From a 1968 album by members of The Scaffold who had a UK Number 1 hit the same year with Lily The Pink. This particular track is most notable of course for having Hendrix playing on it. The albim itself will probably cost you in advance of £350. I was directed this way again by Thurston Moore to whom I'm grateful.
'My letters sit on your window-sill Yellowed by the sun Written that time our love was in its prime They just ran off my pen, my pen is broken now Couldn't eat a thing, couldn't sit next to you.'
As a ridiculously compulsive record buyer, I have some pretty stupid conversations with myself. 'You've bought too many albums this month. You need to wait 'til payday before getting this.' I know I'll get them anyway. For someone like me my record collection is always an unfinished house, just one brick away from completion. Who am I fooling?
I'll have the album this song comes from at some point over the next few months. It's a double and there's a copy in the record shop directly opposite to where I'm sitting now at the window of my flat. That costs £35 pounds which I won't be paying. Discogs means you can find a price that your skin and wallet are more comfortable with.
Probably, the way you feel about Tindersticks, if you ever think about them at all, (and I imagine those that do are in a fairly sizeable minority now), depends on what you think of their singer and main man Stuart Staples. Pitching himself midway between Scott Walker and Nick Cave, without the slightly otherworldly, godlike attributes of either. A suited bloke from Nottingham with a highly mannered voice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Self-depreciating, because he really has to be. He's a very British equivalent to these American and Australian icons I mentioned who chose to spend most of their careers here for some reason known mostly to themselves, who have let our rain seep into their work and characterise it. Staples offers something slightly more modest, recognisable and attainable for the rest of us mere mortals.
I've got this on cd but that's not enough now I listen almost exclusively to records again. I'll own the vinyl version at some point in the next few months. It's a good album, remarkably consistent for a double, a relentlessly focussed meditation on failure, played out to lush, thoughtful orchestration. A series of short stories about what the wear and tear of life and relationships can do to us unless we keep an eye on it and don't let the darkness creep up on us. As the Nineties, when this came out, was pretty much a decade of consistent failure on my part in most respects, it's as good a way for me to remember them by as any I can think of. It comes from a time when lovers used to write letters to each other. I've got a few of my own in a lower drawer on my desk to my left. I won't be reading them any time soon. Listening to the Tindersticks once in a while will do. A very British record. They understand the grind, don't look away while they catalogue it, and meanwhile there's enough colour and humour in the mix to make them a pleasure to listen to while they go about things.
'I was dressed for success. But success it never comes.'
I'm still not entirely sure what I think about Pavement. But this hits the spot. Partly I think because they chose to use New Order rather than The Fall as their role models here and it suited them better. With regards to this line, somehow, you get the impression that the members of Pavement always had success behind them to fall back on if things hadn't worked out with the band. That doesn't take away anything from this. One of their finest early moments.
Pretty much speaks for itself. Great writing and knowledge beyond his years.
'It was a $1000 wedding, supposed to be held the other day And with all the invitations sent The young bride went away When the groom saw people passing notes
Not unusual, he might say But where are the flowers for my baby I'd even like to see her mean old mama And why ain't there a funeral, if you're gonna act that way
I hate to tell you how he acted when the news arrived He took some friends out drinking and it's lucky they survived 'Cause he told them everything there was to tell there along the way And he felt so bad when he saw the traces of old lies still on their faces
So why don't someone here just spike his drink Why don't you do him in some old way Supposed to be a funeral It's been a bad, bad day
The Reverend Dr. William Grace Was talking to the crowd All about the sweet child's holy face and The saints who sung out loud
And he swore the fiercest beasts Could all be put to sleep the same silly way And where are the flowers for the girl She only knew she loved the world
And why ain't there one lonely horn and one sad note to play Supposed to be a funeral It's been a bad, bad day Supposed to be a funeral
Bobby 'Boris' Pickett and the Crypt Kickers started a two week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Monster Mash'. It got to Number 1 in the UK about ten years later. I always thought this was a pretty good record. As Halloween beckons, it might as well get a spin.
He and his wife died at the hands of a firing squad on Christmas Day in 1989. A tyrant. But there are plenty of those and it doesn't make the series of events that led to his death any less frightening.
Another mellow start to the working week. I know nothing at all about the artist though a quick search told me she's collaborated at various points with Sonic Youth, Archie Shepp, Stereolab and Grace Jones amongst others. Directed here by a recommendation from Thurston Moore. This comes from a 1972 album.
