'I Left With An Album': Robert Forster’s Ten-Year Splendour Bender

Steve Bell

Legendary Aussie songsmith Robert Forster spins a decade-long global tale of chance meetings, foreign flair and inner-world building which culminated in his solo masterpiece, ‘Strawberries’.

Robert Forster(Credit: Stephen Booth)

Robert Forster

It’s a long, long distance between Australia and Scandinavia, so the fact that iconic singer-songwriter Robert Forster is flying three musicians from Sweden to back him on the national tour behind his recent ninth album Strawberries – aside from the logistical challenges also not an inexpensive undertaking – speaks volumes of the rapport that he’s built with his new bandmates.

It’s the same trio that backed Forster while recording Strawberries in Stockholm in late-2024, the whole affair orchestrated by Peter Morén – best known as one-third of indie rock trio Peter Bjorn And John – who made a strong connection with The Go-Betweens’ co-founder following a chance backstage meeting at the 2016 instalment of the Splendour In The Grass festival.

“I met [Peter] at Splendour in 2016,” the singer recalls. “I was very aware of – and liked – Peter Bjorn And John and I had a couple of their records, and Peter was into The Go-Betweens and what I do.

“We just met there and chatted, he’s a lovely guy. Then he emailed me a short time after and he just said, ‘If you're ever coming over to Scandinavia or over to Europe, do you want to do a week of shows? I’ve got a booking agent who could get us some shows and I could put together a band and we could rehearse in Stockholm’, and it just sounded great.

“So I went over a year later – I was busy doing other things – so it started in 2017,” he adds. “And bang, from the first rehearsal, the first show, it was obvious that the connection with Peter and the two other musicians was special to me. It just worked and it was just really fun and they were great.

“And so it's just sort of this thing that just sort of came about where every couple of years we'd play, or Jonas [Thurell] and Magnus [Olsson] – the bass player and drummer – would play with me, with my wife Karin [Bäumler] and Scott Bromley from The John Steel Singers, when we did the Inferno tour in Europe in 2019.

“Anyway, so it just was always in my mind I want to record an album one day with these guys, because they said we can get musicians in Stockholm, and that they can organise things so I didn't have to worry about it, and I trusted them.

“And it's the same with them coming out for the tour, it was, like, ‘I want to tour Australia with this band!’ I don't want to go out and do an acoustic tour of Strawberries – as much as that would work, and be good, and be great – but I just wanted it to be with the band, just like I wanted the album to be with the band. And so both of them have come true, which is wonderful.”

The eight-track album that Forster and his new Swedish mates crafted – his ninth solo album, to go with the nine he made with The Go-Betweens over their journey – has been racking up serious acclaim, such as UK bible Mojo’s five-star review calling it “perhaps the most uncomplicated and joyous of them all” (high praise indeed when discussing such a lauded canon).

The songs were pretty much ready to go when Forster landed in Stockholm for his three-week foray, the singer prepped and ready to take his new team through his road-tested recording routine.

“We just did it all in a week of rehearsing, a week of recording, a week of mixing, and I left with an album,” he beams. “It was really a wonderful experience. I really love the album, I really do.

“I’d sent them a demo, and they were very good at working out their parts and coming up with things and learning, so when I arrived we could just go straight into the practice room and start playing the songs. I had two days with Peter right at the start where I went over to his apartment and we just played through everything, like the whole eight songs, just sort of so he and I were on the same page.

“It's the way that Grant [McLennan] and I used to work in The Go-Betweens too, although a shortened version. It’s just I like to play with the other guitar player first so the two guitars are already ready and there's someone else that knows all the songs in the practice room with me. I was the same with Grant and a lot of other people like David McCormack that I've worked with through the years – that's what I like to do.”

Forster has recorded in many exotic locales over the course his near-50-year career – including, but not limited to, the UK, rural France, Berlin, and the Pacific Northwest – but even he’s not sure if the physical locale of his labours influences the finished product in any way.

“I don't know,” he ponders. “I mean, obviously, you're working in a particular studio and you're working with Swedish musicians, different musicians, so it has to. But I just like going into another town with songs, it’s a romantic idea with me. I do think some of the location leaks onto the record, even if only in my head. If I'm believing it is, then that's good.

