go-betweens pop

the ballad of a mixtape, & twin layers of love

The following was originally posted in the Go-Betweens Appreciation Society Facebook group. I qualified at the top that while it was nominally a post about the band, it was more accurate to call it a post about the songs of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan – “as we all know, it’s fallacious to take Lindy out of the equation when conceptually discussing them.” “Lovely tribute,” commented Lindy. “I’m not hung up on not being mentioned in discussion about the songs. I love the songs. It’s [in] the sound recordings and live work that my contribution lies.”

The Go-Betweens’ music is a pair of crucial and contrasting things – elusive and intimate. The sound of their recordings, versus the one in their heads, was mainly dictated by the circumstances provided: which label, which budget, which producer, which year. Yet each is magic, and in a way no contemporary recording matches, because of the idiosyncratic force of the band’s emotion and vision, not to mention chemistry. The lyrics, pure punk poetry, are nearly never forthright (until Forster’s work after Warm Nights). Yet they communicate so much more, and are so much easier to connect with and be moved by, than the “literary” evasions of so many Dylan school graduates. As for the music, you can say it sounds like sunlight or love and be totally correct; it's the traditional way to say that the Go-Betweens really speak to you.

And though they’re an experience you can count on to unfold into an obsession, so that you grow to cherish even the one odd song out on every album (there is one odd song out on every album), their body of work is so diverse, and so consistently good, you're not likely to find a common gateway among its many fans. Though they are roughly categorizable as “rock”, and you can nudge them into a number of subgenres, the pop inflection that mars some of their material for some illuminates it for others. You have Before Hollywood and Liberty Belle people; you have Spring Hill Fair and 16 Lovers Lane people. (Tallulah people straddle the camps, while Send Me a Lullaby people need to be watched carefully.) But I fancy no single person immune to them.

I’ve written elsewhere that I had a somewhat indirect route into the band. I was born in 1987, and have cultivated the taste of someone four decades older. I was struck by the description in the infamous 2004 Rolling Stone Record Guide, but didn’t actually buy a CD by the band until I saw a notice (in Entertainment Weekly!) that Grant had passed. My Christgau fandom ensured that that first CD was Tallulah; in 2006, you could drive to a bookstore in Texas and leave with it. I found it generally appealing, but bookish, distant, and thin, and I couldn’t tell the two voices apart. I somehow found 16 Lovers Lane even less forthcoming. Why were the drums so faint on “Love Goes On”? Why was the hook so faint on “Streets of Your Town”? I foolishly put them away for a year.

I’m fully certain no fan shares my subsequent experience. Fascinated by songwriting duos (having been involved in one, and in fact the parallel compelled my first interest), in 2007 I bought the Intermission compilation on the sheer strength of the concept. I enjoyed Robert’s disc, which felt surprisingly rootsy. But from the ebullient, metallic opening burst of “Haven't I Been a Fool”, I found an itch being scratched. This led me to parsing and thrilling to the dichotomy between the two writers. This led to my locating the rapturous melodies barely concealed behind the cold ‘80s veil of the two CDs I’d purchased. This led me to downloading an MP3 of the Tell Tales interview to whet my appetite for CDs I couldn’t drive to the store for; I loved “Bachelor Kisses” and “Draining the Pool for You” before I'd heard more than thirty-second snatches of each. It led to my discovering that my favorite band is my favorite band.

Like McLennan, I have a soft spot for the prefab, and unabashedly obvious major-key chord progressions. But like Forster, or at least the pre-millennium Forster, I love the thorny, circuitous, and avant-garde. And of course, both men have a talent for each method; to reduce either to each is tin-eared. The one perfumed with the other is what makes this canon sing. But I begin with the former. That’s why, when it came time to make a mix for the red-headed library punk I spent most of my life loving, I called it Go-Betweens Pop. It’s a definitionally heretical object – and when providing a soundtrack for walks through crisp, still-sunny fall days, it could well be my favorite album of all time. However disastrously representative, it’s a dynamite experience.

1. Bachelor Kisses
2. You Tell Me
3. Easy Come Easy Go
4. Clouds
5. Girl in a Beret
6. Rock & Roll Friend (Warm Nights version)
7. Right Here
8. Draining the Pool for You
9. Haven't I Been a Fool
10. I'm Allright
11. Apology Accepted
12. Falling Star
13. Thought That I Was Over You

You see this crudely marked 2008 CD-R in the image atop this post. What amuses me is that I know the track listing would make most Go-Betweens diehards blanch. It blurs the lines between band and solo work, and it ignores Before Hollywood entirely. The fact I included a Jack Frost number but not “Cattle and Cane” feels like it should incur a fine. And it’s only thirteen songs, because while I loved about thirty by then, my criteria was a highly subjective “perfection”. (I had not heard any of the three later albums yet.) And the fact is, it worked. I spent more than a decade thereafter trying to share musical enthusiasms with that library punk, but this was the only one that hit, and it hit for life. Like me, she grew to love every note of the rest of their body of work.

There are a hundred ways to get inside (or around, or between) the Go-Betweens. The only wrong way is if you never find your point of entry – or never discover they exist.

The red-headed library punk and I now enjoy new loves, better suited to the people we’ve become. But last year, I asked her to weigh in on the band, and she nailed it:

“Off the cuff: well I always associate them with our 2007 reunion & falling back in love with you. So from this standpoint there's that bit of nostalgia about them. Especially ‘Bachelor Kisses’ and ‘Girl in a Beret’ (though I know that one is a solo Grant). Their sound is so atmospheric; sun streaks, and the wind blowing all around while driving with the windows down, and in between headphones in a softly lit room. ‘Clouds’ in particular gives me those feels. I've just always been drawn to their whole vibe. & I find the lyrics & sentiments true & relatable & poetic without being pretentious. They make me feel understood.” Play the mix below, and you may find you feel the same.