Possibly not the Lou Reed album you need most. Here it is reviewed at the time of its release by Peter Laughner for Creem. Laugner is one of the great lost figures of Rock and Roll, guitarist and songwriter for Rocket From the Crypts and Pere Ubu, and no mean journalist.as this attests.
LOU REED LIVE
Peter Laughner, Creem, 6/75
Lou Reed reminds me of Jack Kerouac near the end, dozing in an arm-chair with a beer, a flask of bourbon and a script for Obetrols, mumbling the same old stories at anyone within range, "Hey, ya wanna hear me make up a complete Shakespearean sonnet right outta my head?"
Like Kerouac, Reed was mostly responsible for a movement that he didn't want much to do with. Kerouac in his Catholic guilt didn't want to be aligned with a whole generation of screwed-up young Americans. He claimed he wanted to write like Thomas Wolfe. Likewise Reed shied away from, and virtually spit on, the whole gay-flash-rock'n'roll-decadence scene; "Hey, why don't they listen to the ballads?" You can tell the guy would have really liked to be a poet, but the Sixties beat him to it.
All of this and more has been kicked around at length in the pages of many a rock publication. It's a subject I call The Lou Reed Dilemma, or What Do We Do With A Wasted Artist Early In The Seventies. Finally you just want to throw your hands up in the air, quit looking at pictures of new hairstyles and listening to tired old con like "I was better'n Hendrix," and listen to the music. Which I guess is what Lou Reed Live is all about. You might not want to put it up against the third MGM Velvets LP, but... On Rock 'n' Roll Animal, which Live is simply an addendum to, Reed and his band Johnny Winterized four Velvet Underground classics. They sublimated the vocals to a sort of flashoid Saturday Night Les Paul Rave Rock, substituting manic "straight" lead playing and rhythm feel for the feedback-drone-power-chord menace of the original versions. A lot of people like Rock 'n' Roll Animal...a lot of kids who couldn't've cared less about the Velvet Underground, a lot of kids who picked up on Lou Reed because he was new and hip, and basically the same sort of people who make up the vast majority of the rock audience. People who could give a flying fuck whether something is approved by the Academy or whatever, as long as it does something to relieve the boredom, etc. that they're sunk in. As long as it sounds good at a party or on the eight-track.
Lou Reed Live avoids the material that has become fixed in the Classic Tradition of Velvet Underground maniacs. There's more harmonically complex material from Transformer and Berlin which fares better on stage than in the studio. At least you've never heard it done with John Cale, so you don't miss him that much.
"Vicious," the only hard rocker of the set, comes off as a cross between "Louie Louie" and the Allman Brothers. Prakash John sets up a bitchin' undertow on the bass, while Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner wail away with the kind of screaming standard licks they're best at. It's ironic that this entire band, except the keyboard player, now belongs to Alice Cooper, who Reed once called "the worst, most disgusting aspect of rock 'n' roll."
The rest of it's OK. In "Satellite Of Love" we're reminded again that Reed is "just like everybody else" and likes to watch things on TV. "Oh Jim" starts to sound promising in the middle (at least there's no horn section), but finally just gets irritating when you realize that Hunter and Wagner must know every lick ever conceived on the Les Paul.
The only real turkey is "Waiting For The Man." I just don't believe that people waiting to cop junk shuffle their feet to this kind of disco tripe beat. And the vocal totally avoids the hip aloofness that made the song so sleazy before.
So there ya go...put it on, turn it up, pull another pop-top off. I'll bet the kids that take Elliott Murphy's Advanced Rock 101 at Harvard in '86 will think Lou Reed was pretty incredible. Maybe a couple of them can hitchhike down to Florida and visit him. "Hey kid, ya wanna hear some ballads?"
P.J. Harvey: ' When I think of Doolittle I immediately think of I Bleed because that's one of my favourite songs of all time. I love Doolittle. I love it. Tame and I Bleed , I mean I learned to play those back then, I was just in awe of those songs in particular, but Charles' writing is amazing. I don't think I heard Doolittle until a while after it came out. I heard Surfer Rosa first and that just blew my mind, I went , 'What is this?' and obviously immediately went to track down Steve Albini. I can't stress enough what a great writer I think Charles is, and still is. I have such respect for his writing, and the songwriting as much as the sound is what gets me about the Pixies songs. I just think I Bleed is a beautifully structured, very powerful, haunting, scary and very moving song.'