“I've done it on a number of occasions and I always enjoy it. And there's a part of me that's a bit of a tourist – you know, I’m in Brisbane all of the time and I've recorded albums in Brisbane, but it's nice to just sort of be doing it somewhere else and walking down a different street and the weather's different… I find that really invigorating.”

As conversation turns to the relaxed and upbeat vibe that permeates much of Strawberries, it becomes apparent that – as Forster alluded to – even if geography only plays a passing role in a song’s creation, who you’re making the music with can have a far more pronounced impact.

"I think the guys can take the songs to that conclusion, that aesthetic,” Forster offers of the album’s relatively playful mood. “I’m about to talk clichés about Swedish musicians, but they're very pop-orientated, they're very detail-orientated. They're very, very competent. But I think what works with us is that they've got all those qualities, but my material can be quite varied and wild.

“And somehow they can sort of go with the curves of what I'm doing, and they're very on the money. And so it's just sort of the coming together of my songwriting and their musicianship that really works.

“And live it’s incredible, because of what they do for those songs. We toured in Europe and Ireland and the UK last September and October for three weeks and showed what they can do – and this goes right back to when we started in 2017 – and what they do with those songs from Strawberries, they can do with solo songs of mine or Go-Betweens songs. They give it the same sort of feel and flair, and that's what's really great.”

Forster seems totally cognisant of how random it is that he’s forged such a strong connection with people from such a disparate musical world, all courtesy of one sliding doors backstage interaction.

“It’s been so rewarding, and just the story of it all coming out of Splendour is amazing,” he smiles. “Peter just invited me into his world, and he just picked these two musicians because he knew they’d work. There’s a lot of players that he knows, Stockholm is much like Brisbane in that it's a really firm scene of people, and most people know each other. There's a lot of interchanges between all the bands, shared lineages.

“Brisbane's so far away, and sort of geographically isolated in a way, that the people in the sort of punk bands know the people that are doing the more poppy stuff, and know the people doing the more experimental stuff and the people doing the more dance stuff. Everyone sort of knows each other.

“And it's the same in Stockholm. They all have been around Peter and they all came through when they were young – really young – in the late-‘90s, when they were late-teenagers or getting into their 20s and their first serious bands. So they sort of know a lot of other players around town – the people running the studios and practice spaces – they’ve just got it all down, which is really great.

“I have a real sense of discovery when I'm there in Stockholm, just being with them and hanging out and the people you meet. There’s a lot of other characters that you get to meet there, and it's really great. It really plugs you into the city.

“They’re taking you everywhere and you're walking through the streets, or you're in practice rooms, you're in the studio, whatever, or you go to eat somewhere, and they know it all backwards. So you're off the tourist track, and you're just sort of experiencing the city in a little bit of a deeper way.”

While Forster’s previous solo album The Candle And The Flame (2023) was an intensely personal affair – dealing as it was with the fallout of Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent successful treatment – Strawberries is written at more of a remove, containing unrelated vignettes featuring fictional characters battling the ups and downs of modern day life.

Such matters are seldom black-and-white – songs from Strawberries such as Such A Shame and the title track seem too detail-heavy and authentic not to have real-life origins – yet the new album is clearly a less personal affair than its predecessor. Whether it was a straight-up reaction to that previous piece, it’s hard to say.

“It could have been,” Forster admits. “It could have been a kick-off, because it took me a long time to work out anything that I wanted to say, because we were going through such a thing here at home with the diagnosis and the amount of time that health issues took up in our family and just the emotional cost and everything.

“So I didn't even think of really songwriting, there wasn't space. It took me a while to sort of come back to how I was going to do it, especially with the lyrics. With the music I knew that would be an onward journey, but lyrically, what am I going to say?

“And it just sort of started with a couple of songs – All Of The Time was a really early one where I just started to come up with this sort of sideways thing, and then I just started to notice that I was writing these vignettes, as you call them, and it just became a lot more narrative-based, about other people.

“But then I found this wonderful thing I could channel feelings or say things through these other people that were close to how I thought or felt.

“The songs all came together in a really productive songwriting period in late-’22, ’23, early-’24 – there was about 18 months there where I wrote about six songs, which is more songs than I've written that I like in a short period of time than, oh God, like 20 years or something? 30 years? I don’t know.”

The two-year gap between the two albums is indeed the quickest he’s followed up a solo album since his early excursions in the mid-‘90s.

