Go-Betweens - An immortal normality

“Actually, I think we're the strangest of all these bands, precisely because we seem so genuinely normal”

Robert Forster

Life was hard for an Australian band in the early '80s. On the fringes of the crumbling British empire, where rock was considered pub music and the radio and TV airwaves were infested with old relics and dinosaurs: a peaceful, “normal” country, where - especially in the world of rock'n'roll - a cosy machismo reigned supreme, and beneath the surface ran the traces of the violence through which modern Australia had been forged. Grant McLennan, the sweet, luminous soul of the Go-Betweens, would also feel the difference between himself and his peers in having been raised by his mother alone, after his father's death; while his high school classmates went wild for Deep Purple, Grant was buying “Ziggy Stardust” and listening to Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne.

Introverted and sensitive, Grant meets his complementary spirit at university – where he gets good grades without effort or satisfaction – in the lanky, dark-haired, assertive Robert Forster, back when music, for him, was still a magical blend of sounds pouring into his ears. Bob Dylan, a figure so iconic as to transcend even his own gender, would be the connection between the two, both of them largely indifferent to punk aesthetics.

Together, over time, the two would create something unique, yet without ever managing to win over either the press (or at least the press that mattered, which at most threw them the odd coldly professional nod of approval) or the wider public. They could have been the first Australian band to play in art galleries, to go to New York and have their record produced by a Kramer; but alongside them there were the Birthday Party.

They could have been Rough Trade's next big thing, the label that distributed their first record in Europe, Send Me A Lullaby, and directly financed the second, Before Hollywood. But in that same period, the Smiths became Rough Trade's flagship act, and when it came time to trim the label's roster, it was the Go-Betweens who were cut. Unlike Nick Cave, McLennan and Forster don't have that cursed appeal, nor do their songs carry the self-indulgence, self-pity and narcissism of Morrissey's suicidal tendencies; factors that shape both success in one's own time and the depth of one's memory in music history.

In short, the Go-Betweens would always remain out of step with what the public wanted, never eccentric or controversial enough, never "in tune" with the moment – so much so that they released their best records in the second half of the '80s, by which point it was already time for the Stone Roses. McLennan and Forster's songs are "normal": there's no particular expressive urgency, no will to create something "different". But, looking closely, and as the history of other art forms shows, immortality is ultimately granted on merits of substance, not on the success achieved at the moment of creation. And on those merits, the Go-Betweens have nothing to prove next to their more celebrated contemporaries.

The Time of the Two Ls

"In Australia all these bands understood that they would never get the attention and opportunities they deserved. You find that out very early on. It forces bands to make only the music they themselves like. Whereas here [in Britain], if you're even slightly good, success comes quickly and the music suffers for it. They never had the time we had to work on the music"

Robert Forster

After a few years of ordinary toil, two singles released but still with an official line-up made up of just McLennan and Forster, the Go-Betweens decide to take the journey of a lifetime and try their luck in the motherland, knocking on the doors of various labels like modern-day street hustlers of music. After a single recorded at Postcard's studios in Glasgow, with the help of labelmates Orange Juice, our heroes manage, albeit only marginally, to latch onto the Birthday Party's London breakthrough, and to become part of the promising new Australian scene, which also included Laughing Clowns.

The relationship with London is a cold one; the band's introduction to the capital's scene is seen more as an obligatory stop than as the definitive arrival at some musical Mecca.

The bands of the moment (Slits, Wire) have nothing to do with the Go-Betweens' music, which instead looks to Television, Talking Heads and the Velvet Underground. Hence the brief stint with Postcard in Glasgow and a quick return to Australia, where they finally meet the woman who will become a permanent member of the band, the energetic drummer Lindy Morrison, already active in several local bands and soon an unmissable presence in the group's songs.

