The last time I saw Grant
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Andrew Stafford
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I was scrounging for records in a little store in Brisbane's West End the last time I saw Grant. We were both regulars there and it was no surprise at all to see him wander in, bending to pick up a street magazine at the door as he entered. He ended up buying a Dylan album – Bob's latest, Love and Theft, which he knew and loved, but didn't own – and I bought a Dave Graney CD, My Life on the Plains, which I've barely listened to since.
It had been a while since we'd run into each other. We were friendly, but not really friends. I'd known him for ten years, but it was rare for me to talk to him without a tape recorder sitting between us. The longest time we'd ever spent together was a couple of hours, when I interviewed him about his band, the Go-Betweens, for a book I was writing based on Brisbane's music history, Pig City (University of Queensland Press, 2004). That was a few years ago now.
We weren't doing anything much at the time, and our chance meeting extended into coffee, then lunch. That was good. Like I said, we weren't friends – not really. But Grant was sweet that way. He always had time, was always interested in what was going on in your world, and he was an excellent listener and conversationalist. It was the first time we'd really talked to each other outside of our respective roles.
Grant cut quite a figure, not that he looked like a rock star at all. He dressed down, even on stage: faded jeans and sneakers and crumpled t-shirt, and he played mainly acoustic guitar with few fancy frills or poses. But he had an innate style, and was a proud snob. We watched a man cross Boundary Street – shirtless, in shorts and thongs, a heavy beer gut hanging over his hips. Grant didn't bother to conceal his disgust. "Look at that," he muttered, shaking his head. "What a barbaric country we live in!"
A few weeks later, I heard Grant had died.
HERE'S THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD KNOW about Grant McLennan: he wasn't a genius. Neither is his friend and songwriting partner Robert Forster, with whom he formed the Go-Betweens in late 1977. Rather, both were artisans of the first order: talented songwriters who worked diligently at their craft and believed completely in the value of what they were doing. Their aesthetics were finely tuned and they understood – first intuitively, then by experience – what it took to make great records.
They were also determinedly different, and recognition for their achievements was a long time coming, especially at home.
The Go-Betweens, as critic and friend of the band Clinton Walker has noted, introduced poetry to Australian music. They were unabashedly, proudly literate. Karen, one of Forster's first songs, was a tribute to a librarian who educated him in all the "right" authors: Hemingway, Genet, Brecht, Chandler, Joyce. Their name, of course, also alludes to the classic novel by L.P. Hartley, although Forster claims he simply liked the word "go".
This was no small thing. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the internationally accepted Australian sound was defined by AC/DC: bar-room boogie with libidinous lyrics. Nothing wrong with that – there is, in fact, much to admire about the care and wit that went into the late Bon Scott's endless supply of double– and triple-entendres – but the Go-Betweens always aimed higher than your belt buckle. They were unafraid to make demands of their audience. For that, they inspired passion. Their fans were loyal, often obsessive and – thirty years after the band's formation – there were more of them than ever.
That they hailed from Brisbane, at the height of the anti-intellectualism of the Bjelke-Petersen era, underlines their importance. Along with local peers the Saints, the Go-Betweens arguably did more than anyone to change perceptions about their home town, both inside and out. But, although the Saints came first – as Forster told me, "I think we all felt a little bit brushed by the Saints' wings" – the Go-Betweens' reaction to their surroundings was more subtle and subversive. They were sensitive, at times almost effeminate, and they didn't play loud.
It wasn't only musicians who were influenced by the Go-Betweens. Nick Earls, whose second book Bachelor Kisses took its name from one of McLennan's most seductive songs, noted it was the band's third album Spring Hill Fair which convinced him that coming from Brisbane (albeit, in his case, via Ireland) need not prevent him from having an impact as an author. He added that it was interesting it was a band that convinced him of this, and wondered why it was not David Malouf, Brisbane's most famous expatriate author.
Earls was far from the only Queensland-based writer of his generation touched by the Go-Betweens. In Forster and McLennan, the band had two superb lyricists. Pig City was in part an attempt to describe what it was like to be young in Queensland during the Bjelke-Petersen years, but I doubt that anyone has captured the experience of growing up in the state more evocatively than McLennan in his most celebrated composition, Cattle and Cane, where he passes through a series of vignettes drawn from his childhood in far north Queensland:
I recall, a schoolboy coming home
Through fields of cane, to a house of tin and timber
And in the sky, a rain of falling cinders
From time to time the waste – memory wastes
The narrative traces McLennan's shift to Brisbane, where he attended boarding school:
I recall, a bigger brighter world
A world of books, and silent times in thought
And then the railroad, the railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle, through fields of cane
IT TOOK MCLENNAN TIME TO FIND HIS FEET as a songwriter. His preferred medium was cinema, and he made an early name for himself reviewing films for the University of Queensland student newspaper Semper Floreat. When he recommended that a film was "not to be missed", readers took him seriously. Upon finishing his Arts degree, told he was too young to enrol in film school, he finally acquiesced to his best friend's repeated entreaties to form a band, picking up the bass guitar.
The first Go-Betweens single, Lee Remick – Karen was the B-side – opens with the line "She comes from Ireland, she's very beautiful/I come from Brisbane, and I'm quite plain". Like all the earliest Go-Betweens material, this was a Forster song – naïve, poorly played, but immediately distinctive. It was perhaps the first example of the kind of place-specific irony that, many years later, was captured in the term ‘Brisvegas'.
It wasn't until a rather tentative first album, Send Me a Lullaby – by which time the Go-Betweens had been joined by their longest-serving and most original drummer, Lindy Morrison – that McLennan felt confident enough to begin contributing songs of his own. Released in 1981, it now sounds very much of its time: jerky, influenced by all sorts of even jerkier-sounding British post-punk bands like Gang of Four, the Raincoats and the Slits.
The Go-Betweens moved to Melbourne, but were already receiving better reviews in England. There was neither precedent nor place in Australia for a band like them. "In search of a new voice/you burnt all your lyrics/moved to a new town", McLennan wrote, pointing a way forward: "That way, or nothing at all". They moved to London, where they cut their first great album, Before Hollywood, which included Cattle and Cane. McLennan was twenty-four.