In 1975 Forster became one of the first members of his family to attend university. He had excelled academically and was initially accepted into the University of Queensland’s law school before settling on arts, much to his family’s chagrin.
Robert Forster: I was 17, which I think is miles too young. I probably knew somewhere in my gut that I never wanted to work in a normal job, but that was hard to articulate at the time, or even understand. So I just went and did an arts degree basically to buy time.
Grant McLennan was born in Rockhampton, a cattle town in central Queensland. His father died when he was four, and the family subsequently relocated to Cairns in the state’s far north. At the age of 12 McLennan was sent to Brisbane as a boarder at the Anglican Church Grammar School. Growing up in the country, in a climate hotter and even more humid than Brisbane, meant that McLennan viewed the city with greater charity than many of the locals.
Grant McLennan: As a kid I remember being very impressed by Brisbane. It meant the Gabba, because I was interested in sport at school. It meant bookshops; it meant anything that Cairns wasn’t, [because] Cairns just seemed so hot and boring to me at that stage. And very racist. There were definitely parts of north Queensland where there were black pubs and white pubs. There were even pubs that were black on one side and white on the other.
Despite their mutual love of cricket, both Forster and McLennan had gravitated to literature and the arts from their teenage years. Forster had picked up the guitar in his final school years and begun writing poetry. What transpired in the next few years could have been a classic study of wasted potential, as the former high achiever struggled to reconcile his burgeoning interests with both his parents and his own expectations. He never graduated.
McLennan was more sure-footed. Although he too came from a family comparatively untouched by art, his love of reading and, especially, film had been encouraged. Enrolling in an arts degree the same year as Forster, McLennan pursued journalism and drama as majors. It was during drama classes that the future creative partners in the Go-Betweens met in their second year.
Grant McLennan: Drama courses were split into two classes, and at the end of semester each class put on a play. My class did Hamlet, and I played Polonius. And Robert’s class did The Rocky Horror Show, and he played the monster. Typecasting, I thought!
Tall and preternaturally handsome, Forster had the air of a 1940s Hollywood star. The active construction of a public persona was very much part of the developing Forster (and indeed the McLennan) aesthetic. David Bowie was at the peak of his fame; Lou Reed had undergone his post-Velvet Underground transformation. The songwriter who most captured Forster and McLennan’s imagination, however, was an even more compelling combination of the decadent and the poetic: the young Bob Dylan.
And the city that brought Bowie, Reed and Dylan together was New York, where the music scene was exploding. Figures such as Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell all held artistic pretensions that would take their work, and their reputations, beyond the narrow confines of rock & roll.
Grant McLennan: I noticed that Robert was carrying around records that I was interested in, and vice versa. He was reading NME and I was reading NME. We were both into New York Rocker, an awesome magazine at the time. The New York scene was a mixture of rock & rollers who wanted to be artists, and artists who wanted to be rock & rollers.
1975 was in some respects a watershed year for Brisbane’s first wave of musical talent. Six months prior to Triple Zed’s establishment in December, a tiny shop had opened in Rowes Arcade, off Adelaide Street in the city centre. Rocking Horse Records (closely followed by Discreet, in the bohemian oasis of Elizabeth Arcade) was Brisbane’s first import record store. Its timing was perfect: by the middle of the ’70s, pop music had reached a crossroads, about to shed the endless layers it had accumulated since the Beatles’ ultimate pop-as-art statement Sgt Pepper in 1967.
Rocking Horse swiftly became something of a meeting place (and an employer) of young musicians, and its range of magazines were certainly more important, at least in terms of local development, than the deluxe imported copies of Eagles and Jackson Browne albums cramming its racks. Its founder, Warwick Vere, still manages the store today.
Warwick Vere: At the time there was an enormous undersupply by the Australian record companies of what should have been available. Kids were reading things like Rolling Stone, which was a very good magazine back in those days – it had Hunter S Thompson, William Burroughs, people like that writing for it. There was lots of interesting stuff, and music reviews of stuff that just wasn’t available here locally.
