Love Goes On!

It's hard to reconcile the image of two young friends in late-'70s suburban Brisbane trying valiantly to unlock the magic of the music that captivated them amidst the oppressive heat and even harsher socio-political environment of the time, with their eventual band The Go-Betweens, whose urbane and literate music made them global cult figures, revered for (in their own words) “that striped sunlight sound” which became so distinctive throughout their long and decorated career.

Of course, history tells us that the bond forged by those two friends and confidants – Robert Forster and Grant McLennan – all those years ago was cruelly ripped asunder when the latter passed suddenly in 2006, just as the second phase of the band's career was threatening to take sail and perhaps even afford them the commercial success that had forever eluded them, even while they were being critically feted all over the world.

We'll never know where the ride would have ended had it not been for McLennan's tragic passing, but thankfully we still have The Go-Betweens' beautiful music. They left us with nine studio albums – six from their initial period of existence between 1977 and 1989, and three from the twilight phase that began with their reformation in 2000 – plus a swag of compilations and live efforts, and now they're adding their first completely career-spanning retrospective, Quiet Heart, to that canon.

“It was a long process – we actually started this around September last year,” the eternally debonair Forster recalls of the compilation's genesis. “A lot of work goes into it – you think, 'Oh well, we just have to write sixteen or seventeen songs on the back of an envelope and mail it off to EMI' – but various members of the band were involved in the selection process, plus there's a live album, so you've got reel-to-reel tapes from 1987 in Vienna... it takes time. There were no serious hitches or anything – it was quite a smooth process – but it just took time. So that's the physical side of things. On the emotional level it was great. Just listening to the albums and tracks and singles – it was a pleasure working on it.”

Other compilations have covered The Go-Betweens' career before, but never one mixing together songs from the disparate eras, and Forster stresses that they did their utmost to make Quiet Heart a release befitting the band's considerable legacy. “The packaging was important – I'm very happy with the way that it looks and it feels, and I'm very happy that [US Rolling Stone senior editor] David Fricke has written some amazing sleeve notes for it. A lot of attention has gone into it, so it's not just the record company picking sixteen tracks and a generic cover of a rose with a raindrop on it, and it's called The Go-Betweens Ultimate Collection in a plastic case, and that's it. I think there's a whole process behind it which has come very much from the band – it's a personal record. The band's hands are on this release.”

The inclusion of the bonus disc, Live In Vienna, is important from Forster's perspective not just as a document of The Go-Betweens in the live realm but also as a complementary device to help get a more rounded handle on the band's career.

“Quiet Heart is obviously studio cuts, and there's a lot of attention to detail, which is fantastic, but what I love is having something sitting beside it, which is just the band on fire and wild in Vienna one night in 1987, where you just get twelve tracks in an hour. So [on one hand] you get eighteen tracks culled from almost 25 years of recording in various studios in different countries, and then you get this very kinetic livewire night of mayhem in Vienna, so it's a balance. The band's this – which is the studio – but live the band was also that. Plus it gives us a chance to put in tracks like The Wrong Road, [The House That] Jack Kerouac [Built] and The Clarke Sisters – tracks that we would have had to fight to get onto Quiet Heart.”

In recent times, as well as continuing his solo career and making promising excursions as a producer, Forster has forged a name as an astute rock critic, writing for The Monthly and even releasing an incisive collection of his music criticism, The Ten Rules Of Rock And Roll. Did he glean any significant insight about his own band when poring over its history for Quiet Heart? “Oh, tons! When I was listening to it one thing that sticks in my mind which has come to me about the band – and this is just a random thought from over the last month – was how there was an unorthodoxy built into the band right from the start, and I don't think we ever deviated much from that. Grant wasn't a musician – I taught Grant to play the bass, and he was like nineteen and had never been in a band before – so it sort of starts like that, it starts with friends and one friend teaching the other. The Go-Betweens are not five guys meeting and starting a band, who had met each other around practice rooms and had been in gigging bands and pulled advertisements off rehearsal room walls. The band is quite unusual from the start, and then Lindy [Morrison] joins – a woman drummer, she was already in her late-twenties by that time and had already had a number of careers – so that's another unpredictable choice coming into the band. And it just goes on from there – it was just different right from the word go with The Go-Betweens. It's not a normal career at the start, and we pretty much follow that all the way through.”

Forster is justifiably proud of The Go-Betweens' legacy, and is hopeful that the music that he and his bandmates made will resonate through the ages.

“It does and I think it will. I think the work is too good, and I think we've done enough of it – we did nine albums, there's depth of catalogue there. I still think that The Go-Betweens are criminally underknown, and maybe with this filtering process the band will become potentially in fifteen years far bigger than they are at the moment. There is that chance. But one thing that I see – and I'm proud to see – is that I read reviews from around the world of other bands, and I see The Go-Betweens used as a reference point. I find it quite extraordinary, if only because I know how I felt – and still feel, but especially when I was younger – about bands that I loved, and wanted The Go-Betweens to sound like. That the way I felt about Talking Heads in 1977 might be the way that someone feels about The Go-Betweens in 2012 is very gratifying and an amazing thought to me.”

Robert Forster will play the following shows:

Tuesday 23 October - Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane QLD
Wednesday 24 October - Brisbane Powerhouse, Brisbane QLD
Friday 26 October - Thornbury Theatre, Thornbury VIC
Saturday 27 October - Theatre Royal, Castlemaine VIC
Sunday 28 October - Caravan Music Club, Oakleigh VIC
Friday 9 November - The Vanguard, Newtown NSW
Saturday 10 November - The Vanguard, Newtown NSW