Sleater-Kinney, who have a career retrospective box set coming out on Sub Pop next week are a band that have inspired incredible eulogies over the years from music journalists and fellow musicians. Greil Marcus called them 'the best band in the World', others 'the best American Punk band ever'. R.E.M's Peter Buck has said they, "changed your perception of what rock'n'roll could be", adding: "Were they kindred spirits to REM? Absolutely. They were politically oriented without being real preachy… They were noisy, uncommercial, wilful". They were certainly special. Here's a choice of ten from them, chosen with a bit of help from Rob Sheffield, from throughout their career and their seven studio albums.
This is interesting. From 1966. Their only single. On the surface pretty conventional but at a certain point in the instrumental break it goes to a place that almost seems to pre-empt the Velvet Underground. A Chicago band who did the right thing and split up after high school.
From a band who generally charted the shallowness of Generation X a bit too closely for my tastes. Still, they had a knack of writing pretty good pop songs. And Kim Deal is certainly cool.
U2 released a song dedicated to Joey Ramone recently. That's not getting anywhere near here. This is infinitely preferable. More on Sleater Kinney over the next couple of days on here as they're currently getting press over a forthcoming re-release on their back catalogue.
Here's a very upfront and revealing interview with Moore from The Guardian. I saw him a couple of years ago in a small upstairs room of a pub playing with folk veteran Michael Chapman. He stopped the set after the first song to give me a cough drop for which I'm still grateful. The show was one of the best I've ever seen!
Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore: ‘There are very few bands where people work together and live together’
The musician talks about his divorce from Kim Gordon, life in London and whether Sonic Youth have a future
Thurston Moore. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
Beware small talk with Thurston Moore, the man who knows too much. When I meet the former Sonic Youth frontman for lunch in a noisy London restaurant, I politely ask how he’s finding life since he moved from Connecticut to Stoke Newington, north London last year. I begin to fear I will never get to ask a second question. His encyclopaedic response takes in the differences between US and UK punk; the gentrification of Lower Manhattan; the importance of Patti Smith (“the model for all of us”); the British “anxiety towards impropriety”; and the neglected counter-cultural history of his new neighbourhood.
“That history has been deleted, for the most part, from the streets of Stoke Newington,” he says. “It’s hidden behind all these young marrieds with prams in boutiques. You should know where you live. I find that to be a certain responsibility.”
Moore’s enthusiasm, pouring out of his strangely unlined face beneath a boyish shock of hair, makes him seem much younger than 56. He has an infectious let’s-do-the-show-right-here vibe that explains why he’s been able to work with everyone from Neil Young and Yoko Ono to REM and John Zorn. In the 1980s and 90s, some bands owed their record deals to Moore’s cheerleading. “He exuded this faith,” his former wife and bandmate Kim Gordon once said about the man she met in 1980. “He didn’t really worry about the future.”
He still doesn’t, even though the future is more uncertain than ever. In 2011, it was announced that he and Gordon were divorcing, which inevitably meant an indefinite hiatus for Sonic Youth. “The suspension of the band was enforced by our marriage dissolving,” he says. “There are very few bands where people work together and live together. Nothing about it was pretty. At all. It’s really intense and heavy on both sides.” Thurston Moore, far left, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth, Amsterdam, 1986.Photograph: Frans Schellekens/RedfernsIt feels strange discussing the split with Moore because I interviewed Gordon earlier this year, but it’s fruitless, not to mention grubby, to take sides. Other people’s marriages are a mystery. Gossip sites, however, thought differently, revealing the identity of Moore’s new girlfriend, book editor Eva Prinz, and blaming him for the divorce. When, in March, Moore confirmed in an interview that he’d begun seeing Prinz while still married, the website Jezebel confidently declared, “Thurston Moore Confirms He Is a Dick.”
Moore found the attention surprising (“I’m in an alternative experimental rock band, for God’s sake. Big fucking deal”) and unpleasant.