Both Forster and McLennan were avid followers of NME’s Nick Kent, whose espousal of ‘the dark stuff’ was arguably as important to punk’s philosophical development as Lester Bangs. But no matter how difficult a place Brisbane may have been for many young people in the ’70s, the Go-Betweens were in no way a product of that darkness. Forster’s early musical memories were dominated not by the Beatles or the Stones – much less the Stooges and the MC5 – but by Donovan and early ’70s bubblegum. McLennan, for his part, was introduced to music chiefly through television and The Monkees.
The obvious bridge between these extremes was Jonathan Richman, whose band the Modern Lovers married a refreshingly positive lyrical sensibility with driving Velvets-inspired rock & roll. Songs like Modern World and Roadrunner were to have a profound influence on Forster’s early songwriting. By 1975, before he met McLennan, Forster had formed his first band, the Mosquitoes, followed by the Godots, a name that inspired the wry caption ‘the band everyone’s waiting for’. The literary overtones of the Godots were reinforced by Forster’s first notable original composition, Karen, a love song to a librarian:
She helps me find Hemingway
Helps me find Genet
Helps me find Brecht
Helps me find Chandler
Helps me find James Joyce, she always makes the right choice
As Go-Betweens biographer David Nichols has pointed out, Forster’s denial of his desire for any ‘Queen Street sex thing’ with the fictitious Karen makes two radical statements: first, the song is specifically located in Brisbane; and second, his interest is intellectual, not carnal (carnal knowledge still being very much a mystery at that point to the 18-year-old Forster1). The self-deprecation of another Forster original, Lee Remick, was even more striking: Forster’s juxtaposition of the film starlet’s aura with the lyric ‘I come from Brisbane, and I’m quite plain’ is probably the first explicit manifestation of the kind of place-specific irony that, many years later, was captured in the term Brisvegas.
Forster’s muse was too eccentric, and quite possibly too sexually ambiguous, for the series of would-be ‘musos’ he initially auditioned to join his band. As well as his own nascent original material, covers of songs by the early Beatles and stripped-down versions of disco classics like KC and the Sunshine Band’s Shake Your Booty – even Hot Chocolate’s Sexy Thing – reflected a camp sensibility totally alien to any self-respecting Deep Purple fan.2 If Forster were to develop, he would need to find someone more sympathetic to his vision.
Robert Forster: I just realised towards the end that I’d never find the musicians. We’d have guitarists come down, guys that would play in cover bands, and it never worked. So what I had to do was teach my best friend. That’s what Tom Verlaine did with Richard Hell, he taught him to play bass, and so I did the same thing.
Grant McLennan was a reluctant musician. Unlike Forster, he was committed to his studies and was sailing through university with distinction. His first love was film, and while working at the Schonell Theatre on campus, he also wrote reviews for the student newspaper, Semper. His ultimate plan was to attend film and television school, but on application was told to come back when he turned 21. After finishing his arts degree in the minimum three years, aged 19, he finally acquiesced to Forster’s repeated requests to start a ban
d. He had no previous musical experience.
The Go-Betweens – the name echoing LP Hartley’s classic novel – were one of many new bands on the Brisbane scene at the beginning of 1978. The Survivors, whose set consisted largely of full-throttle versions of ’60s pop classics by the early Who, Kinks and Small Faces, were already gigging. So too were the Leftovers, the most obvious group to pick up the punk baton (and its attendant attire) discarded by the Saints. Although poles apart stylistically, what the Go-Betweens shared with the Saints was a disdain for music as fashion statement.
Robert Forster: I think right from the start we could see that being in leather and chains was exactly not what punk was about. Punk was more the New York thing, where you could have hair down to here, like Joey Ramone. It’s variety; it’s individual expression; it’s diversity.