New York is the true spiritual home of Send Me A Lullaby, the Go-Betweens' debut, released through the Australian label Missing Link, the same one that put out records by the Birthday Party and Laughing Clowns. McLennan's softly declamatory style borrows here and there from Dylan ("Eight Pictures"), the interlocking guitars and dissonant bass syncopations follow Talking Heads blueprints ("Hold Your Horses", "Arrow And Bow"), while airy, dreamlike guitar motifs lead toward Velvet Underground territory on the lovely "One Thing Can Hold Us" or on "It Could Be Anyone", which already shows the seeds of McLennan's gift, above all, for forging melodies of an innocent romanticism, with the delicate sensibility of a keen observer of the human soul.

Send Me A Lullaby, however, seems to suppress the natural instincts of its two authors, McLennan himself and his partner Forster, in search of a music that wants to be different from everything else but doesn't yet know how, and ends up resembling, in the end, whatever else was happening around it at the time, straddling the late '70s and early '80s, a period when everything was changing. The great pop songwriting talent can already be sensed; faint echoes of that extraordinary fusion of romantic pomposity, glam (John Cale in particular) and schizophrenic jangle nervousness hint at the secret of a maturity reached too late.

The record won't achieve the success hoped for, but it will draw enough attention to push Rough Trade to distribute it in Europe. Rough Trade! If there was a band ready to explode, if there were sounds nobody had ever heard before that were about to travel through clubs the world over, they were signed to Rough Trade. It's now 1982 when the three Go-Betweens get one-way tickets to London as part of their deal with the English label: the same year the Smiths are born.

I recall

da “Cattle And Cane”

Sometimes memory fails him, says McLennan, when he tries to recall his childhood years on his mother's ranch. A bigger, brighter world, full of books. "Cattle And Cane" is the first single from Before Hollywood, recorded entirely in England, and it's perhaps the first song that, aside from being yet another missed hit, surreptitiously worked its way into Australian collective consciousness, so much so that it still periodically turns up on radio compilations of the island's greatest songs.

The step taken by the band since Send Me A Lullaby amounts to a total evolution for the Go-Betweens, an evolution as songwriters, musicians, and as arrangers and producers of their own music. The sound rounds itself out, the instruments spread to fill every space (at the time of recording the group was still a trio), and the songs take on a sleeker profile, pointing more precisely at their target. Morrison's drumming becomes more measured, while still remaining a protagonist, with that commanding pulse that seems to bolt the spiraling bass and guitar lines to the track's rails, the instruments becoming almost separate beings that occasionally cross paths by chance, never losing their own trajectory. In this she would prove an inspiration for Janet Weiss and the music of Sleater-Kinney.

The post-punk minimalism of the guitar and bass parts, sharp and nervy as in the Feelies, clothes a repertoire of great pop songs, with an elusive, subcutaneous vitality, melodies as hard to pin down as the harmonic ups and downs of "Bad Debt Follows You", with its hysterical rhythm changes and its Who-style organ. Beyond the more aggressively new wave moments, like the title track and "On My Block" (both Forster's doing so far), it's McLennan's sensibility that marks a clear break (vocally too), surfacing in the conciliatory nostalgia of "Cattle And Cane" and the crepuscular musings of "As Long As That". And then there are the glam drapes of piano in the drunken declamation of "Dusty In Here".

Inevitably, Before Hollywood completely fails to bring the Go-Betweens into view within the landscape of emerging bands, not just in England but in Australia too. Given sales figures worthy of a genuine "cult" band - the kind fans consider established classics but who still struggle to draw more than a few dozen people to their shows - Rough Trade drops them after financing just one album. Another label they'd been in contact with, Elektra, shuts down its UK offices.

[Robert Forster:] We got to know all these groups, from Orange Juice to the Birthday Party, Aztec Camera, the Smiths, and bang! Six months later they're all massively successful. It's really interesting, because you can see the trajectory of how it happened, from so close up. Everyone around us seems to be a star...

[Grant McLennan:] That's fine. In the reflected light, we look like stars too!