“Yeah, it’s embarrassing,” he says, wincing. “It’s humiliating. It affects people close to me in certain ways – my family, the woman I’m in love with. It can be really degrading and I try to be philosophical about it. As soon as I put the [laptop] lid down and walk out the door, it’s not there.” While Moore’s fraught and folky, Beck-produced 2011 album Demolished Thoughts was recorded while his marriage was in peril (“a very intense record for me to do at that time”), his new one, The Best Day, is bigger, bolder and more outgoing and contains, he insists, no tidbits for the gossips: “I would never do that.”
The Best Day advertises its optimism with a cover shot of Moore’s mother, bathing in the sea with her dog, in Florida in 1940. He chose the image “because it conveyed a sense of peace and calm in a world where we don’t always have that. I’m in this place where it’s really welcoming and happy for me, and there’s a certain sound of pleasure on this record. So this photograph is so fitting for how I feel right now.”
The Thurston Moore Band features My Bloody Valentine’s Debbie Googe on bass, Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on drums and Moore’s Stoke Newington neighbour James Sedwards on guitar. Just a year ago, however, Moore was fronting a completely different band, Chelsea Light Moving, and insisting he’d keep the name. So what changed?”
“At the time I really desired anonymity without losing my desire to work in the public realm as a musician,” he says. “For a while it was kind of OK. I struggled through my personal issues while touring in the back of a van and playing every little basement that would accept us. I was just in a band. This wasn’t the Thurston Moore Show. But that wore thin after a while. And I was mentally …” – a rueful smile – “losing my shit. I needed to leave the United States, move to London, and contemplate what exactly I was going to do.” As a teenager, Moore fantasised about running away to London, where the bands were younger. “I was the same age as Johnny Rotten and Viv Albertine and Sid Vicious and I was like, how come they’re not here? New York City was intellectuals, art-school graduates and poets.” But he thinks London would have been too large and diffuse for him then. A natural collaborator and connector, in love with the idea of community, he thrived in Lower Manhattan. “New York is a street-corner world,” he says. “It’s hard to be in a hermit state in New York.”
Sonic Youth grew out of a rowdy, close-knit world and became a keystone in New York’s music scene but Moore felt the band was running out of road after 30 years and 15 albums. “It probably sounded like Sonic Youth was making records for the sake of making records,” he says. “That bothered me a little bit because I felt each record was a very serious undertaking.”
Playing live became less fun too. “I felt that the audience had reached a place of complacency where we were decoded. That edge of wonder and surprise had all but disappeared. A lot of what we developed over the years has seeped its way into music culture. We weren’t the radical band any more; we were more of a radical reference point. I was getting a little bored with people getting bored with us.”
He insists there’s no “decree of finality” on Sonic Youth, but he’s not hankering for a reunion. “It defines me and it always will,” he says. “I would never want to replicate that. This band is something else. I always feel like I’m in a state of apprenticeship. I never feel like I’ve achieved something where I can actually get retrospective.”
So he doesn’t feel the weight of the past? He beams, his faith in the future undimmed. “No weight whatsoever.”
• The Best Day is released on 20 October on Matador Records
No direct link but it's here! In the UK for the past 10 years or so there's been a radio station called BBC 6 Music which was pretty much invented for the likes of me. I can listen in the evening particularly and be pretty sure that I'll hear something that'll make me sit up and I'll probably end up posting what I've heard on here. Last night it was this. From ex-Crucial 3 member Pete Wylie and his band Wah!. B-Side of Seven Minutes to Midnight and it probably outshoots the A-Side with its Garage Punk glee. Like virtually every Wah! song from this period it has the sense that something really bad is about to happen. That bad thing probably already had with the arrival of the Thatcher government.
Thurston Moore's new music sounds impossibly good! This must be what comes of moving from Connecticut to Stoke Newington. Here's a picture of his mother in the sea with her dog in 1940 from the record's cover. Beautiful touch!
Probably the greatest closed space in history in terms of the creation of Rock & Roll Art closed today in 2006. It shouldn't have been allowed to happen.
From Anthem, which came out in 1984. I bought it. Held my first house party the same year. My copy of this was smeared liberally with yoghurt and was never played afterwards. During the course of the evening, vegetables were chucked in the washing machine, the cooking vinegar was drunk. An aerosol placed in the oven. It exploded when I was cooking my lunch the next day. The previous evening punks and skinheads had arrived at midnight and started trampling cigarette ends into the dining room carpet. The police were called and escorted everyone out. Happy days! Thirty years and counting.
