D10

Wilfred Langmaid
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Robert Forster: The Evangelist - Yep Roc / Outside

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Photo by Stephen Booth

THREE SONGS: Robert Forster, a charter member of The Go Betweens, has released a new solo album. One of the focal points is the three songs that began from song fragments that his songwriting partner Grant McLennan wrote before he died.

It is the solo album that Robert Forster would have never planned or hoped to make.

The Go Betweens charter member lost his songwriting partner, bandmate, and friend when Grant McLennan died of a heart attack in May 2006. Forster gathered the two people who filled out the band when it reformed earlier this decade (bassist/backing vocalist Adele Pickvance and drummer/backing guitarist/backing vocalist Glenn Thompson) and some other collaborators to record material.

The result is a stirring memorial to his late friend and a powerful artistic statement.

The Go Betweens were never chart toppers, even in their native Australia, but they had a core following. They were media darlings, as visitors to this newspaper's archives would see if they checked out my column, The Vinyl Word, from the 1980s. They have also been cited as huge influences of everyone from REM to Coldplay.

After a run of six lovely albums between 1982 and 1988, The Go Betweens dissolved. Forster and McLennan did some solo albums in the 1990s, and reformed the Go Betweens in 2000.

One of the focal points of the 10-song disc is surely the three songs that began from song fragments that McLennan had written before his death at age 48. The skiffle beat of Let Your Light In Babe and the hoedown It Ain't Easy are certainly more melodically upbeat than most of the tracks on the album, but there are clearly heartfelt tributes.

The latter sees Forster sing such explanations as "I write this tune to words he wrote on a full moon" and "It was a head trip, it was a friendship" while the chorus bottom line is the McLennan song fragment "It ain't easy when that love is blue, the love is blue."

The other song fragment is within the heartbreakingly beautiful Demon Days, where McLennan's lines "something's not right, something's gone wrong" are giving a haunting feel after the fact by Forster.

A lot of the remaining songs are a fusion of the stark, haunting feel of Forster's solo albums recorded in the 1990s after The Go Betweens' brilliant run of the 1980s and the sound of the post-reunion Go Betweens of this decade. Did She Overtake You, If It Rains, Don't Touch Anything, and Pandanus are standouts.

The closing track From Ghost Town is the coup de grace. It is done in a stark manner with gentle strings and Pickvance's occasional backing vocal as the only augments to Forster's vocals, piano and harmonica. The song is chock full of tender remembrance and utter grief, but the kicker is the line "He knew more than I knew, and I hated what he hated too, this world." It is a heartbreakingly beautiful end to what is ultimately a heartbreakingly beautiful final Go Betweens chapter.

Fredericton-based freelance writer Wilfred Langmaid has reviewed albums in The Daily Gleaner since 1981, and is a past judge for both the Junos and the East Coast Music Awards. His column appears each Saturday.