"White boy love songs" are all the rage, though, after the breakthrough of the Smiths, Orange Juice, Prefab Sprout and Aztec Camera, and an active, promising band like the Go-Betweens still has a market. This time it's Sire, a Wea spin-off, that gets in touch to record their next record; it all happens in Cannes, in the same studios where, a few months after the release of Spring Hill Fair, Wham! would record.

The Go-Betweens are now a foursome, following the arrival of bassist Robert Vickers, which frees McLennan to pick up the guitar again. "I think Robert follows a line much closer to his own views most of the time, whereas I'm quite interested in considering the form, and working within that form for a while. Particularly when I first wrote that song ["Bachelor's Kisses"]. [...] It caused a certain amount of friction in the band, because I wanted to make a recording in the manner of a well-produced, well-arranged pop song," McLennan says of the first single and opening track of the album, "Bachelor's Kisses", wrapped in the lush embrace of a synth, its melodic progressions of emotional surrender, the female backing vocals, the themes of the vanity of the male-dominated world and its promises of purely material security and comfort ("All they give you is a diamond ring").

"The old way out is the new way in", the Go-Betweens hope in "Old Way Out", on an album whose most important achievement is to begin hinting not only at the sound, but also at the instrumental setup and, in some way, the emotional territory of what the band's music would become in the years to follow. A proper rhythm guitar adds its own chords to the interplay of bass and lead guitar, the latter now freer from strictly melodic duties but still faithful to Forster's dictates: "I have an aversion to solos. I think two people playing melody and rhythm are enough".

You can also notice the refinement his songs undergo (all of them written in a drunken state, claims the band's brooding soul), for instance the beautifully doomed "Man O' Sand To Girl O' Sea", now far removed from the vague new wave atonality that had been its trademark in the demo recordings from the Before Hollywood sessions. Spring Hill Fair, meanwhile, has by now shed the more threadbare tendencies, emotionally too, of the past, in favor of an intensity that makes Forster even more unhinged ("You've Never Lived") and McLennan more Morrissey-esque ("Part Company").

It isn't refinement, however, that builds the success of a record. Spring Hill Fair, the band's third album, doesn't have the sweet fragility of a "This Charming Man", nor the explosive creative funk of "Satellite City". The more you listen to the songs on this record, the more you realize their perfect "normality": they don't have Morrissey's voice or Waits's, they don't have Verlaine's guitar or Marr's. They don't strike the senses, but they lodge themselves in the intellect. Needless to say, this record too will fail to bring the recognition they hoped for; but the ground is now ready to yield the noblest fruits of the Australian band's career.

Pocket Masterpieces

Liberty Belle & The Black Diamond Express, released through Beggars Banquet, is a powerful record, overflowing with life in its violin and accordion arrangements, in the airy flow of its chords; at the same time, it's a record in which the literary spirit of Forster and McLennan emerges more clearly than ever - starting with the title - offering a compendium of images as imaginative as they are tangible.

"If the Devil had seen your dress/ He would have changed his name" sings a hoarse Forster (he recorded his vocal parts in a single afternoon, due to problems that plagued him throughout the record's production) on the fiery "In The Core Of The Flame", where he shows off at his best his vehement, invective-laden compositional style, vibrant with emotions amplified by nocturnal solitude.

The presence of violin accompaniment and a very unusual bridge for Forster's usual sharp jabs says a lot, though, about the direction taken by the band on this latest record with two L's in its title. The Go-Betweens of Liberty Belle are pompous, theatrical, as in the exemplary "The Wrong Road": every song has something scenic about it, a flourish of images and transfigurations that finds its counterpart in the orchestral sweep of the arrangements.

In the disjointed breaking light

I took the wrong road round

da “The Wrong Road”

And here come the strings, the piano, the cymbals roaring in this enormous lyricism, which thunders and almost stuns. At last, these songs don't need digesting, don't need thinking about. They impose themselves instantly, in the invigorating embrace of "Bow Down", in the carnivalesque fable of "The Ghost And The Black Hat", in the nocturnal allure of "Twin Layers Of Lightning", which likewise unfolds into a grand architecture of piano flourishes, black-and-white guitar notes, and crystalline drumming.

Forster too finds his own route into pop, fusing in "Palm Sunday (On Board The SS Within)" the syncopations reminiscent of the band's early days with the gorgeous melody of the chorus, which almost draws a laugh with that glittering, trinket-strewn accompaniment.

In short, Liberty Belle had all the ingredients to launch the Go-Betweens, eight years after their formation, onto the road to real success - the kind measured in copies sold, not in the superlatives of reviews, which they had already been racking up for some time. 1986, however, is also the year that "The Queen Is Dead" came out, with everything that implies.

Not that, on the whole, the Go-Betweens have anything to be ashamed of next to the Smiths album, which often turns up in Top 10 lists of pop music history. But it doesn't reach the sublime peaks hit by Morrissey and Marr, nor does it have the defenseless, and therefore more exploitable, charm of their weaker songs. Liberty Belle is already a mature record, one that could hardly thrive on college radio. "Spring Rain", a gorgeous track that exemplifies the record's spirit of heady fullness, would make a brief appearance on one of the Australian charts, only to drop out again soon after. That's more or less the sum total of the recognition the band got from contemporary listeners for one of their masterpieces.

So we arrive, as the Smiths break up, at Tallulah, after the group added Amanda Brown, a multi-instrumentalist (keyboards, oboe, violin, guitar and backing vocals) and soon McLennan's partner, to whom he would dedicate more than one of the following songs. The record, again released through Beggars Banquet and True Tone, is probably the band's most radio-friendly and so-called commercial effort, starting with the production, at times a bit too flat, and with the first single, which also opens the record, "Right Here", with its reverberating drums and its swooping violin lines, McLennan's romanticism finally fulfilled and sunny.

The theatricality of Liberty Belle disappears almost entirely (except for the spectral, gothic "The Clarke Sisters", a mood later picked up closely by the Paradise Motel, another important Australian band). McLennan's spirit seems swollen, almost overwhelmed by an unhoped-for idyll that drains the songs of intensity, as on the exemplary "Bye Bye Pride" (which also has a few sound issues).

Velvet-esque vibrations on "Spirit Of A Vampire", a smoothed-out Robert Forster on "I Just Get Caught Out", caught up in the record's somewhat baroque scaffolding ("Someone Else's Wife", with McLennan almost a crooner between a plucked violin and a muted guitar).

Tallulah is, in short, a record that lives on a slightly cloying refinement, weighed down by this relationship between McLennan and Brown, which seems to seep through the songs too, from the somewhat fanatical, blind fullness of the closing "Hope Then Strife", with its grandiose bow sweeps and Brown's own soprano backing vocals.

Everything, however, seems to be in service of a truly rare record, in the history of the many bands more or less well known. One of those records where the chords seem to leap out and propel the songs in an incessant, unconscious motion toward an invisible horizon, as if possessed by some uncontrollable emotion. We're talking about 16 Lovers Lane, the band's true great masterpiece, in which McLennan and Forster seem to turn back into boys, back to the days when they dressed like Bob Dylan and dreamed with a guitar in hand.

The two souls of the Go-Betweens deliver the swan song best suited to each of them: Forster in the breathless outpouring of "Was There Anything I Could Do?", consumed by pathos, McLennan rediscovering a grip on his own emotions in the erotic pulse, almost a thirst, of "You Can't Say No Forever" and the passionate "Love Goes On!", an irresistible hymn to love, in all its forms, low or high.

Late at night when I want you

I lock you in my room

‘Cause I know a thing about darkness

I know a thing about lovers

Lovers want the moon

from "Love Goes On!"

