It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record (so it's sun on the music). It could be the sun coming through as you practice in the loungeroom of a large Brisbane house of a certain era...It's sunshine imposing on inside darkness.
-- Robert Forster, from his notes to the Go-Betweens' 2006 album That Striped Sunlight Sound, explaining the inspiration for the term, to which the band dedicated its first single, "Lee Remick", in 1978.
Even the spiffiest 21st-century satellite connection can't transmit weather over the phone. But you had to guess from Robert Forster's upbeat mood that the morning sun was, indeed, shining in Brisbane. You know Brisbane: third largest city in Australia, perched on the east coast in the great state of Queensland, mean March temperature of 82 degrees -- and, in no small measure thanks to Forster's influence, a Billboard selection last year as one of the world's top five music hot spots.
Forster was speaking from out back, behind his house, in a shed he just began using as a writing studio and place to conduct bits of business, free from the daily clutter of the house he shares with his German wife Karin and their two young children. "It was long overdue," said the co-founder of the Go-Betweens, Australia's greatest gift to world culture since...well...has there ever been anything greater, music-wise, from Down Under?
With his second career as an award-winning pop columnist for The Monthly, a smart new Melbourne-based magazine, in full flower, Forster has a greater need than ever for personal creative space. The main reason the sun was shining so brightly for him, though, is that after a shock to his system that left him wondering whether he would make any more records, he has enthusiastically resumed his first career. On April 29, Yep Roc released The Evangelist, his first solo album in a dozen years.
Two years ago, Grant McLennan, his longtime friend and gifted partner in the Go-Betweens, died in his sleep of a massive heart attack. He was 48. McLennan, who played the sometimes dreamy, sometimes fiery pop romantic to Forster's more level-tempered bohemian rocker, was "on a roll, really buzzing" as an artist, said Forster. He had written a bunch of stellar songs for the Go-Betweens, who were coming off their most commercially successful effort, Oceans Apart. It won them their first-ever ARIA, the Australian Grammy. What it didn't win for McLennan, whose sunny tunes failed to sufficiently impose on his inside darkness, was peace of mind.
"Album 10 was going to be something special," Forster wrote in his Monthly column after McLennan's death. "Yet he wasn't happy. He was proud of the band's recent success, and his private life, after a long bumpy ride, was settled; in general, he was the most contented and up I'd seen him in a long time. But deep down, there remained a trouble, a missing piece that he was always trying to find and that he never did. Family, a loving girlfriend, a circle of friends: All could count for so much, and it was a hell of a lot, but it could never cover over a particular hurt."
Forster's own hurt over McLennan's passing drove him into seclusion. But anyone who understood the bottomless passion for pop that he and McLennan shared -- nearly 30 years into their career, coming up with a great chord progression or opening riff could still thrill them -- knew Forster's retreat from music would prove only temporary.
The impetus to record The Evangelist came from three songs left behind by McLennan, including "Demon Days", whose half-finished lyrics were completed by Forster: "The half whispered hopes/The dreams that we smoked/Puffed up and ran/As only dreams can/Dreamt by the young/Sparks to be sung/In places so bright/But something's not right/Something's gone wrong."
With its hushed vocal and tingling celeste interludes, "Demon Days" is one of the most haunting songs in recent memory. But even as The Evangelist is grounded in a deep sense of loss, it projects a powerful uplift, tapping into the positive energy that drove Forster and McLennan as artists, individually and together. The presence of the other surviving Go-Betweens, bassist Adele Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson, and the producers of Oceans Apart, Mark Wallis and David Ruffy, enhances that feeling.
"'Demon Days' is an amazing song," said Forster. "There's pain in it, yes, but also this sense of glory, in being able to continue this amazing thing. For me to be able to present a song like that the way I wanted was the other side of a doubled-edged sword. That carried me through a lot of the album, and a lot of the work I've done in the last two years."
Forster and McLennan formed the Go-Betweens in 1978 while attending Queensland University. They met in the drama department. McLennan was an aspiring filmmaker and out-of-his-time renaissance man in the making (at the time of his death, he didn't own a computer, drive a car or have any credit cards). The first version of the band was a trio with Forster on guitar, McLennan on bass and Lindy Morrison on drums. As they developed their idiosyncratic art-pop identity over the course of six albums, they doubled their guitar sound, with McLennan switching over, and added instrumental voices, notably violinist and oboist Amanda Brown (with whom McLennan became involved romantically).
"We wanted to write adventurous pop music," said Forster. "Enough of that 4/4 bang. We were interested in pushing things, pushing the outer structure, having fun with it."
Their terse, streaming rhythms seemed drawn from the sound of people talking, while their sculpted lyrics eschewed love-song convention for open-ended narratives and poetic reflections on time and place. Boasting elusive melodies, or none at all, the songs could be deceptively simple, like the bounding "Spring Rain", or treacherously complicated, like "Someone Else's Wife", the uneasy shifts of which belie McLennan's declaration that "There's a fine line between love and despair."
