the Go-Betweens

Robert Forster: What can ordinary be?

Music / / 8 minutes of reading

When I meet former Go-Between Robert Forster at a cafe in the centre of Brisbane for a walk around his home town, it’s no surprise to see a book on the table in front of him. It is The Café With No Name, by Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler – a gift for his wife, Karin Bäumler.

Forster picked it up, somewhat reluctantly, from a chain store. A great indie bookshop, he says, is “the one thing that I really miss in Brisbane – the thing that makes me go, this is not a world-class city”. He remembers a time when it was, but it’s not when you might think.

At home, in the leafy western suburb of The Gap, he has a copy of a colour photograph of Brisbane’s main drag, Queen Street, from the late 50s. Historians would have you believe that back then Brisbane was just a big country town.

The photograph tells him it was all that and more. “It looks incredible, like the most gorgeous city you’ve ever seen. It was a beautiful country town! It’s all neon; it looks like a cross between Las Vegas and Memphis.”

And now? “It’s been mall-ised, it’s been nibbled away, it’s been destroyed.”… Read more..

Robert Forster: What can ordinary be? Read More »

The Zoo: No Rum, No Double-Shots, No Dickheads

Music / / 9 minutes of reading

Shane Chidgzey is talking a mile a minute, sounding half street hustler, half tech bro. “I didn’t come from the music industry initially,” says the Sydney-based entrepreneur and owner of Brisbane’s The Zoo, one of Australia’s longest-running music venues. “I was looking for a way to disrupt, because I like to disrupt as a basis for most of my businesses.”

The Zoo has endured plenty of disruption in the last few years. Established in 1992 by two young women, Joc Curran and C Smith, it’s still emerging from a difficult period after Curran sold the venue in 2016. “I’d given it 24 years of my life, and I needed to have a life outside of that,” she says.

Since then it’s gone through a couple of sets of hands. Pixie Weyand bought The Zoo from Curran and, with the latter’s help, staged a 25th anniversary celebration in late 2017. But the Covid pandemic wrought devastation, despite Brisbane initially escaping almost unscathed: in 2020 the city played host to a packed AFL grand final, normally held in Melbourne.

The largesse afforded to major sporting events wasn’t extended to music. Under Weyand, the 500-capacity venue became one of the first to trial socially distanced shows: 100 people, positioned 1.5 metres apart.… Read more..

The Zoo: No Rum, No Double-Shots, No Dickheads Read More »

Robert Forster: The Candle and the Flame

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

A quick perusal of the history of rock & roll will tell you that most songs are concerned with three things: getting laid, getting dumped or getting cheated on. Rare is the songwriter that explores the challenges of commitment, fidelity and growing old with dignity – which is not surprising, since rock stars are not well known for any of those things.

But most rock stars are not like Robert Forster, the former Go-Between. Back in 1993, Forster made his second solo album, Calling From A Country Phone. It’s one of the happiest albums you could wish to hear: Forster was newly married and blissfully content. Thirty years later, pushing 65, Forster is still married, still happy, and still wants you to know all about it.

Take his new song Tender Years, from The Candle And The Flame, Forster’s eighth album outside the Go-Betweens. “I see her through the ages / She’s a book of a thousand pages,” goes the opening line, over a shuffling rhythm and a sly melody that Forster, as usual, barely tries to sing. Yet it fades out in a richly harmonised croon: “See how far we’ve come.”

But the shadow of mortality hangs over The Candle And The Flame.… Read more..

Robert Forster: The Candle and the Flame Read More »

Robert Forster: Inferno

Music / / 3 minutes of reading

Here in Brisbane, the heat has finally broken. For 46 days in a row, the mercury exceeded 30C. The previous record was 27 days, in 2017. While the north has been awash, the wet season here has failed. I’m listening to the title track of the new Robert Forster album. It’s called Inferno (Brisbane In Summer). You might think it looks like paradise, he sings, but everyone here is screaming: “Let me, let me, let me, let me, let me out!”

Forster has written about the weather in Brisbane before. On his 2008 album The Evangelist, recorded during a similarly excruciating period of mind-melting heat, the first song was called If It Rains. At the time, we thought it might never rain here again. Not that Inferno is any kind of manifesto. This is not a climate change concept album. It’s a Robert Forster record, which means buckets of atmosphere, dry wit, subtle pleasures and unerring quality.

While Forster’s last album, Songs To Play, was recorded close to his home patch in the hills west of Brisbane, for Inferno he escaped to Berlin, where he recorded his first solo album, Danger In The Past, in 1990.… Read more..

Robert Forster: Inferno Read More »

How the Go-Betweens made Streets Of Your Town

Music / / 8 minutes of reading

The Go-Betweens’ Streets Of Your Town is the winner of Guardian Australia’s Songs of Brisbane poll. But is it even about Brisbane? Separate interviews with the surviving members of the band reveal very different viewpoints and memories about the song’s genesis, recording and legacy.

The writing

Streets Of Your Town was written in Sydney shortly before the recording of the Go-Betweens’ sixth album, 16 Lovers Lane, in 1988. Grant McLennan was in a relationship with multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown when he wrote it. It was unusual in that the band’s co-founder, Robert Forster, had not heard the song before it was brought to the group. McLennan died in 2006.

Amanda Brown (violin, guitar, oboe): “Grant and I were living together in Bondi Junction in Sydney, and that song was written very quickly in our sunny top-floor flat … It was written in, I would say, 10 minutes. I was singing along and I sung that ‘shine’ line, which is like the call and response answer in the verses, and that’s pretty much it – that’s how it came about. And I don’t collect any songwriting royalties for that song, because that was a condition of my joining the band.”

Lindy Morrison (drums): “We were in a park in Glebe when Amanda and Grant played the song to us for the first time, and I guess I was hearing it through Robert’s reaction, because Robert was so shocked.… Read more..

How the Go-Betweens made Streets Of Your Town Read More »

Songs of Brisbane

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

I’m from Melbourne. I spent the first 15 years of my life there, in the outer eastern suburbs of Wantirna South and Ringwood North. I grew up on Australian Rules football and Countdown until punk entered my life 10 years too late. Then, in 1987, my parents relocated the family to Brisbane. Other than a few regrettable years in Sydney in the late 90s, I’ve been here ever since.

I still feel like a Victorian, though I’ve come to hate the cold. I still follow a Melbourne-based AFL team, despite having written on the side about the Brisbane Lions for 13 years. I even wrote a book about Brisbane, a sort of love letter to my adopted city and, especially, its music. The sound of the place captured me. To this day though, I feel like an outsider or interloper. Stranded, you might say, far from home.

But when I hear Streets Of Your Town by the Go-Betweens I feel differently. Never a hit at the time (the band’s co-founder Robert Forster has said they may as well have released a free jazz record, such was its commercial impact), the song, written by Grant McLennan, has become part of the city’s fabric.… Read more..

Songs of Brisbane Read More »

Scroll to Top