A palpable tension runs through the record, even though the Go-Betweens no longer show, strictly in terms of sound and arrangement, any sign of asserting their independence. That instead is recognized on a deeply compositional and expressive level, in a work that builds on the strengths of McLennan's songwriting, already evident on Liberty Belle, and draws on Forster's existential struggle to set its tracks alight with a vividness of poetry unlike anything else in the Go-Betweens' music. A total emotional surrender, an inner storm relentless except through the beloved's "quiet heart" ("Quiet Heart").

In 16 Lovers Lane, however, the band enacts a clear shift in sound and arrangement from the baroque flatness of Tallulah, on a record where electric guitar is essentially absent and violin appears only sparingly. Everything rests on simple but resonant acoustic duets, framing the wistful wanderings of the lovelorn McLennan, as in the pre-Murdoch "Pretty Woman" of the single "Streets Of Your Town", or in the shower of shooting stars of "Love Is A Sign". Or again, in the talking riff of "I'm Allright".

And it's precisely with the last song of the Go-Betweens' output from this era, "Dive For Your Memory", that the pair seem to want to pay tribute to their master – or rather their idol – Dylan, in another of the record's gorgeous acoustic declarations.

With 16 Lovers Lane (the first of their titles without a double L) the first chapter of the band's career comes to a close, after "Streets Of Your Town", despite achieving the biggest audience response in the Go-Betweens' history, entered the Australian and British Top 100 only to drop straight back out. Beggars Banquet would try, ten months later, to re-release the single in the UK, without success. By then the press's attention had shifted to the new phenomenon in British music: Stone Roses and the Madchester scene of the late '80s.

The project naturally ran its course by the end of 1989, following the breakup between McLennan and Amanda Brown. The difficulty of carrying on, after twelve years, was even greater for a band built around two independent songwriters, however fraternal their friendship. Volumes could be written on the reasons the Go-Betweens slipped out of the music world without anyone noticing, but perhaps nothing says it better than what Robert Forster said, years before the group's actual split:

"In Hollywood there are two kinds of actors. There are the stars – the swimming pools, the fan clubs, the pressure. All the attention is on them. Then there are the character actors […]. They don't have all the trappings the stars have, but they put together a body of work that's usually more substantial, far more real than the stars'. As far as the Go-Betweens go, we are the character actors. That's how I'd like us to be remembered."

Robert Forster

Unfinished business

Finding an old friend again. Before the advent of social media, this could still sound like a naively nostalgic idea rather than a side effect of Facebook. Much like a band reunion: the mere thought of one didn't automatically make you wince. The Go-Betweens' reunion, however, was something special right from the start. First, because the return of a cult band is hardly front-page news: hard, in other words, to see any marketing ploy lurking behind it. Second, because the bond between Forster and McLennan, in truth, had never really been severed: "I always thought we'd record something together again," Forster admits without hesitation, "it was only a matter of time."

Indeed, even after the Go-Betweens split up, the solo careers pursued separately by Forster and McLennan (four albums each, in perfect symmetry) didn't stop the two songwriters from crossing paths again more than once along the way. In 1994 they took part in Beggars Banquet's 20th-anniversary compilation with a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil", recorded under the name The Global Twins. In 1996 the French magazine "Les Inrockuptibles" talked them into dusting off the old band name for a concert in Paris, followed by a string of live shows in Brisbane. Alongside them were two members of Forster's backing band, the Warm Nights: Adele Pickvance on bass and Glenn Thompson on drums.

But it was when Forster and McLennan took on an acoustic tour together, organized to promote the Go-Betweens compilation Bellavista Terrace, that the idea of recording a new album together began to take shape. It was 1999, and at the end of one of their shows, Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss came up to them with a smile: "On stage I had announced that Grant and I were going to make a new record," Forster recalls. "When we came off, we met Sleater-Kinney for the first time, and Janet immediately said: I'll play drums!"

