The Go-Betweens, Grant McLennan’s death, almost a year on…

Last May saw the sudden and entirely unexpected death of Grant McLennan (on the right and int the background of the image), singer and guitarist with the Go-Betweens. The Cedar Lounge Revolution wasn’t extant when that happened but the shock of his death still remains and it’s strange and poignant to think it’s been almost a full year.

The Go-Betweens were quite a band, who I first saw in 1987 (yikes – actually I’m now told it was 1986) playing outside the Pavillion in TCD at lunchtime during the TCD Ball week, and then quite a number of times since. Most recently was in 2002 in the Ambassador. The sound was muddy, the acoustics dire, but their enthusiasm was unflagging. Their style was in some respects pop, but with an element of grit that undercut the melodic approach.

I’m very leery of meeting people in bands, but for once, fuelled by a similarly reflective enthusiasm and a fair quantity of pints I went over and said a few words with McLennan in Conways pub after the gig. I had a particular interest because another band I’d rate very highly are fellow Australians, The Church (perhaps best known for being on the soundtrack of Donnie Darko during the party scene where their one and only hit “Under the Milky Way” is playing in the background), whose lead singer Steve Kilbey had worked with McLennan on the “Jack Frost” project which produced two excellent albums in the 1990s.

He was very charming, but I didn’t linger, there was a queue of supplicants there to interrupt what no doubt he hoped would be a quiet pint with the bands latest drummer.

In a way an added tragedy of his death was the way in which they as a band had undergone something of a critical and commercial revival. Both McLennan and his songwriting partner Robert Forster had disbanded the Go-Betweens in 1989, pursued interesting if slightly disappointing solo careers throughout the 1990s and then reformed in 2000 assisted by former riot grrrls Sleater-Kinney. Usually such reformations fail, either due to them being cynical exercises with eyes purely on the money, or threadbare pseudo-nostalgic projects (of which an example of same was the Psychedelic Furs a couple of years back. Those of us who ‘caught’ them in Vicar Street will not soon forget the experience). The Go-Betweens were, thankfully, neither and in the subsequent six years they released three albums of varying but generally very good quality.

There was always a certain something to the band, a combination of intelligence, sensitivity and a sort of arch knowing quality (generally supplied by Forster whose solo gigs are – well – remarkable). And this was reflected in both the music and lyrics, that pop sensibility previously mentioned leavened by a certain degree of grit, a world very slightly askew, either on an emotional level or otherwise. It’s perhaps reaching to suggest that they were a political or even an explicitly feminist band, although the Sleater-Kinney connection would indicate at least something of a shared sensibility. Yet lyrically there was a darkness and, again, this knowing quality as the lyrics of the summer sweet “Streets of Your Town” (a minor hit in the UK) demonstrate,

Round and round, up and down
Everyday I make my way
Through the streets of your town

Don’t the sun look good today?
But the rain is on it’s way
Watch the butcher shine his knives
And this town is full of battered wives.

And with a lyrical concern that centred on relationships and being male without being macho it’s unsurprising, to me at least, that their appeal tended to centre on a very specific, generally male audience. Their gigs were, in latter years, a forest of greying or balding pates.

Forster announced, quite naturally, that the Go-Betweens were finished as soon McLennan died. Since then things have been quiet. Last year he won the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing for columns he writes in the Australian magazine The Monthly. For a flavour of the band, and both McLennan and Forster it’s worth reading his column on their friendship.

A fine band, a lovely man, an enduring loss.