From the vaults, here's the interview I conducted with the Go-Betweens in London for Melody Maker in 1983....
The Go-Betweens: Mysteries
of Exile
Lynden Barber, Melody
Maker, 1 October 1983
The Go-Betweens' country of origin has been of crucial importance in
forging their identity. Unlike many groups in this country, they still maintain
an admirable idealism — an uncompromising belief in their music and a distaste
for the manipulative moguls operating inside the major record corporations.
They don't like Britain much, they're here briefly because their record company
is Rough Trade. It has faults, but they feel it's been about the best option on
offer.
"A lot of it comes from our backgrounds," Drummer Lindy
Morrison launches into her explanations without a single pause. "In '77
and '78 and '79 we were constantly being challenged by the really conservative
system we lived in, where hardly anyone had any faith in what we were doing.
"Then we came over here and it was the same thing, we were seen as
quirky and strange because we were Australian. Because everyone saw us as
'weird' or something, it just means we're not happy to join forces with people
who have always treated us as if we were 'the other side'. Why give in to them,
just because it's now fashionable to join forces with people you know don't
think the way you think? I'm still angry with those people who were in
positions of power to put our music out but never did, and always treated us as
a silly group of amateurs."
THE MISTS of independence hang heavily about the Go-Betweens — they seem
less of a "rock'n'roll group" than a small itinerant artistic
community, a close-knit group of friends who define themselves in terms of
their separation from the music around them.
The title Before Hollywood, the front cover shot of
Morrison, Grant McLennan and Robert Forster (a fourth member, Robert Vickers,
has since joined) in an antique shop, their unfashionable American influences
and their spectral, evocative lyrics add to the feeling of distance and stark
individuality.
Here is a group who have detached themselves from their home country,
who flaunt imagery associated with the past, whose songs are redolent of travel
and a strong sense of place, of childhood and remembered thoughts and feelings.
"We would have been happy in the 18th Century: I would have been
anyway, I could quite forget about the 20th," says Grant when I suggest
the Go-Betweens are a group out-of-place and out-of-time.
Lindy immediately leaps in: "If you look at our histories we're not
out of time, out of place, we are exactly right at this moment. And that goes
right from the time when punk hit me, when I was playing drums in an acoustic
band and it was very easy to go onto electric instruments, and at that time
girls were being given the big push. And I ran into these two, brought up on
American films and Dylan and mid-Seventies punk from America. And we all meet
up — we're the only people in this town (Brisbane) who are ambitious musically,
and we wanna get out of that town. And we did it all in the right time, and I
still think we represent the right exact moment in time.
"When Geoff (Travis) called us into his office on Saturday to give
us a lecture on how we were losing Rough Trade money because we hadn't had a
hit he said, 'We know that fashion and history turns about and it's just a
matter of waiting for it.' Well perhaps that's the case."
Adds Grant: "We're doing something new and something very
emotional, and we're experimenting. It's just a matter of the focus. I do think
we're right at the centre, and eventually all the other dreck that's around
will be just washed away."
One of the group's two writers — he and Robert Forster work separately —
Grant McLennan exudes a sense of purpose and firmness of tone that isn't in any
way diminished by the quietness of his voice.
When asked if they consider themselves to be a "pop group"
McLennan replies: "I think we are a pop group, but we're the most unusual
pop group there's ever been. Although we work with melody, we sometimes work
against it, and that's like one of the cardinal sins of pop music."
He lists some of the characteristics that exemplify their strangeness —
their unusual rhythms ('Cattle and Cane' boasts a tricky but effective eleven
beat time signature), their sparseness and lack of decoration, their words and
subject material, their relative ages, the way they play, the way they look,
the fact they're from Australia.
Another of their special qualities is their subtlety and consequently
lack of immediacy — many of their songs fail to make an initial impact, but
germinate and slowly flourish with the movement of plants.
"People often mistake subtlety or reticence for naivety or
wimpiness," says Grant. "If people do that then it's quite pathetic.
You just can't have those two qualities if you want to be in the charts, so
that's our dilemma..."
The Go-Betweens exhibit a gentleness of touch and sensitivity of
approach that is unforced and quite natural. There's a femininity about the band,
something Lindy takes as a great compliment.
"I think that's true, I think the boys in the band have allowed the
feminine side of their nature to show and probably reacted strongly against the
macho elements inherent in the Australian male.
"Also, most men born post-53 have been allowed to be more feminine,
I think, if they're conscious of the world. I always say I don't trust anyone
born before 1953 anyway!"
LIKE AMERICA, Australia is a country of immigrants, where the mythology
of the pioneers is deeply ingrained in the national consciousness. Perhaps it's
this that sometimes gives the group a strangely individual American resonance.
While 'Cattle And Cane' is exclusively Australian, containing references to the
fields of cane and timber houses of Queensland, a song like 'Two Step's Step
Out' is more ambiguously located, with lines like "the steamer's
left" and "sold my horse". Certainly part of their American-ness
is due to their fascination for American literature, films and music. Lindy
can't quite see it though.
"Because I know these two so well, whenever anyone makes out
American influences, whatever they write, their music seems so uniquely their
own that I can't see that influence any more. I might have when I first joined
the band, mainly because they shoved Modern Lovers and Tom Verlaine and Bob
Dylan down my neck for the first year I was in the band, that was all I was
allowed to listen to.
"I see them as a direct reaction against being from Australia, so that
makes them Australian artists. There are writers like them, like Patrick White
and David Ireland, they're the same people who fought against everything that
is male and aggressive and arrogant in the Australian white person. To talk
about influences from America is irrelevant for me."
As the interview draws to a close Lindy reveals they're thinking of
asking John Cale to produce their next album; that is, if they ever get it
recorded, since Rough Trade haven't enough money to pay for it.
The Go-Betweens may end up signing with a major company because the only
other option will be no more records at all. Somehow I can't see them
compromising their attitudes or music one iota if they do sign. And I think we
should drink to that.
© Lynden Barber, 1983
RoseNman! RoseNman! (with two ens)
ReplyDeleteHe was a very nice person. I'm saddened to hear of his passing.
Corrected. My error, not Michael's
ReplyDelete