Ten Leaves On A River Bank

One of the books I read on holiday was Tracey Thorn's My Rock 'n' Roll Friend, an account of Tracey's friendship with Lindy Morrison. Tracey first met Lindy backstage at a gig. Lindy marched into Everything But The Girl's dressing room looking for lipstick- Tracey describe's Lindy's entrance, Lindy depicted as a force of nature. She goes on to describe and dissect her thirty seven year friendship with Lindy and her part in story of The Go- Betweens. As the book goes on Tracy seethes with righteous anger about Lindy's role and position in the Australian band, how Lindy has been written out of the group's history- by journalists and when they reformed in 2000 by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan (a group she joined in 1980 and was an essential part of as a three piece and then five piece). Tracy articulates the way the music press played down Lindy's role, how it was often portrayed as being all about the two men, the songwriting partnership. Lindy was a key part in the band, not least visually- a tall, blonde, unconventional drummer playing behind two bookish men. 

The Go- Betweens moved to London, finding it a miserable, unfriendly, cold and wet place. They lived with Nick Cave and The Birthday Party- no one worked except Lindy, the men all falling into a life of being artists sitting around taking drugs and waiting for songwriting inspiration to strike. Lindy and Robert are in a relationship which implodes (and so does the band, the two men ending it in spectacularly sexist fashion, Robert sacking Lindy as simultaneously Grant sacked his girlfriend Amanda Brown- and was then surprised when Amanda left him). As I read the book I cringed slightly, wondering if I'd fallen into the same (male) trap when writing about The Go- Betweens. 

It's also a book about friendship and affection, the nature of female friendships especially, about connections and the passage of time, about the wild, frank and outgoing Lindy and the reserved and more cautious Tracey and what attracted them to each other. Lindy is the member of The Go- Betweens who is the most rock 'n' roll but as a woman she's criticised for her behaviour. She came from a feminist punk background and music journalists are terrified of her and describe her in ways they never would men. There is much food for thought within its pages. 

It's a book which requires little or no knowledge of anyone's bands either, of The Go- Betweens or Everything But The Girl, although it sits very well with having read Tracey's Bedsit Disco Queen and Robert Forster's Grant and I (Forster's book and its title alone support much of what Tracy is saying, Lindy once again written out of the story). Tracey writes really well, is incisive, self- aware and analytical. She is fairly fearless too in addressing aspects of relationships, her own as well as Lindy's. 

This song is on the 1984 album Spring Hill Fair, recorded in France. Producer John Brand used programmed drums on many of the songs and trying to get her to play to a click track which led to conflict with Lindy, conflict she didn't back away from. 

Draining The Pool For You

The second book I read was a novel, Benjamin Myers' The Perfect Golden Circle. It is the best novel I've read in years, an atmospheric, fully realised story of two men in the summer of 1989. One is Calvert, a traumatised Falklands veteran. The other is Redbone, a cider- punk veteran of free parties at Stonehenge and the Battle of the Beanfield living in a van. Their friendship is the core of the novel. In 1989 they are in their third summer of creating corn circles and through the long, hot summer of 89 they plan and carry off increasingly bold and intricate designs in farmer's fields in the south of England. Myers goes off into various places as the book unfolds, returning to the two men and the almost mystical aspects of their crop circles. It's a gentle and insightful book, beautifully written, poetic in parts and with characters that stick in the mind when the book is put down. 

In 1990 Led Zeppelin released a compilation box set with crop circles on the cover. I shared a house with someone who bought it and the front cover was eye catching even if I didn't care much for the music. On the whole I can live without Led Zeppelin- I like some of the first album and the folky, mystical songs on the third are good- but its a type of music that doesn't do a massive amount for me. Priapic cock rock- I can imagine Tracey and Lindy discussing it in those kinds of terms. I have a fondness for Kashmir though, ridiculous as it is. Maybe its the ridiculousness that appeals. 

Kashmir

Crop circles are probably better connected with The KLF. I'm sure Redbone in The Perfect Golden Circle would be a KLF fan. Kylie Said To Jason came out in July 1989, at the height of crop circle mania

Kylie Said To Jason (Full Length Version)

Head Full Of Steam

This is one of those 'just because' posts, no real reason for posting it other than it's a great song by a band who seem destined to remain a cult concern but who had the songs if not the temperament to be massive. The Go- Betweens, formed by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan in Brisbane in 1977, made six albums between 1981 and 1988, all of which are worthy of your time and money. They reformed and made three more in the early 2000s but were brought to a halt by the premature and tragic death of Grant McLennan in 2006. During the 80s they moved to London and signed to various labels (Rough Trade, Sire and Beggars Banquet), expanded their line up and sound and in 1986 recorded what drummer Lindy Morrison says is their best, Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express. Every song on it could be a single- jangly guitars, clear production, melodies and poetic, personal lyrics by Grant and Robert. This song, Head Full of Steam, was a single, remixed slightly for radio ,with friend Tracey Thorn on backing vocals and a new middle eight. Lyrically, like many of their songs, it's about lost or unrequited love, 'I don't mind/ To chase her/ A fool's dream/ I'm 104 degrees/ With a head full of stream'. 

Head Full Of Steam

Was it a hit? No, it wasn't. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. It's not that they didn't have the songs but maybe they were just too something to reach a bigger audience- quirky isn't the right word nor is awkward but something stopped them crossing over. Maybe the mid 80s only had room for a certain number of literate alternative/ indie guitar bands and The Go- Betweens fell outside the number who made the cut. Whatever, the songs and the albums remain. Here they are on Whistle Test in '86 promoting it in an empty BBC studio, showing exactly what a great band they were. 