So, in early 2000, Forster and McLennan found themselves together with Janet Weiss and Adele Pickvance at Jackpot Studios in Portland. "We didn't want to go back into a big studio, we didn't want to put all that pressure on ourselves," McLennan explains. "We wanted to keep it simple, go into the studio and play live." The record that resulted, The Friends Of Rachel Worth, was ready to win over a whole new generation of fans to the music of the Go-Betweens.

Time knocks you down like a rolling ball

In memory hall

Love leaves you clean like a waterfall

Then you hit a wall

from "Magic In Here"

The arpeggio of "Magic In Here" instantly renews the enchantment, dissolving time into the density of the present moment: "I don't want to change a thing when there's magic in here", announces McLennan's soft voice. Then it's Forster's turn to take the microphone, and the acoustic nakedness of "Spirit" takes on a dusty flavor reminiscent of Dylan in the western mode of "Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid".

The contagious sparkle of "Going Blind" alone would be enough to prove McLennan right: "our music is simple and direct, that's why it still sounds current". The Friends Of Rachel Worth is not an album made by has-beens: it settles into the present without regrets, yet with all the awareness of the years gone by. And time itself is one of the album's fundamental themes, from the depth of memory in "Magic In Here" to the ticking hands of "The Clock", with the guitar riff melting into the sweetness of the melody.

Between the pulsing bass of "Orpheus Beach" and the dreamy choruses of "Surfing Magazines", McLennan delivers in "Heart And Home" one of his most romantically penetrating songs. Forster, for his part, recalls the years spent in the middle of the Bavarian countryside in the angular "German Farmhouse", before dedicating the closing elegy "When She Sang About Angels" to Patti Smith, suspended between an arpeggio and a caress of violin: "When she sang about a boy, Kurt Cobain/ I thought what a shame it wasn't about Tom Verlaine".

Meanwhile, the home recordings made by Forster and McLennan back in their early days are also being released: 78 'Til 79: The Lost Album is a collection of lo-fi sketches (captured on a two-track recorder) offering a glimpse into the Go-Betweens' origins, caught in their most authentic, bare-bones essence.

Nothing in my life is numbered

In my life nothing is planned

You might think you see purpose

When what you're seeing is a band

da “Too Much Of One Thing”

A room flooded with sunlight, a gentle breeze filtering through half-open windows: one of those spring mornings when the air delicately brushes against the nostalgia hidden in the heart. It's from a scent of luminous melancholy that the songs of the second chapter of the Go-Betweens' reunion, Bright Yellow Bright Orange, seem to bloom: a title that evokes the colors of Forster's son's bedroom, the colors of a horizon full of possibility.

The best way to let yourself be drawn into the strange magic contained in the oblique pop songs of Bright Yellow Bright Orange is to surrender to Forster and McLennan's new colors without necessarily comparing them to the shades of the past. Otherwise, the album's content risks fading into the background in the face of the inevitable question: are the old Go-Betweens better than the new ones? And, as we know, in that case sentimental answers would end up winning out.

Those who discovered the Go-Betweens precisely at the time of their rebirth, on the other hand, only have to reckon with the Byrds-like aromas of their electroacoustic watercolors, capable of blending R.E.M. and The Smiths with unsuspected freshness.

If the new album perhaps loses a bit of liveliness compared to The Friends Of Rachel Worth, it certainly gains in cohesion: Forster, finally back living in Australia, can once again work closely with McLennan as he used to. "It's no longer about experimenting just to see what happens", he confirms. "It's about behaving like a real band in the middle of its activity". So, on "Too Much Of One Thing" the two experiment for the first time in their career with four-handed songwriting, splitting up words and music instead of alternating as usual in composing the songs.

For Forster and McLennan, following up the reunion of The Friends Of Rachel Worth comes naturally: "For us it was a given that there would be more albums, it was immediately clear that the band had truly come back, not out of nostalgia or to silence regrets or to fulfill a contract", Forster recalls. And McLennan immediately echoes him: "It's like a magnificent old car that's been shut away in the garage for years; when you bring it back out on the road and the engine roars, you just want to keep driving it".