Forster and McLennan embraced unlikely influences including the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas and Jonathan Richman, which may explain their ability to both plug into and stand outside of the post-punk/new-wave aesthetic of bands such as the Talking Heads, Television and Gang Of Four.
A fascinating study in persistence and adaptability, the Go-Betweens somehow thrived on both adventure -- they recorded in England and Australia and France and the United States -- and misadventure. They endured difficult times in London, where they lived in the shadow of Brit bands after moving there in 1982 to take a run at commercial success. They endured busted record deals, dire financial straits, internal strife, and health problems (Forster couldn't sing during the sessions for 1986's Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express and had to add all his vocals later in a mixing studio).
In 1989, a year after recording 16 Lovers Lane back in Sydney, the burnt out Go-Betweens went through what Forster called a "savage and abrupt" breakup. At the time, Forster was less fond of the band's increasingly polished productions than he is in retrospect. He and McLennan talked about continuing as an acoustic duo, which is how they began. But McLennan, devastated over the band's dissolution and a simultaneous romantic breakup, decided to go it alone. A decade of solo projects by Forster and McLennan began, with Forster mostly living in Berlin, where his future wife lived, and McLennan in Australia.
When they got back together in 2000 under the Go-Betweens banner to record The Friends Of Rachel Worth in Portland, Oregon, with a cast including three members of the American indie-rock band Sleater-Kinney, Forster and McLennan were refreshed and recharged as a team. It can be argued that they never reached greater heights than during their second coming, which gave us the chiming lyricism of "Magic In Here", the driving urgency of "Here Comes A City", the mantra lift of "Too Much Of One Thing", the rich moonlit reflection of "Darlinghurst Nights".
McLennan saw even better times ahead for the band. "If you're a Go-Betweens fan, I really think in the next couple of years we're going to vindicate your love of us," he says on the DVD companion to That Striped Sunlight Sound, in a charming segment where he and Forster discuss the history of the band and survey their songs on acoustic guitars. For him, the possibilities were endless. "We could end up doing the soundtrack for a five-hour French movie," he says, "or end up writing songs for 'The O.C.'"
There's a tendency, in considering great songwriting collaborations, to assign opposite roles to partners -- in this case to see Forster as the band's Lennon figure with his confessional rock leanings, and McLennan as McCartney with his pop sensibility. Forster and McLennan did, indeed, have very different personalities. But over the years, their distinctions as artists blurred as they exerted a strong influence on each other.
"We took things from each other into our own work," said Forster. "On The Evangelist, I wanted the pop songs to be pop, carried on from Grant. I wanted a little bit of a homage to him. Grant was more melodic, in a traditional way. I learned from him not to be afraid to search for hooks, to make it sound like the Monkees, like the Mamas and Papas, like David Bowie, to carry on in that direction."
It took "Cattle And Cane", McLennan's 1983 masterpiece about a schoolboy and "a bigger brighter world," to open Forster's eyes to the possibilities of "doing childhood" and writing in the past. "Up until then, all my songs were now, now and me, me," Forster says on the Striped Sunlight DVD. "I heard 'Cattle And Cane' and immediately thought, why didn't I think of that?"
McLennan's fondness for country music, which Forster had little use for when they first teamed up, also became a shared influence. By the time Forster recorded his first solo album, Danger In The Past, in 1990, he was looking to old-school Nashville and upstart Austin for inspiration. "Wondering who sings better in the dark/Is it Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark?" he sings on "Dear Black Dream". His 1995 covers album I Had A New York Girlfriend includes songs by Clark, Mickey Newbury, Bill Anderson and Rick Nelson.
"I got into a sort of wild Texan country folk thing," he says. "I go for a lot of lyrical oddities, people who are very strong lyrically and a little bit mad who go into areas pop music doesn't go into. I also like Shel Silverstein and Steve Goodman and Jerry Jeff Walker and John Prine."
Even as they point to different albums and phases of the Go-Betweens, Forster's solo efforts are more relaxed and more stylistically varied. Like the Go-Betweens' albums, they were recorded in various countries, but with different producers and supporting players. Danger In the Past was made in Berlin with Mick Harvey and two other members of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds. Calling From A Country Phone (1993), never released in the United States, was recorded in Brisbane with a band of young unknowns. Warm Nights (1996) was done in London with an old friend of Forster's, Scottish pop artist Edwyn Collins of the cult band Orange Juice, who used brass and strings.
"The decisions to record those albums where I did were some of the bravest I've made," Forster says. "I mean, I had to make records that sold. I might have gotten further if I based myself in London, put all my chips there, gotten a budget and worked with name producers. But I had to follow my heart.
"I love the fact that those are three very different records, because they were recorded so differently. Place and location were always enormously important to Grant and me. We talked about doing a Paris album, a Dublin album, a Lisbon album. Being in a place during the four to six weeks it takes to make a record seeps in. It gives character to a record."
