Robert Forster - The Candle & The Flame

 

I don't think I've ever heard a Robert Forster record that I didn't like. I can't think of another long running musical obsession of mine, band or solo artist that I can say that of. Even R.E.M. let me down in the end. But Forster never has. And every record he's been on since the Go-Betweens first hatched in Brisbane in the late Seventies still has had a great deal to say for itself.

But even given Forster's hallowed status as a serious and genuine hero of mine, I approached The Candle & The Flame with particular excitement and anticipation because it was made under particularly trying  circumstances, indicating that it might be a listen of an entirely different sort from what we're generally used to.

In 2021 Forster's wife Karen was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and the prognosis was not good. Rather than being momentarily crushed by this turn of events as many would have been, Forster and his family circle chose to turn this into a creative act of solidarity and support, and eighteen months later we have The Candle & The Flame and it's a truly remarkable object. Not the doom and gloom ordeals we have got accustomed to in recent years from the likes of Nice Cave & the Bad Seeds and Mount Eerie, for someone who has past. but something much more celebratory and even upbeat in tone. With all of the wisdom of a loving husband and father.

This is in keeping with everything I've got to know about Forster down the years, listening to his records, reading the interviews he gives, and Robert is the most generous and eloquent interviewee I know. The whole slightly sad and thwarted story of the Go-Betweens, one of the most important bands of my adult lifetime, and the way he has tirelessly documented and anthologised it since the premature, untimely and frankly tragic death of his writing partner Grant McLennan in May 2006.

Forster's band for this project is composed of his closest intimates. Adele Pickvance, who played in the late incarnations of The Go-Betweens. His son Louis, also of the late Goon Sax. His daughter Loretta. Even Karen herself on xylophone and 'ba ba ba' backing vocals. It's a family circle and probably needed to be, given the circumstances.

Every song has the resonance, the intimacy and levity and love of family meals. In a way it's the most private of private rituals put on display. Forster sings of himself at 19. His early heroes, Bowie, Ferry, Byrne and Verlaine who taught him to be the only artist he could. He sings of the passage of meeting and falling in love with Karen in Germany. He sings of their current relationship with tablets and pills and her tenacious fight with cancer.

It's a beautiful, minimal and brave record by an artist who has always valued the minimal as an instrument for profound artistic expression. It's an album that doesn't say too much but just enough. One to come back to over the coming weeks and months as I surely will. Power to the Forster elbow.