Bright Yellow Bright Orange was born between Melbourne (in a studio just a few blocks from where Send Me A Lullaby had been recorded) and Sydney, at the end of the summer of 2002. On drums, once the collaboration with Janet Weiss came to a close, Glenn Thompson stepped in, having been at Forster's side since his solo career days. And, for the first and only time in the Go-Betweens' history, the album cover features not an image of the band, but a drawing by a brilliant disciple, Cameron Bird of fellow countrymen Architecture In Helsinki.

The breezy rush of "Caroline And I" evokes none other than the tabloid figure of Caroline of Monaco, once again telling the story of time's passing: "she's the same age as me and I've always been drawn to her", Forster explains, "it's as if ours were two parallel lives". While the ghost of the Lou Reed-esque sweet Jane gently peeks through in "Mrs. Morgan", it's above all the sparkling energy of the power-pop gem "Make Her Day" that drives the album forward. So, from the bittersweet aftertaste of "Poison In The Walls" to the piano notes of the closing "Unfinished Business", Bright Yellow Bright Orange sounds like full confirmation of Forster and McLennan's splendid maturity.

The Last Train

What would you do if you turned around

Or would you sing along?

from “Finding You”

While in London for a couple of shows organized to mark the reissue of the old Go-Betweens catalogue, Forster and McLennan decide to step into a recording studio to cut a single: the song is called “Here Comes A City” and it's one of those simple pieces of magic capable of winning you over from the very first listen, much like “Make Her Day” had already done on Bright Yellow Bright Orange. “It was so good, so perfect that I loved it immediately”, Forster recalls. A lightning-fast travel snapshot (“Why do people who read Dostoevsky always look like Dostoevsky?”), which with its square-cut rhythm and nervy guitars would deserve an honorable mention in the manual of the ideal pop song.

Out of “Here Comes A City” comes the ninth Go-Betweens album, Oceans Apart, recorded at Good Luck studios in London between late 2004 and early 2005. The title comes from the name of the Florida-style bar where Forster and McLennan used to take refuge during breaks from making the record. And from the elegant black-and-white of its cover onward, it presents itself as the most softly melancholy chapter of the Australian band's second act.

Letting yourself be enveloped by the soft-edged shadows of Oceans Apart is like suddenly finding yourself in the middle of a scene from “Donnie Darko”, with Church providing the soundtrack to a group of strung-out teenagers' Halloween party, while on TV the images of the Bush Sr.-Dukakis race flicker by. The production by Mark Wallis, already at the Go-Betweens' side on their last album before splitting up, 16 Lovers Lane, does away with sophisticated orchestration, setting aside strings in favor of guitar and keyboard sounds, with the occasional sporadic nod to electronic rhythms.

But the Go-Betweens of Oceans Apart aren't merely a band for nostalgics of the Eighties, even if on the brassy shimmer of “Darlinghust Nights” Forster lets himself drift into memories of bohemian life in Sydney in the early Eighties. At times the romanticism risks slipping into sappiness, but the heartbreaking Morrissey-esque turn of “The Statue” manages to transform what might seem like mere swooning languor into genuine infatuation. A cross between Pet Shop Boys and Bob Dylan, someone called it, but McLennan prefers to picture it as a meeting between Serge Gainsbourg and Ladytron…

Oceans Apart earns the Go-Betweens one of the few “official” accolades of their career: winning the award for “Best Adult Contemporary Album” at the 2005 Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards. And even the popular TV series “24” pays the band a small tribute, writing into the plot a company with the telling name “McLennan-Forster”.

