There may come a time when the ghost of Grant McLennan does not sit at his side, but for now Robert Forster is keeping him right here. "This is a line in the sand, but I'm not looking for a cut-off," he says of Grant & I, his touching memoir of a 30-year friendship and artistic collaboration. "I can have Grant in my life right until the end. I don't want to deny that."
It is, astonishingly, a decade since McLennan died in his home in Brisbane one Saturday afternoon, just hours before a big party he was due to host. He was 48, unmarried but in a new relationship, living, as he had most of his adult life, in a share house.
When Forster turned up to that party, he was met with the sight of an ambulance in the driveway and, from McLennan's girlfriend Emma, the chilling words "My baby's gone".
Officially, McLennan died of a massive heart attack; unofficially, there were rumours about his drinking, his drug use, various health issues. Forster doesn't really go there in his book, and over lunch at Garden State Hotel in Flinders Lane, I grill him about why. But we'll get to that later.
He and McLennan were the songwriting heartbeat of the band, which was born in 1977 out of an intense friendship and a shared love of European art cinema. They recorded half a dozen albums before splitting up in 1989, and three more after reforming in 2000, without drummer Lindy Morrison, who had been there from the beginning, and violinist and backing vocalist Amanda Brown, who joined two albums in.
"Nine albums," Forster says, a little dreamily. "It's a pretty full story. It's not like Joy Division, where there's two albums and a lot of what-ifs. It's a body of work."
Still, there's a slight sense of unfinished business. Loved as they were by indie music fans and critics, the Go-Betweens never had the chart success they craved and felt they deserved. Streets of Your Town came closest, but the top 40 remained barely visited, the top 10 a fabled land never glimpsed.
"Right till the end we thought we were fully capable of breaking out and becoming really popular in our 50s and 60s," he says. "It was still like, 'This could go anywhere', and that was right up until the day he died. There was still potential. We were still rising."
He knows that's funny. But he also knows they had something special. "He was the smartest person I ever knew, the most brilliant person I ever worked with. I'll never find someone like him again."
"It's great to meet that person at 18 or 19 – to be lonely boys searching in Brisbane, out in the desert, to meet someone at that age who says, 'I'm not going to be a schoolteacher; I'm going to go to New York, I'm going to walk down the streets of Paris, of Rome, I've got the history of cinema in my head'."
Forster is a gifted but idiosyncratic writer, as anyone who has listened to his music – which includes eight solo albums since 1990 – or read the reviews he wrote for The Monthly between 2005 and 2013 will know. He paints a detailed portrait of life in a band – he says Mark Seymour's almost obsessive-compulsive book Thirteen Tonne Theory was a big influence – but for all the accumulation of detail, McLennan remains a slightly elusive character.
It strikes me, I suggest tentatively, that despite being so close for so many years, your best friend remained slightly unknowable to you.
"That's fair," he says. "I could visit him from 11am to 4pm, we'd be working on songs, writing, chatting, and I'd leave and there's total enthusiasm. Then I'd go to his place the next morning and it would be as if he hadn't seen me for six months. It was back to zero every time."
McLennan came from north Queensland, via boarding school. He captured the dislocation and yearning of his childhood in Cattle and Cane, an early song that is not just one of his best but one of the finest in all Australian pop music. In Forster's view, he never stopped being that 11-year-old sent away to board in the big city, retreating into his tightly ordered space – his neat bed, his records, his books – as a way of keeping a frightening world at bay.
Do you think that was his tragedy, that he was never able to break that habit of isolation and let the world in?
"Yes, that's his tragedy," he says. "He was a lone and lonely person at times. He had very little back-up. That doesn't really matter in your 20s – you're flying, you don't need anyone, you're going on your own energy, your health is good, these are your breakthrough years. But in your 30s or 40s you might need back-up, or a place to go to, or resources inside you that are going to help with the shit life is going to throw at you. He didn't have that."
Forster got married, had children – his 18-year-old son Louis is in a three-piece band called the Goon Sax, with a female drummer, just like the Go-Betweens' first line-up – and he and his German wife moved back to Brisbane and bought the cheapest house they could find. McLennan, on the other hand, "right to the end was living in circumstances that were exactly the same as when I met him at 18".
Planning for the future was a foreign concept to him. "If you gave him $100 and said, 'OK this has got to last you a day or two', he'd go to an oyster bar, order a dozen oysters and a bottle of champagne, and sit there reading by himself. He'd go hungry the next day but he'd have been perfectly happy."
As it happens, Forster has ordered a dozen Coffin Bay oysters for lunch. And because he's started to tuck in before the photographer arrives, he orders another half dozen so the plate will be full for the shot. "Great oysters," he says. "Freshly shucked."
That's his entire meal. Valiantly, I soldier on long after he's finished with a wagyu steak with burnt beet salad. It's delicious.
Forster says the oysters remind him of McLennan, but there will be no champagne today. He doesn't drink, and hasn't since the day he was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 1990.
He's clear now – the first of two brutal rounds of Interferon treatment failed, before the second one took – but he lives with the prospect of a shortened lifespan due to liver failure. Drinking simply isn't worth the risk.
Forster writes in the book about his heroin use, because that's how he got sick. But McLennan's indulgences are off-limits. Some have taken that as a failing, a shirking of the truth, but Forster thinks of it merely as doing the right thing. In too many rock biographies, such tales are used as payback, and that wasn't ever on his agenda.
"I gave myself very few guidelines or rules when I went into writing the book, but one of them was that I was going to write about no one's drug experience but my own," he says. If not for having to deal with the hep C issue, he says, "I wouldn't have written about my own drug use in the '80s because it really didn't affect anything – there was no heroin in the recording studio, or on the road.
"For me it was an occasional thing, almost a social thing. I wasn't a sort of junkie who, as soon as I got in a city, needed a connection."
In terms of their relationship, writing about the hep C mattered because it was why he stopped drinking, and alcohol had been an important part of their lives.
"After shows, after a day of recording, I didn't go to the pub any more. I went to bed. And Grant was the one going out till 3 or 4am every night. A lot of things get said at midnight after you've had a bottle and a half of wine that don't get said over a cup of tea at 2 in the afternoon. That didn't happen any more, and that changed the dynamic. Our friendship was strong but a crucial thing was gone and I think Grant missed that."
In the end, Forster says, alcohol wasn't good for McLennan either. "It made him unhappy," he says. "It exacerbates depression."
Was he an alcoholic?
"If he wasn't he was very close." Pause. "I'd have to say yes."
But if there was a tragic aspect to Grant McLennan, that's not really the focus of Grant & I. Rather, it's the friend who, Forster says, "opened up the world for me", and whose absence he feels so keenly.
"We went through so much together," he says. "We saw so much together. And now I'm the only witness."
The Bill Please
Garden State Hotel, 101 Flinders Lane, city. 8396 5777. 11am-1am, seven days a week.
Grant & I is out now through Penguin. Robert Forster plays songs from his latest album, Songs to Play, and more at the Gasometer Hotel, Collingwood, on November 17, the Newham Mechanics Institute on November 18 and the Factory Theatre Marrickville on December 1. Details: robertforster.net
Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin