Robert Forster Is Super Proud Of His Solo Catalogue - But It Still Takes A Lot Of Work

Robert Forster

Robert Forster’s newly minted seventh album Inferno brings things almost full circle to the early days of his solo career, after celebrated outfit The Go-Betweens, which he co-founded in Brisbane in the late ‘70s, disbanded in 1989.  

After six revered albums Forster had retired to Bavaria to lick his wounds alongside his future wife, so when time came for his inevitable debut solo statement it made sense to conduct those recording sessions close by in Berlin. 

To produce the project he enlisted fellow Aussie Mick Harvey – whose then-current band Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds were at that staged based in the German capital – and banged out the ensuing Danger In The Past in a quick 12-day burst, pulling together a band comprising a couple Bad Seeds, and assisted in the studio by another Australian expat, young engineer Victor Van Vugt.

"The fact that melodies and songs still come is now a real pleasure."

Now, not quite three decades later, Forster has returned to Berlin to reunite with Van Vugt – these days an in-demand producer with his own studio in the German capital – again putting together a new band for the occasion and wasting no time bashing the album into perfectly refined shape.

But while Inferno – a concise and focused batch of songs showcasing Forster’s unique, literary take on rock’n’roll – was recorded in Berlin, its songs have their genesis in Brisbane where they were stockpiled in the years following his previous solo effort, 2015’s Songs To Play.

“A few of them were started when I’d been travelling, but they were all essentially done here [in Brisbane],” the singer explains. “Which is one of the reasons that I also wanted to travel away from Brisbane to make the record, because I was very, very happy with my last album that I did here in Brisbane – I recorded it up at Mount Nebo with Jamie Trevaskis and I was enormously happy with that – but I’d written all of those songs here and I’d written [2016 autobiography] Grant & I here, and I just felt that I wanted to do something outside of Brisbane. I just wanted to take it out of the city, which is what I did.

“[Choosing Berlin] was purely because of Victor. He’s been there at his studio for about four years, before that he was in New York for about 15 years or something, and I hadn’t seen him for a long time.

“We’d sort of stayed vaguely in contact, and then a German edition of my book came out and I was in Berlin at a launch for it in a bookshop and Victor turned up! So it was lovely to see him, and that was the start of it all really.”

During the creative phase Forster wasn’t writing with a specific album in mind, rather just seeing where the individual songs would take him.

“That’s generally the way that I go,” he admits. “I don’t write quickly enough in a way – I’m grabbing, I’m not one of those songwriters who goes ‘I’ve got an album coming up, I’m going to go away somewhere for two months and write 20 songs.’ I don’t know how people do that – some people do it and are good, but I couldn’t do that. Those songs tend to have a real sort of ‘one batch’ type of feeling to them, where I write one or two or perhaps three songs a year, and I’ve done that since the early ‘80s.

“So I can’t really get on top of it all and go, ‘This is where I’m going’ and ‘I’m listening to this record so I’ve got this feeling I’m after’ – I’m writing over years. But the songs are all fairly consistent with each other: I’m working in a particular field, I know that.

“I’m surprised I’m still writing songs: I just thought with my limited guitar technique and my limited musical knowledge that I might have written myself out at 40 or 45, so the fact that melodies and songs still come is now a real pleasure. Because I enjoy songwriting – although it’s hard work, it’s rewarding.

“And you get to go to Berlin and record them and all those wonderful things – it’s not like I’m writing songs and they’re not being recorded and just going onto a shelf or something. It’s very satisfying that if I do write something good then it gets recorded. I have to work hard at it, but ultimately they just appear – it’s still something of a mystery to me.”

Forster’s solo career used to be considered an adjunct to his work with The Go-Betweens, but after seven albums it’s now a canon of great depth and substance in its own right: is he proud of the music he’s managed to accrue under his own name over the years?

“Look I am, I really am,” he admits. “The ‘90s albums apart, having done The Evangelist (2008) and Songs To Play this is sort of crowning it – it feels like I’ve done three really good records that I’m really, really happy with. I could almost tour just on those three albums – I could put together an amazing set taking my favourites, 18 or 20 songs, from those three albums.

“Now people are talking about reissuing the old solo albums on vinyl, which is something I want because I want to tour more over the next year, so I’m hoping to take my back catalogue out on the road and play and have those solo albums there.

“But it is, it is something of its own, and you can’t imagine how satisfying that is. Because everyone knows and holds The Go-Betweens in a certain amount of regard, and it’s good that I’m happy and I can sense the quality of what I’m doing as a solo artist: that’s a good feeling.”