'Incorporating the avant-rock of underground Cleveland bands like Pere Ubu, the angular slash and burn of the English post punks, the trance repetition of German Bands like an and Neu, and the aggressive propulsion of The Ramones, Mission of Burma, 'invented a new way to snarl', wrote critic Rob Sheffield, ' the sound that American indie bands have been tinkering with ever since'.
Any excuse to write about this quite staggering band. They've featured before on this blog but not on this particular series so here goes. I first heard of them when R.E.M. namedropped them amongst list of countless others in their early interviews at the start of the eighties. They'd already split. Frankly their name was enough, (it came from a plaque the band noticed in the diplomatic district of New York, 'it was murky and kind of disturbing'). Their records were not freely available in the UK at this point so I caught up late. They're a quite one off group. You can hear flashes of sound in their songs that remind you of others and where you can hear their influence on innumerable bands that came after but they're really just flashes, the band are moving so fast. Their only full album 'Vs', will be winging its way to my doormat shortly having mesmerised me for an hour at work early yesterday afternoon. This was their early radio college hit, not actually a single as this was in the late Seventies before the American Independent Sector had really established a network. It's about the Chinese revolutionary movement where the notorious Gang of 4 attempted to seize power. Appropriately Leeds band Gang of 4 are probably the contemporary band Mission of Burma have most in common with. But somehow the Boston band sound freer to me. Listen to them. They've reformed and are still making ground-breaking records. Immense. They also feature in a chapter of Michael Azerad's ,'Our Band Could Be Your Life', which is well worth tracking down.
Here's Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth writing about the band:
'I always felt a kinship with them, although Sonic Youth were never intimates with them like we were later with the Swans, the Laughing Hyenas, or Die Kreuzen. I saw Mission of Burma when they first came to New York and played the original Danceteria. Nobody really knew anything about them, but Jim Fouratt would actually book these unknown regional bands. He would listen to the tapes and if he liked them have them open for the Bush Tetras or something.
I walked in and Burma were already in full concert mode, and it was really shocking, because they were playing really heavy guitar music, but not like punk-rock-guitar music. It was something we were only hearing through the bands that were into the mass-guitar post-MC5 vibes that were resonating through guys like Glenn Branca. And Mission of Burma were not approaching it in an academic way. They were these guys in flannel shirts and jeans really going at it. It was beautiful ringing loud guitar music, so I was knocked out.
When Sonic Youth started and Jim Fouratt booked us at Danceteria, it was opening for Mission of Burma, although I don't think Mission of Burma were making too much of a dent in the New York scene. But they rang true for me. Branca also saw them and was turned on by them. At that time a lot of the music in New York's underground had to do with no-wave funk, which I really dug because elements of that music are wonderful. But Burma were among the few bands that would display something wholly other than what was going on in the New York eye of the hurricane when they came to town. R.E.M. was like that too.
When we opened for them, it was really cool. I was really into the fact that we were playing with them, and I was hoping they would see us and see that there were bands in New York that weren't playing no-wave funk. We were at our most cacophonous. We were doing one song where I would stick a cowbell under the guitar strings and bend the strings up with it to create this squall. I remember after sound check one of the members of Burma saying, "That cowbell song was pretty good."
Today I don't see their influence in the mainstream at all. The whole neo-punk-rock scene – a lot of those bands don't reference what was going on in the American underground in the '80s. A lot of them are influenced by each other and by Nirvana and share the same signifiers, be it the Misfits or something else.
Bands like Burma had a quality to their songwriting that was really accessible, really uplifting, and I don't hear that kind of plain good songwriting in mainstream radio. When I spin the radio dial, it confuses me because there is so much good music out there, and very, very rarely will it hit radio. A lot of what's coming out of the radio is so insipid.
Over the years we would meet up with Roger and would play with the [Peter Prescott] Volcano Suns. The Burma legacy was very strong. Most people who played in bands in the '80s and '90s were aware of it. I think it was more significant for musicians. At that time Mission of Burma, the Butthole Surfers, and the Big Boys were the really interesting bands, because they weren't standardizing. They were coming out of punk and playing music that was sophisticated, in a sense, in this classic unsophisticated quality. There was a certain proletarian standardization in hardcore, so it was great to see and hear bands like Mission of Burma and the Big Boys step away from that with no ambitions toward the mainstream. I still put ‘Academy Fight Song’ on mix tapes.'