“But it was strange with The Candle And The Flame, we sort of had it finished but it didn't come out for almost a year because of just timing and stuff with the record company,” he puzzles, “so there's actually a bigger gap between The Candle And The Flame and Strawberries than it seems.

“But it was a real burst of songwriting, and I just suddenly realised that I had the album written. These eight songs just really welded together. And I was actually thinking of recording a year later, but I got in contact right at the start of ’25 with the guys in Stockholm and just said, ‘Look, I'm ready, do you want to do it in September?’ And they went, ‘Yep, we can all free up a couple of weeks’, and so it happened.”

Forster’s realisation that he can use characters to express his own emotions seems analogous to his recent first foray into the fiction realms with excellent debut novel Songwriters On The Run (2026).

Long a respected music journalist due to his award-winning long-form writing for The Monthly – which he parlayed into literary collection The 10 Rules Of Rock And Roll: Collected Music Writings 2005-2009 (2009) and his memoir Grant And I: Inside And Outside The Go-Betweens (2016) – Songwriters On The Run is also clearly imbued with, and given such potency by, Forster’s own hard-earned life experience.

“There is a clear connection,” he offers. “They're both the same, and I can see that the biggest comparison between the songs on Strawberries and Songwriters On The Run is just the sort of mixture that goes into what I'm saying, which is basically stuff that's close to me, and then there's stuff that I've seen – you know, it's not been me in the middle of an event, but I’ve been there to witness it.

“Say in rock’n’roll, I've seen bands, I've seen venues, or I've seen other groups or whatever and I'm obviously not in them, but I know what's going on – you get a lot of material that way. And then there's stuff that's just unknown that I just make up. So those three things I swirl around in my songwriting and I swirl them around in the book, I think.

“Because I think there’s times that I’ve been really autobiographical, but I think you can wear people out with that. I think it can become so ‘I, me, me, me’ orientated that you just start to become oppressive in a way, so I try to create a world.

“That's what I'm doing is creating a world, and I can do it in songs, and I've now discovered that I can do it in fiction.”

Strangely, Songwriters On The Run began its life as a Forster solo song, a fictional narrative that refused to stop playing out in his mind long after the track had already been committed to tape.

“That wasn’t meant to happen,” he marvels. “I wrote the song in 2009 and it didn't come out until 2015 with an album called Songs To Play that I did up at Mount Nebo. There are two songs I've written in my career – the other one's [the title track to 1990 solo debut] Danger In The Past, and then there's this one, and I've written about 250 songs I'd imagine – but it wouldn’t let me go. From 2009 until 2015 I thought a lot about this song, and I basically concocted the book in my head.

“It was like a mind puzzle. It was, like, ‘Why are they in jail? Why are they trying to get out of jail? Where are they running to?’ I wrote the three verses of the song and I thought it was done forever, but then it just started to percolate.

“And I just started to think over the years, you know, well it couldn't happen in a big town, maybe they were in a small town and local cops bust them and that's why they've got to go all that distance, why they're on the run because they've got to run not from Chermside over to Indooroopilly – there's not really a book in that – it’s from Rocky and they're going down to Melbourne.

“And then maybe their managers had something to do with it? It just started to go all through my mind, and then when I wanted to write a book, which was after Grant & I came out, I set myself two months at the start of 2017 and I went, ‘I'm going to try and write a story’. At first I had a couple of ideas that were more literary, and then I thought of this song.

“It’s like I've got this really full-on plot in my head I've been thinking about for years, and I could get it going. I could make that, I could write it. Just telling this crazy story, but the song sparked it. It's all off the song.”

Has Forster had the chance to reflect on the current equilibrium in his career, having now released as many solo albums as he made during his lauded stint guiding The Go-Betweens?

“Yeah, I think about that a lot,” he concedes. “I really see the symmetry in that. And I think over a career that's gone so far, I don't think that's too much work. I quite like the fact that it's not 25 albums deep or something. I mean, some artists you look at their Discogs and it just goes on forever, which is great, but I always wanted it sort of contained. I like the fact that it's not too many albums.

“I never saw any of this coming, you know, like Grant's passing or what I was going to do as a solo artist. All of it's just enfolded right in front of my eyes – I never even thought I’d be a solo artist! I never thought I'd be a novelist back in my 20s and 30s either, so it’s just happened before my eyes.

“But I'm very, very happy with the way it's gone and it's going.”

Tickets to Robert Forster’s upcoming Australian tour are on sale now.