The Go-Betweens - what's it all about?

Ugh I know [weeps softly as quiet heart plays]

when push comes to shove, i'm most interested in the book.

i'm pretty annoyed that you have to buy redundant (for me) vinyl versions of the proper albums in order to get the CDs with the unreleased stuff.

i mean, i guess it makes commercial sense for them, so good on that, i guess. but no thanks.

xpost me too. plus i already have all of the 2cd sets.

yeah, i've bought most of their albums twice -- older 1-cd reissues, those 2-cd things. i'm not going to buy them a 3rd time. :(

To answer some of those questions - the book is great - beautifully done and informative. There are some discographical notes in the book about the source of the recordings, and there is more information within the booklets for each CD. Between them, the picture is clear. I've copied all the CD tracks to my computer for easy listening and put away the box, but because I AM AWESOME, I shall delineate the origins of the rare tracks for you here:

CD 1:
1) I Want To Be Today
- studio October, 1978 w/ Peter Walsh on guitar, recorded the same time as the "known" early version of Don't Let Him Come Back."

3) People Say
4) Don’t Let Him Come Back
5) Long Lonely Day
6) Day For Night
7) Love Wasn't Made For You And Me
8) Just Hang On
9) Summer’s Melting My Mind
10) Obsession With You
11) The Night
12) Rare Victory
13) Big Sleeping City
14) Beachcomber
15) The Missing One
16) I Am An Architect
17) 8 Pictures
18) The Green Light Don't Mean Go
19) Cold Flame (It Burns)
20) Help Or Something
21) Only Sinners Care
22) Lies
- all of the above are studio demos (more like decently recorded rehearsals, really) recorded by Gerry Teekman from May to October 1979.


CD 2:
1) Don’t Let Him Come Back
- recorded at the Glasgow College Of Technology, April, 1980 w/ Stephen Daly of Orange Juice on drums - this apparently live, but sounds like a rehearsal take - interesting, though it sounds like it was dubbed from cassette

6) It Took You A Week
- early studio version from Brisbane, May, 1981 w/ Lindy on drums

7) Day After Tomorrow (this is an early version of "Hold your Horses")
8) I Know Why
9) Circle You
10) I Need Two Heads
11) All About Strength
12) One Word
- all the above tracks recorded in the studio by Gerry Teekman, in June, 1981

13) Red Epaulettes
- great live track from Brisbane, 1981 engineered by Gerry Teekman - an otherwise missing classic.

CD 3: (live show - all 12 songs previously unreleased)
ACTUALLY, I take this back - "Distant Hands" is the same version as on the 2xCD "Before Hollywood" - but everything else unreleased. This is an *astonishing* live show - the Subway Sect-ish weirdness of the early stuff played with fire and energy. Crucial.

CD 4:
3) On My Block
4) Cattle And Cane
5) Hammer The Hammer
- recorded live to air for Swiss Radio - sound and performances are amazing. "Hammer The Hammer" particularly fine.

6) Man O' Sand To Girl O' Sea
- rejected studio single version

14) Part Company
- earlier studio version - great, with some interesting lyrical differences and a wee bit less polish

15) Bachelor Kisses
16) The Old Way Out
17) Unkind And Unwise
- early studio demos - brilliant, especially "Unkind And Unwise"

18) Just A King In Mirrors
19) Rare Breed
- these are the original 12" b-side versions, unreleased on CD until now JAKIM is way superior to the other version, IMO

Of the otherwise never-released-on-CD stuff, aside from the Swiss radio session (if you count that) and the two listed live tracks and the entirely live CD, there isn't anything "live" of the rare tracks, although a lot of CD #1 is kind of live-in-studio.

Hope this helps!

wonder if there's any chance in hell of this stuff being released in a slightly more affordable/less lavish format? pleeaassse?

as much as I love these guys I have no interest in owning this. The Ryan Maffei essay inside is first-rate though.

Crusty, that's exactly what I was looking for, thanks so much! The tracks you didn't list, there's no info for them?

(i think) 3 of the last few tracks on 'suicide note' are from a peel session

The tracks I don't list feature on the 2xCD reissues, the Lost Album or the Peel Sessions EP - what I list is the stuff that's not on CD anywhere else, ie, you can only get it here.

Grant's pretty gold in this lolzy Brisbane hometown interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfiOt6CIvEM

My favourite cities in the world - and this isn't one - have harbours....

haha, that is a good one...
still digging through the box set -- so much cool stuff. wonder if they'll do another pressing of it? perhaps in more affordable format? that would be cool.