Eric Burdon made some interesting records after he left The Animals (because this is them only in name, not much more than a backing band). He went to America, seemingly gobbled up every drug in his path, hung out with other spoilt Rock stars, spewed out records without editing anything apparently and made some good and goddam awful records. This is one of the better ones.
It's now 30 years since this album came out and this interview took place, was written up and published in The NME. I bought the record fairly shortly afterwards in a shop in Twickenham that my sister ssuspects still exists. Strangely, the cover photograph of them staring out the lens from a plush theatre balcony was taken just down the road at Richmond Theatre close to where I grew up. It's them at their angular, melodic peak for me. It has at least nine of their greatest songs, and one flawed but brave statement, (River of Money), shows them at their most unreservedly romantic and real at a time when the charts and airwaves were busy cheapening such raw and real emotion. The Go-Betweens have been part of me ever since. It's still the album of theirs that means most to me. The one that resonates and takes me back. The name of this blog comes from the first line of second song Five Words. One day I'll summon up the energy and collect my thoughts sufficiently to write about them at length. In the meantime, here's the article:
The Go-Betweens: Money Can't Buy You Love
Mat Snow, New Musical Express, 13 October 1984
THERE'S NOTHING quite like a love affair to shake you out of an autopilot trance and put you back in touch with your feelings; feelings about home, job, friends, whole way of life.
And you know the side effects – certain records have come to hold a particular poignancy; The The's Soul Mining, Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones and Elvis Costello's I Wanna Be Loved amongst others.
But most of all it is the songs from the Go-Betweens' new LP Spring Hill Fair that will evoke most achingly my summer and autumn of 1984.
It has already been a good year for the roses, for white-boy pop songs that deal affectingly with the faces and layers of love L-U-V. The Smiths, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout and, perversely, Nick Cave spring to mind.
But – and this is entirely a matter of my own personal wavelength – none have touched quite so deeply the chords that bridge literal lyricism and its wordless articulation in music. I don't think that I've heard purer, more moving songs since ... Blood on the Tracks? Imperial Bedroom?
Heavy Duty albums, but I reckon Spring Hill Fair can stand the comparison. As '84 mellows from Indian summer to autumn, my heart beats to the Go-Betweens' tune.
Now as it happens, the first feature I ever wrote for NME was an interview with the Go-Betweens. That was two years ago, and as a three-piece of Grant McLennan on bass, Robert Forster, guitar and Lindy Morrison, drums, they had just released their debut album Send Me A Lullaby on an indie label in their native Australia licensed through Rough Trade.
Since then they have gained Robert Vickers on bass (Grant thereby moving to guitar), released my favourite LP of last year, Before Hollywood, left Rough Trade and signed to the WEA spin-off label Sire, home of the Ramones and Talking Heads. Thus it is that you can go down to your local disc emporium and stand an excellent chance of being able to buy Spring Hill Fair this very afternoon. It was recorded during a very wet May in the Miraval Studios in Cannes owned by piano-playing French star Jacques Loussier, where even now Wham! are hatching their new LP.
Career moves over; let's talk about music. "Song of the week," proclaimed Biba Kopf recently of ‘Bachelor Kisses’, the new single and first track on Spring Hill Fair. "Only when we're confronted with a song so perfectly turned, lines so finely balanced and a melody so achingly sweet as ‘Bachelor Kisses’ are we forced to notice how hollow most contemporary pop rings."
In the past, the Go-Betweens have hovered on the edge of a tense, terse and nervous sound which lends an edge of outsiders' awkwardness to even the most consoling and uplifting of themes. Not so with ‘Bachelor Kisses’, which caresses with expansive spaciousness and layered plangency. It has a sound not unlike those great AOR productions of late '70s West Coast pop – Fleetwood Mac, that sort of thing.
I put this soft muso question to the song's writer, the dapper and wittily uptight Grant McLennan, and kicked myself afterwards for not inquiring into a parallel with friend-of-the-band Roddy Frame and his choice of Mark Knopfler as producer of Aztec Camera's Knife LP.
Any road, Grant, were you going for the poolside sound of Andrew Gold? Of Lenny Waronker? "I'm glad you hit on that; it's one of the reasons Robert and I started the band – Andrew Gold's first album. I'm interested very much more than Robert in genres of music. I think Robert pursues a line far more true to his views all the time, whilst I'm quite interested to look at the form, and to work within that form awhile. And in particular when I first wrote that song. If that song had been written by Culture Club, it'd have been given the production. It caused a certain amount of friction in the band because I wanted to do a record in the manner of a well-produced, arranged, produced pop song."
So far, so good. I then turned to the Go-Betweens' lyrics, which I find immensely evocative if not always crystal clear. As the discussion developed – and if you think musicians and journalist droning on about the intricacies of music is boring, then you've just wasted 45p – I began to sink deeper and deeper into hot water. My idea of the songs was often way out from the intended meaning – I thought they were all about L-U-V given the tenderly anguished melodies and a state of mind ready to identify Cupid's arrow even in the phrase 'differential calculus'. Right now in my book Mills and Boon have all the best tunes; thus all the best tunes whisper soft of right and wrong romance.
So, I lumbered, is the tenor of ‘Bachelor Kisses’ that of courtly romance?
"Whenever I listen to the first or second Bob Dylan album and pick up a guitar afterwards I might feel like a troubadour. But I think it's a very easy song to misunderstand. It's not about courtship. It's about a man singing a song to a girl stating his feelings. The song might sound like that; the perverse part of me wants it to sound like that. I expect of myself if I ever hear a song, see a painting or read a book, to work.
"I'm sorry, Mat, if it sounds a courtly song but it's not about that. I see a lot of infidelity around me most people involved in music are guilty of it in many cases. I see a lot of trust, promises being broken – I'm guilty of it myself. It's about all the promises the world of men have made women as far as the future of their lives, security, the raising of children, and I've found it wanting. Not a unique thought."
When Grant was a child his father died and he was subsequently brought up by his mother on a cattle-station in Queensland, Australia's Texas – facts which unlock some of the 'meanings' behind last year's classic single, the autobiographical ‘Cattle And Cane’. On the new LP, ‘Unkind and Unwise’ again allows glimpses of a rural, fatherless childhood.
"Ever since I was a boy I absolutely detested 99% of male society because they stick to the masculine role model. You talk of one-parent versus two-parent families; if you just have a mother you tend to have a completely different perspective and approach, and I think I've benefited a great deal from that. I don't think anyone could argue against the determining thing in the relationship between most men and women is the power wielded by men.
"But that song is no liberated blueprint. It's the narrator of ‘Cattle And Cane’ all grown up, a little less nostalgic. He realises that while memory and the past can be really seductive, it's an unwise feeling to sink too much into. That song has nothing to do with a romantic love between two people beyond the family. I would never write a song about an idealised woman – ‘Stairway to Heaven’...
"‘Slow Slow Music’ also invokes the bond between parent and child as a music ever present yet so slow as to be inaudible to anyone else. I like songs about family and parents; it's unusual, since most pop treats the old folks as non-existent, figures of fun, or curmudgeonly old gaolers. Lennon was an exception, but being to all intents and purposes an orphan from an early age, parents weren't something to be taken for granted."
Is songwriting, then, for Grant, a form of emotional release?
"Nothing as dramatic as that. It's just when you walk outside and see something, you just want to shout about it, tell someone, you just want to write it down, phone someone up. That's pretty much the way I write songs.
"When you listen to a song there are a lot more things than the words and the music, things like the sound of a voice beyond the chords and beyond the lyrics that just hits you. It can be a guitar sound, a drum pattern...
"When I hear rock'n'roll phrases like ‘Tutti Frutti’ or Marc Bolan's ‘Jeepster’, what do the lyrics mean?"
Robert Forster is seven foot two and permanently bemused. His hangover from the previous evening's housewarming party thrown by Perth's excellent Triffids is even worse than Grant's. "One of the classic lessons of rock is to throw phrases over the top that don't mean anything. From T. Rex back to Chubby Checker back to Little Richard they've done it. So I do it. I'm interested in directness. "The lyrics I wrote on this album," (‘You've Never Lived’, ‘Part Company’, ‘Draining The Pool For You’, ‘Man O'Sand To Girl O'Sea’) "I wrote when I've been drinking. I wanted to speak a lot more directly and I wanted to speak about certain topics in a very straightforward way. And the best way I found of doing that was by sitting down and drinking. A conversational-type lyric. Most of the lyrics I've done on that album were started at night. I'd start drinking, smoking cigarettes, and I'd write all the lyrics in one sitting. I think it shows."
