’” But after spending a decade on solo projects, they delighted fans by coming together in 2000 for The Friends of Rachel Worth with Sleater-Kinney as their backing band.
“When we were touring in 1997 I had been listening to their ‘Dig Me Out’ non-stop – it utterly floored me,” Forster explains. “There had been some talk of Grant and I doing a new record and after the show in Seattle, Sleater-Kinney came into our dressing room. Janet (Weiss) said, ‘do you need a drummer for your new LP?’ I was floored again – here was the drummer from the band whose album I couldn’t stop listening to asking to be on our record!”
Like previous Go-Betweens LPs, new album Bright Yellow Bright Orange is composed of five McLennan songs and five Forster songs. It’s almost as if both songwriters work as one half of the same brain, creating what sounds like a cohesive Go-Betweens whole instead of a split EP between the two songwriters. “While we’ll have concepts,” he concedes, “we do most of the work in isolation. That the result is ‘The Go-Betweens’ is part of the unknowable; the chemistry that Grant and I have together.”
Forster’s principal inspiration still comes from peering through windows into other peoples’ lives – espying stolen glimpses, overheard conversations. “A lot of these heavy metal bands have a whole mythology – Satanism, Nordic gods, unicorns. A lot of people are into the Bible. I don’t have that,” he deadpans. “I just scrap together what’s going on around me” (he wryly chuckles) “though I try to make it a little more glamorous.”
This interview originally appeared in is this music? issue 5, in May 2003.