The group that provided the most immediate assistance to the Go-Betweens was the Numbers, soon to become the Riptides. Fronted by Mark ‘Cal’ Callaghan and featuring future Go-Between Robert Vickers on bass, the Numbers’ snappy surf-pop songs and winning sense of irony made them natural allies to Forster and McLennan, and it was at a Numbers show in early April 1978 that the Go-Betweens made their first public appearance, at Baroona Hall, just around the corner from the long-gone Club 76. Forster simply asked permission for the band to get up and perform two songs during a break following the Numbers’ support act (the delightfully named Ronnie Ribbitt and the Toadettes). Forster felt like a debutante.
Robert Forster: We played the two songs, and as soon as we got off stage, Mark Callaghan, Robert Vickers – we met them all, in five minutes . . . They immediately asked us to play a second show. On a personal level, I went from having very few friends to suddenly knowing 100 people. It was incredible, it was like a coming-out, like some sort of old-fashioned Victorian belle or something . . . Life suddenly had a purpose. It just flowered. And it flowered right from the start – right from us playing Lee Remick.
Baroona Hall had originally been secured as a venue by one John Reid in order to raise money for the Cane Toad Times, a local anarchist paper produced by various Triple Zed alumni, including Radio Times illustrators Matt Mawson and Damien Ledwich. The fact that the hall was owned by the Paddington branch of the Labor Party was an important consideration: by late 1977, punk gigs were being routinely targeted by police. Although barely a stone’s throw from the barracks on Petrie Terrace, Reid hoped that the hall’s status would afford the venue, and its patrons, a degree of political protection from further harassment.
John Reid: They’d been trying to have these punk dances in places like Hamilton Hall and Darra Hall, and police would descend upon them all the time. At Baroona we never had a phalanx of police invading the hall. They kept their patrols to the outside. Every other hall dance, the police would come in – I’m talking at least 30 – to shut it down.
Forster and McLennan were still minus a drummer. They had borrowed local author and part-time Toadette Gerard Lee for their first, unplanned show at Baroona Hall. The Survivors’ Bruce Anthon also played several early gigs with the band, and his consummate skills probably helped boost the credibility of Forster and McLennan, at that point still extremely limited musicians. But Anthon was committed to his own group.
What Forster and McLennan really wanted was a female drummer. As both freely admit, this had more to do with appearances than talent.
Robert Forster: Grant and I very much liked [Talking Heads’ bassist] Tina Weymouth, and we also liked a show called The Mod Squad, on TV, which had two guys and a girl. We just liked the chemistry. I think if Grant had have taken to playing drums, we would have had to get a girl on bass. It was like casting.
By this time Forster and McLennan were living together in an old Queenslander in Golding Street, Toowong, not far from the university. Shortly after the Go-Betweens’ debut, Grant McLennan wandered into a struggling record store located in a small arcade off the suburb’s main shopping precinct of Sherwood Road.
Damian Nelson: My father bought a record shop. And for some reason he looked at me and said, ‘Damian, you can manage this record shop’ . . . One day Grant McLennan came in and was searching through the records and started advising me about the records I should have, and the next day he came in and asked for a job. And I said OK. No job interviews or résumés! I’ve often said that if they held an Olympics for the world’s worst businessman, I would be the Mark Spitz of that Olympics.
Damian Nelson would become the Go-Betweens’ friend, driver and, within his limited means, financial benefactor. He baulks at the term manager – ‘I couldn’t manage a piss-up in a brewery’ – but that is in effect what he became when McLennan showed up at the store one evening with a bottle of wine and told him that the Go-Betweens were going to cut a single. The band had been in existence less than six months.
Registering the name the Able Label (again, its moniker a vehicle for the rather daggy caption, ‘If it’s ready, it’s Able’), the band was booked into Window Studios in May 1978, where (I’m) Stranded had been cut 18 months earlier. Like the Saints’ first effort, the creation of the first Able Label single was an almost totally DIY operation.
Damian Nelson: We got 700 of these singles back, then we got the labels for the A-side and the B-side. And we just sat around the table, sticking them on.