Like in ‘You've Never Lived’ which typifies Robert's angular and punchy yet allusive style of song and delivery.
"It's the confessions of people who are hounding someone. Like John Lennon and Yoko; there's a John Lennon interview where he says that when he met Yoko Ono, George Harrison had said that Bob Dylan had said that Yoko Ono had a bad name in the Village. John, keep away from Yoko – she's got a bad name! So I just thought of the greatest insult I could pay those sort of people. People who don't believe in love or commitment in a relationship, that two people together are not a good creative unit".
‘River of Money’ is the most extraordinary song the Go-Betweens have ever played. Narrated over an ominous execution backbeat counterpointing an eerily hummable guitar motif and noises of muted feedback distortion, it tells the story of the aftermath of an affair, of a man pining into oblivion. Only the chorus is sung: "I'll take you to Hollywood/ I'll take you to Mexico/ I'll take you anywhere the River of Money flows". It's absolutely chilling, and echoes in some of its feel the Velvet Underground's black comedy ‘The Gift’...
"I'm sorry to disappoint my fans but I personally have never liked ‘The Gift’. I've always found it a bit... tedious. I'll be castigated for this. I'm not a big ‘Sister Ray’ fan either. " I had a personal sense of loss I wanted to use in a song. I also had a picture of some person alone in an old wooden homestead in the country in Queensland, just endlessly regretting and ruing.
"The repetition of "I'll take you to Hollywood" etc. is all those blinding promises that people make to each other of I'll take you out of your life. I certainly haven't lost sight of the ridiculousness of I'll buy you a fur coat, two Rolls Royces and a yacht, all those stupid promises when all you have to promise is trust... It's another perspective on the traditional McLennan pastoral theme that I've been lumped with," laughs Grant wryly.
A year ago in a live review Barney Hoskyns wrote of the Go-Betweens' "bedsit bookishness – an allusive literary shell from which little seems to protrude..."
"That's bullshit," objects Robert, freshly aggrieved at a criticism which I know wounded them deeply at the time. "We're obviously not vaudeville, which it's required in this country to be for mass success, we're not jumping up and down on the stage. We're standing there playing our instruments. Somehow that's taken as if we spend all our time huddled over books.
"If we were bookish, we'd be off reading books, but we're in a rock-pop band, and being in a band takes you away from the seclusion that the word bookish implies.
"It really upset me because I see some truth when people say that we're very isolated because we came from a place that was away from the centre. That we're incredibly introverted."
"In Australia," adds Robert, "all these bands have realised that they're not going to have the success and opportunities that they deserve. You find that out very early. That forces the bands to play music that just pleases themselves. Whereas here if you're any good success comes very quickly and the music suffers. They haven't had the time that we've spent working on the music."
"I think that we deal with a language that no one else was using, and I still think we do," rejoins Grant. "But unfortunately, given the mass-production values in this country, a lot of people can't be bothered to work, to try and make an effort to understand.
"I sure as hell don't reckon I'm much different from other people when I listen to music. I expect to be impressed, to be moved every time I hear a record. If I'm not, I look for reasons why I'm not. And I work at it.
Last question – and it's always the last question to people whose talent deserves far wider credit – do you want to be rock'n'roll stars?
Grant: "Having been in the ball game for a few years I know what it takes and what you got to do, and we'll do a lot of that. But no way could I entertain the idea of us as megastars. It's just not that sort of music and we're not that sort of people."
Robert: "We've known all these groups, from Orange Juice to the Birthday Party, Aztec Camera, the Smiths, and bang! six months later they're very successful. It's very interesting because you can see the route of how it happened because you're so close to it. Everyone else around us seems to be stars..."
"It's all right," soothes Grant. "In the reflected light we look the stars!"
Robert: "We're the friends of the stars!"
Grant: "We run out and buy their Chinese meals..."
But Robert has the last word, signing off this piece with suitable gravitas...
"In Hollywood there are two types of actors. There are the stars – the pools, the fan clubs and the pressure. All the attention is on them. Then there are the character actors – people like Thomas Mitchell, Thelma Ritter, Ned Beatty. They don't have all the stuff the stars have, but they make a body of work that is often a lot more substantial, a lot more real than the stars.
"And as far as the Go-Betweens go, we're the character people. That's what I'd like us to be remembered as."
But Robert has the last word, signing off this piece with suitable gravitas...