Lee Remick

I picked up Robert Forster's autobiography Grant And I, his memoir of his life, his time as one of the two songwriters and frontmen in The Go- Betweens and friendship with the other one, Grant McLennan (who died at the early age of forty eight in 2006). Forster is a witty, reflective and very literate writer and he describes the birth of the group and their subsequent trials and tribulations- critically lauded albums but very few sales- in a breezy but detailed manner. The 1980s and it's insistence on big studios, big producers and drum machines doesn't come out of it well, several albums full of fine songs being scuppered. His writes vivid portraits of London in the mid 80s and of the music and social scenes in several Australian cities.The chapter at the end of the first half where he deals with the band's breakup is open and honest about his and Grant's reasons and mistakes (especially when telling Lindy and Amanda, the other band members, one of whom was living with and in a  relationship with McLennan who then regrets this and pays for it for some time afterwards).

Early on in the band's history Robert writes a song called Lee Remick, a tribute to the American star of Days Of Wine And Roses, The Omen and Anatomy Of A Murder, and it's clear this song is a breakthrough for him, a love song written by someone who at that point hadn't been in love, a love song for someone he doesn't know, his feelings projected onto a film star. The music, folky post punk crossed with 60s bubblegum, is stripped back, taut and amateurish and all the better for it. It's clearly indebted to Jonathan Richman and The Monkees. The Go- Betweens pressed up 700 copies on 7" released by Australian label Able in 1978, which are worth a small fortune now. The subject of the song, Lee Remick, owned three copies of the single, one sent to her by Forster in 1979, another he gave to her in 1988 and a third bought by the production team when she appeared on an Australian chatshow.

Lee Remick

The book cost me a fiver in the Waterstones sale, five pounds well spent. You can barely get a pint for a fiver in some parts of town now.

Then I got thinking about songs where the title of the song is the name of a famous person. Sadly The Wedding Present's George Best album doesn't count as it's an album not a song and the boy Gedge didn't include the word William in the title of his song Shatner. But I've got a couple of others which I'll put up over the next few days.

Rain Of Falling Cinders

The Go-Betweens have been in the ether recently- the documentary has been on the TV and the recent album by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever has some songs that sound very like them, especially in the vocals. Checking my back pages here I was stunned to find out I've only posted anything by them twice and nothing since 2012 which seems really remiss of me.

The Go-Betweens made a handful of really good albums, records filled with unique and intuitive songs. I got into their 16 Lovers Lane album not long after it came out in 1988 and dug backwards from there. The compilation 1979-1990 was a must too, the first disc a Best Of and the second a round up of B-sides, early singles, radio sessions and lost songs, a real treasure trove. The group's founding members Robert Forster and Grant McLennan were inspired by Brisbane's nascent punk scene, The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan and The Modern Lovers, heads full of poetry, and 60s and 70s films and both had something to say, Forster first and then Grant when he started writing songs too. They developed really distinct but complementary voices and the band that formed around them- first as a three piece with drummer Lindy Morrison and then later with Robert Vickers and Amanda Brown- filled out the twin acoustic guitars and made music to match the words. In places the words and the vocals are as good as anything anyone else was doing in the 1980s- the first line of the first verse of Man O' Sand To Girl O' Sea where Robert Forster growls 'I feel so sure about our love I'll write a song about us breaking up' comes from somewhere most singers weren't inhabiting.

Cattle And Cane was the first single off their Before Hollywood album, released in 1983. Sparse acoustic guitar and bass open the song, with a strange changing time signature throughout, music that seems both post-punk and traditional.  Grant sings about fields of cane and a house of tin and timber, evoking the open expanses of his Australian childhood, then being a teenager and losing his father's watch while at school, then as a young man. It's a song about home written thousand of miles away, in a run down flat belonging to Nick Cave during a miserable London winter, on Nick Cave's guitar, while he lay unconscious nearby. The backing vocals at the end are particularly gorgeous.

Cattle And Cane

Always The Traffic, Always The Lights

There aren't too many band re-unions that go on to make decent music in their second lives (although I'm happy to be corrected on that). The Go-Betweens re-united and made Oceans Apart in 2005, with this standout track which I love to bits. It's one of those narrative songs which so few people manage to do well. Robert Forster opens up a notebook, 'The Darlinghurst Years', and sparks off a train of bittersweet memories of his time living there- gut rot coffee, Joe playing the cello, the non-stop traffic and non-stop lights, Marjorie, Clint, Debbie, people who came and went, and Suzie who they never saw again. The music is equally good; dramatic guitar and strings, and a lone trumpet freaking out at the end.

Darlinghurst Nights

The picture shows Darlinghurst,a suburb of Sydney, at the start of the twentieth century.

Go Between

The Go-Betweens were an Australian group formed in the early eighties, inspired by punk, The Velvet Underground's Loaded album and Jonathan Richman. They moved to London thinking the streets would be paved with post-punk gold and at first released a single on Postcard (home of Aztec Camera and Orange Juice). Based around twin songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan they wrote some lovely, wistful, sardonic, imaginative songs releasing a slew of good albums. They ended with a nearly hit in 1988 with the single Streets Of Your Town (which Radio 1 only played on sunny days apparently) and the shiny 16 Lovers Lane album it came off. This song, Draining The Pool For You, sees Robert Forster (front in photo) imagining working for a decadent rock star as pool boy, becoming increasingly fed up with the decadent behaviour he sees. It's from their 1984 album Spring Hill Fair. I was introduced to The Go-Betweens by an ex, who had 16 Lovers Lane. I think it was the only positive thing I got out of it.

06 Draining the Pool for You.wma#2#2