From Australia with love for the Go-Betweens

I am now in Australia, for a week’s work, and think this is the perfect occasion to blog about Australian music and the bands from the vast country which have made most impact on me. Perhaps I am faintly intoxicated by the move from dreary recessed cold Ireland to a warm, bright, friendly, vibrant country (big impression made!), and the giddy horizontal vertigo of being so so far from home, but I have been listening to a strict diet of Australian music (carefully constructed Antipodean playlist) and it just fits, and much of it is great.



While I may come back later in the week to some broader thoughts on other bands, I must obviously start here with the Go-Betweens (see also Allmusic Guide page here), surely the most magnificently beautiful band to come from that, or perhaps any, continent. Appearing in the early 1980s as a collaboration of two physically and stylistically contrasting singer-songwriters, Grant McLennan (ostensibly the sunnier one, unassuming and not very rock-star-like) and Robert Forster (contrastingly tall, dark and serious, looks like the rockstar above). They released a series of albums as a band in the 1980s, then split and went on to two parallel solo careers (of which McLennan’s did more for me, although Forster’s solo debut, ‘Danger in the past’, backed by various Bad Seeds and recorded in Germany, is a moody classic), before reuniting in the last ten years for two new albums together; fresh critical acclaim and a new audience were found, but the new beginning was cut tragically short when McLennan suddenly died in May 2006.

The Go-Betweens speciality was bittersweet songs of love but with an edge or twist, set against achingly beautiful, usually acoustic, backing; they were once described as having a 'striped sunlight' sound (which became the name of their love CD and DVD) and somehow this just fits perfectly - bright, but not all the way, shadows on a beautiful picture. Somehow I think this may be a metaphor for Australia itself, hot and bright and sun-drenched, but with a troubled undercurrent of violent history and danger, from blazing bushfires to a million lethal life-forms.

Of all their striped sunlight, none shone brighter for me than ‘Bye bye pride’, from 1987’s ‘Tallulah’ . While I have made it tediously clear in previous entries that ‘Inbetween days’ is my favourite song of all time, this is the only one that even comes close, and couldn’t sound more different. IT HAS A BLOODY OBOE SOLO ON IT! To me, ‘Bye bye pride’ is just the sound of widescreen joy, large with life and love, bursting at its seams with pleasure, as it builds up and up to a full-on onslaught of energy and warmth at its climax. Lyrically simultaneously evocative yet mysterious, conjuring images of warm nights in far-off place with sad lovers splitting painfully (‘took the shirt of his back, the eyes from his head, and left him for dead...didn’t know someone could be so lonesome, didn’t know a heart could be tied up and held for ransom’). It is very scarily close to perfect, and I absolutely love that song.

Tthe official video, which I cannot believe I have only just discovered thanks to the miracle of Youtube, is here:



Their back catalogue is adorned with other gems, like ‘Right here’, ‘Spring rain’, ‘Finding you’, 'Batchelor Kisses' and ‘When people are dead’. Their best album is probably ’16 Lover’s Lane’, which contains their most commercially successful song (‘Streets of your town’) but also two further stone-cold acoustic masterpieces, ‘I’m alright’ and ‘Quiet heart’, the latter like a slower but incredibly stately and elegant cousin of 'Bye bye pride', replacing the oboe solo with a harmonica one of almost equal grace (see [unofficial?] video here).

I first encountered them in 1989, although I had heard of them before, when I saw them support REM in Dublin during the ‘Green’ world tour; knowing they would be playing that night, I bought ’16 Lover’s Lane’, and was getting to know the songs which helped, and they were incredible. I still remember, although not which of them, Grant or Robert introducing ‘Clouds’ with ‘this is my favourite song’, and the live version with extra verses and pared back instrumentation is well worth tracking down (see it here).

In addition, the ‘Striped Sunlight Sound’ live DVD includes a beautiful session of these two guys, old friends, sitting together with acoustic guitars in someone’s house, just playing and chatting about their history, and is a lovely way to remember Grant (see them do 'Bye bye pride' in that session here).

It is debatable whether their latterday reunion ever reached the musical heights of their earlier perfection, and I don’t for one think it did, but they were gathering critical acclaim and a new audience, particularly for their last album together ‘Oceans apart’; where they would have gone after will never be known. They were certainly not suddenly going to become the biggest group in the world or anything, but perhaps even more people would have been welcomed into their shade-dappled world and have let the beauty of their songs into their hearts; as this cannot now happen, it is up to us who remember and love them to keep the flame going and the word spreading.