In the album's limited edition, the accompanying bonus disc also offers live versions of five old band tracks, recorded in 2004 at a London concert. An appetizer followed, in 2006, by the most complete document of the second incarnation of the Go-Betweens on stage: That Striped Sunlight Sound, a live CD and DVD capturing a 2005 show at the “Tivoli” in Brisbane. A set that opens with McLennan alone delivering the acoustic delicacy of “Black Mule”, before being joined by Forster for a version of “Clouds” that also slips in a nod to Dylan's “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. Only at that point does the rest of the band take the stage, as if to underline that the real Go-Betweens, in truth, are just Forster and McLennan: and so the past of “Streets Of Your Town” materializes once again, even if the setlist is rather stingy with classics (no “Cattle And Cane” or “Bye Bye Pride”, to name a couple). In the end, a hypnotic, torrential “Karen” keeps the audience glued for over seven minutes, before the quartet finally resigns itself to leaving the stage.

It's Forster himself who explains the album's title in the liner notes: “In 1978, when we released our first single, we dedicated it to the “striped sunlight sound”. It's not a manifesto. It's a feeling. A feeling our music gave us. It's the sun asserting itself over the darkness within. That's what Brisbane is to me. Sun and darkness”.

The DVD then adds to the picture an acoustic session in which Forster and McLennan pick up their guitars to tell the story of the Go-Betweens as if on an afternoon among friends, revisiting the key songs of their career starting with the playful “Lee Remick” from 1978.

David wrote in his goodbye note

As I move on

da “From Ghost Town”

It's May 6, 2006 when a sudden heart attack kills Grant McLennan at his home in Brisbane. He's forty-eight, and his second youth with the Go-Betweens seems to have only just begun. “I was paralyzed,” Forster recalls. “I no longer knew what music meant.”

In 2007, Beggars Banquet, crowning the careers of the two Australian songwriters, released “Intermission”, a splendid double-CD retrospective of the best of their respective solo careers.

McLennan's death prematurely ends the story of the Go-Betweens, but the solo album Robert Forster made in 2008, “The Evangelist”, sounds like the echo of a mysterious post-mortem afterlife for the thirty-year friendship between the two old partners in adventure: picking up from the melancholy veins of Oceans Apart and using the last sketches left behind by McLennan, Forster pays a tribute that is anything but nostalgic or rhetorical to the legacy of one of the sharpest, most sensitive bands to survive the Eighties.

“Demon Days”, in particular, is the final legacy of the collaboration with McLennan, able to caress autumnal chords with a mournful serenity entirely eels-like, made of whispers embracing strings and celesta. And in the album's epilogue, “From Ghost Town”, the reflection of the departed friend becomes more palpable and painful, with the lonely piano notes dissolving into the anguish of the duet with Adele Pickvance. “It’s gone, yes yes yes, it’s wrong/ And why should this be so, why why why, why why why?”. The question echoes insistently over a high-pitched harmonica, like a cry that refuses to fade away.

As McLennan always used to say, what matters isn't the music you appreciate with your brain but the music that doesn't satisfy your heart. “To be touched by a song I need to feel that whoever is singing is speaking directly to me,” he would insist. The Go-Betweens' music has always been made to speak directly to the heart. Their only ambition, to use Forster's words, has always and only been to “make great music, as great as the music that inspired us.” A few brushstrokes of colour are enough for him to describe it: “The glint of a Fender. Accompanied by the touch of a groovy bass and simple drums. Harmonies and resolute pop songs. Reading a book lying in bed by a window in the afternoon light.” When the shadows begin to lengthen at the end of a bright day, it's time to pick up an old Go-Betweens record again. And let yourself be wrapped once more in those unmistakable strips of sun-drenched sound.

Lorenzo Righetto: Send Me A Lullaby, Before Hollywood, Spring Hill Fair, Liberty Belle, Tallulah, 16 Lovers Lane

Gabriele Benzing: The Friends Of Rachel Worth, Bright Yellow Bright Orange, Oceans Apart, That Striped Sunlight Sound

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