Eventually released in September, Lee Remick/Karen exposed a band still barely competent on their instruments: Forster chops through the chord changes, McLennan plunks away earnestly on bass behind him, and ring-in drummer Dennis Cantwell, of the Numbers, struggles to keep time with either of them. On the other hand, it captured perfectly the Go-Betweens’ brazen mixture of naivety and self-belief. The sleeve – which depicts Forster and McLennan alongside portraits of Dylan, Che Guevara and, naturally, Lee Remick herself – dedicates the record ‘to John Fogerty, Phil Ochs, Michael Cole, Natalie Wood, and that striped sunlight sound’.
As the Numbers’ bass player Robert Vickers packed a suitcase full of copies to tote around to record shops in Sydney and Melbourne (along with his own band’s debut effort, Sunset Strip, recorded in July), the Go-Betweens set about sending most of the remaining platters around the world, not only to journalists and record companies, but also to many of their idols, including Remick, the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and producer Kim Fowley.
The label that responded most enthusiastically (predictably, no local record companies were interested) was the British arm of America’s Beserkley Records, whose most famous previous signing was no less than Jonathan Richman.
The group had acquired their first real drummer. Cyprus-born Temucin (Tim) Mustafa was recruited shortly after the recording of Lee Remick, and he appears on the picture sleeve, although Dennis Cantwell is credited ‘for the beat’. (Earlier, one Lissa Ross had appeared as the band’s drummer in their first press article, but Forster claims she only ever practised with the group.3) Mustafa hadn’t played in a band before, but his skills were at least comparable to his new band-mates.
The Go-Betweens were looking to expand their sound even further. They had met Peter Milton Walsh, songwriter and guitarist for another new band, the Apartments, in Damian Nelson’s shop. A dapper, charismatic figure, Walsh was similarly besotted with Dylan and the New York scene. Moreover, he had just returned from England, where he had witnessed the British punk explosion first-hand: ‘It was phenomenally exciting to come back to Brisbane and think there was no reason why I couldn’t do it.’ He was also slightly older and, in every sense, more worldly than the Go-Betweens.
Robert Forster: He was very much a character. We were characters in the making, but he was more fully formed. He’d been overseas, he’d even been to Morocco, which to a couple of boys who’d never been out of Brisbane . . . He was flamboyant, like someone out of a novel, and we liked him. He was enormously funny, very quick-witted, very sharp-tongued.
Walsh’s impression of the young Go-Betweens validates Forster’s a
ppraisal entirely.
Peter Milton Walsh: They were wholesome, upbeat, sunny people. But everything was mediated for them, nothing was ever experienced, and that was reflected in the sort of songs that they wrote. They were masters of the vicarious!
Beserkley had offered the band a contract that proposed the reissue of both Lee Remick and Karen as two single A-sides, followed by an eight-album deal. Seduced, the band sent not only their signatures but also the master tapes of the single off to England. They were never seen again. Nelson, as green as his band, unfairly blames himself for the debacle.
Damian Nelson: I remember they sent over this huge contract. The guy [from Beserkley], the first time I heard his voice, I had this feeling of dread. But I honestly just felt so happy for Grant and Robert. We took it in to see a lawyer, and he went through it with us. ‘Yeah, it’s a standard contract.’ And they signed it . . . God, I was an idiot. The naivety, the absolute naivety.
Forster had visions of being booked into larger venues in London, and it was with this in mind that he approached Walsh to help fill out the band as a second guitarist. The shimmering sounds Walsh contributed to the two songs the band recorded for Beserkley in November 1978 – especially The Sound Of Rain – represented an enormous advance. But when Beserkley went bust only weeks later, the basis for his recruitment evaporated. Walsh was also starting to write excellent songs of his own and needed his own avenue to present them.
Robert Forster: Musically, it was too big a jump for us. And Walsh realised as soon as he wasn’t going to London with us that his playing guitar in the Go-Betweens just wasn’t going to work, so it just sort of fizzled out. And he went off and formed the Apartments, which was entirely the right thing to do.
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