I've had my eye on that boxset... and the rising ebay prices make me antsy to nab the one at my former place of employment that's still there. Though I can't justify another splurge.

https://scontent.fsnc1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/t31.0-0/p526x296/13724083_1141012472608806_6727107650706108692_o.jpg
Forster sez: Here in this post is the cover of my book 'Grant & I'. Seven years in the writing, to be released in Australia and New Zealand on Penguin/ Random House at the end of August. I hasten to add It is currently on prospective publishing house desks around the world, and I hope it will be taken up and available everywhere. The book has been a massive undertaking - to tell the story and learn how to tell it over 87,000 words. I have little idea how it will be received, as only a few people involved with its production have read it, and I am in the days before reviews appear and the opinion of friends around the world arrive. So I am nervous. Knowing though that I gave it my best and when I read some of its pages, I always want to read more. A good sign. I look forward to it being in shops and in people's hands and hearing reactions. My final word on it for now, is that it is a book about a friendship, and one that existed almost as much in the years when we weren't in the band, as when we were.

That's one for the Christmas stocking.

Look forward to reading that.

B-b-but why is there a picture of Gerard Depardieu on the cover?

That looks so great. I only just ordered Robert Forster's 10 Rules of Rock n Roll the other day.

The book looks just great. As for the big question posed by this thread, well, I have come to think that the Go-Betweens were pretty much what Pavement wanted to be, but with a romantic side Pavement never had. Post-punk with Guy Clark hanging around at the bar, if you will. If anything, Forster and McLennan were every bit the equal of lauded songwriters like Clark or Townes Van Zandt or any number of Nashville or Memphis tunesmiths. I don't own the box, but a friend of mine does, and I've heard the tracks (the remastering of Spring Hill Fair, which is my favorite album when Tallulah isn't, is superb. And the demos and live stuff are often stunning, with the version of "Part Company" particularly stunning. These guys were musical--the oddball meters and foreshortened licks were integrated structurally into song form that hits my ears as addictive as, say, Big Star's stuff, just way more skewed and modest and literary. And the box contains this live-with-John-Peel version of the Spring Hill track "Five Words" that may be the greatest thing the band ever did, or at least the one track you'd play to demonstrate how a literary band with seemingly little song smarts turned out to be songful as hell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4snhqQ9eP24

"Five Words" always reminds me a little bit of Seals and Crofts' "Diamond Girl."

They probably liked Seals and Crofts.

Yeah, the intro to "Part Company" is like Seals and Crofts play Television.

I'm definitely looking forward to reading that!

Review of Forster's memoir:

The heart of the book, though, is about a close friendship with someone who remained unknowable: a “naive boy” who kept a close watch on his inner life, only to pour it out in songs such as the revered Cattle and Cane and its companion, Dusty in Here. Both songs reference McLennan’s father, who died when he was six. Yet as Grant & I (and the band’s career) unfurls, McLennan recedes; as his friendship with Forster is attenuated to a few words or glances, it’s easy to lose sight of him.

And in this, there is an omission. The shadow of heroin hangs over this book, but we don’t know of it until Forster drops the bombshell of his own diagnosis with hepatitis C, a likely consequence of his own dabbling with the drug. It’s well known in rock circles that McLennan was a long-term user; Steve Kilbey’s book Something Quite Peculiar speaks bitterly of McLennan introducing him to opiates, and the journalist Clinton Walker has also written of his habit.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/australia-books-blog/2016/aug/29/grant-i-review-the-go-betweens-robert-forster-grant-mclennan-moving-definitive-portrait

ha, Lindy pops up the comments there ... knew of mclennan's heroin habits, didn't know of forster's ... seems it was really a big part of the aussie music scene in the 80s.

Thanks for a reminder that this book is coming out.

That photo there sure captures a divide -- the 'regular' McLennan, Forster going for the alien sculpted beauty look.

love goes on anyway

Lindy's comment is definitely the clearest I've seen regarding that whole legal tangle.

love how she wouldn't name them, just used "the songwriters"

yeah it's a bummer they still haven't really buried the hatchet (though maybe there's not outright animosity). though it was obviously mclennan/forster focused, it is impossible to imagine the bulk of the GB's best stuff w/o morrison.

Yeah, harsh, but she says no ill will.

still think "twin layers of lightning" (which i think is about forster/morrison's relationship) is one of the best/weirdest love songs.

On how many GBs tracks was Lindy replaced by a drum machine? "Bachelor Kisses"?

That early?

And what other pop star has written as well as Forster? Caetano Veloso? Scott Miller?

Johnny Mercer

xpost Do you mean prose?

In that case, Chico Buarque.

And what's-his-name, our own Chachi Loves Aerosmith, apparently, although I personally have not read yet

Prose, yeah. I haven't read Buarque...

Chuck Berry
Dean Wareham

Keen to get the book, curious if the second and third box sets are still happening/progressing.

anyone seen the film?

https://vimeo.com/243460646

I liked it a lot.
A genuinely odd cast of characters they were. Not odd like Klaus Nomi or GG Allin, but subtly off. That def comes across.
Lots of genuine warmth (particularly in the direction of GM from RF) and a real awareness of what they actually were.

I found it kinda beautiful.

i wish it was twice as long.

the Forster book is among the best rock memoirs I've read.

Been reading some of Robert's stuff in The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll and finding it pretty well written so based on that and positive reviews by the likes of Alfie and a writer in the Grauniad I think I am going to have to buy it.