Forster didn't mention the 1995 covers album, from which he included only one song, Newbury's "Frisco Depot", on Intermission, a great 2007 collection consisting of one disc of Forster songs chosen and sequenced by him, and one chronological disc of McLennan tunes chosen by him shortly before his death. (McLennan made four solo albums, including 1995's remarkable nineteen-song Horsebreaker Star, recorded in Athens, Georgia, with Syd Straw prominently featured on backup vocals.)
The covers record, with its painful rendition of Spirit's "Nature's Way" and a decidedly unresonating version of Martha & the Muffins' "Echo Beach", induces a bit of head-scratching. But it also has its strong moments, the most appealing of which is Forster's handling of Bob Dylan's "Tell Me That It Isn't True" from Nashville Skyline. Like other talking-singing vocalists, Forster has had his delivery compared to Dylan's. Here, he puts a knowing smile on the great one's mannerisms, as only a Dylanologist could.
Forster shared his Dylanian insights in a column for The Monthly, in which he ranks Blood On The Tracks as the artist's greatest achievement and the Daniel Lanois-produced Time Out Of Mind as his best recent work. As much as he admires Dylan, though, he had no qualms calling him out for underachieving on 2006's Modern Times -- or calling the rock press out for over-praising the album.
In Forster's estimation, Modern Times needed a better producer than "Jack Frost," Dylan's nom de studio. "The songs need more," he wrote, "especially when Dylan calls upon a set of pre-rock 'n' roll influences, as he increasingly does. Lanois understood this: Those old records had atmosphere and they had arrangements. Dylan is arrangement-shy and always has been. A typical Dylan-produced song, in the studio or on stage, consists of all the musicians starting together and finishing when Dylan gives them the nod. No one sits out. No one comes in just for a chorus. It's all pretty flat, and that's fine when the songs are topnotch and we listen to Bob sing. But as soon as they slip -- as they surprisingly do on much of this album -- you realize that someone else is needed to push Dylan on his material and the way it might sound."
"The blues is a cornerstone of Dylan's work," Foster continued in his column, "but he always needs an angle on it -- some outrage, a big dose of humor."
Reading Forster on Dylan -- and Forster on Bryan Ferry doing Dylan on his recent Dylanesque, which contains a version of "Positively 4th Street" that Forster praises for finding "sadness, pathos and warmth" in what originated as a "caustic mid-'60s putdown" -- you're struck by how unusual it is for an active pop musician to write critically of other active pop musicians. Authors regularly review each other, but when was the last time we were treated to the kind of honest, informed insights Forster brings to bear on his contemporaries? (He's a lively historian, too. "Those that follow Petula Clark," he writes in his notes to That Striped Sunlight Sound, "I've always found to be grittier and more clear-minded than those who follow Dusty Springfield, who I've always found to be a little dreamy and highly strung.")
"I was hesitant at first to do the column," he said. "I had never done anything like it before. Was it really rock 'n' roll to do this? But what are the rules of rock 'n' roll anyway? I accepted the position that doing this was unique and good and valuable. I was surprised at how sorting things came naturally to me. I know about sequencing an album, putting musicians together, working with a producer, the role people play in the studio. Why not share that knowledge?"
Surprisingly, to anyone seduced by the image of a songwriter scrawling lyrics on napkins in restaurants and knocking out albums in the marathon bursts of inspiration, Forster writes, by his accounting, no more than three songs a year. Three. There is no slush pile of unused Forster gems, though one piece he is extremely fond of, "Don't Touch Anything", made it onto The Evangelist ten years after it was written. For reasons Forster said were never clear, McLennan didn't like it. By the rules of their partnership, they would each have an equal number of songs on their albums, and each would have veto power over the material.
Why does Forster write so few songs? "It's always been that way," he said, adding that he typically worked out the tunes with McLennan at his or his partner's place, one running guitar lines through the other's singing and strumming. "I just like the melody to be fresh. I mean, I could write twenty songs a year, but they would sound similar in themselves. If you crank out songs, they all end up sounding like Tim Hardin's 'If I Were A Carpenter' or Nirvana's 'All Apologies'. There's a reason Dylan made no album [of original material] between 1990 and 1997. He didn't have ten songs he thought were good enough."
Forster originally planned on using the brooding "If It Rains" as the title track of the new album. But he got convinced that "The Evangelist" was a stronger, snappier title. And the song, about him uprooting his family from Germany in 2001 and moving back to Australia for the promise of a better life, carries a theme of renewal that speaks to his artistic reawakening.
Yes, the sun is shining in Brisbane. The darkness hasn't gone away, but the possibilities McLennan envisioned still abound in his absence.
"I'm interested to see where it's all gonna go. It's been twelve years" since his last solo album, Forster notes. "These were unique circumstances. I'm happy with the album. I very much like the sound of it and the songs. We'll see how it goes when I play live. That's when the emotions come out the most. But so far I've been able to handle it. The music can really carry you, you know? There's just so much in it that lifts you up."
Contributing editor Lloyd Sachs, a music writer living in Chicago, Illinois, hates it when great things end, but basks in their lasting achievement and the promise they inspire.
Comments ()