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The Go-Betweens.
In a Brisbane lounge-room in 1978 Robert Forster and Grant McLennan
were trying to come up with a phrase that best described the
music of their new band The Go-Betweens. What they came up with
was "that striped sunlight sound". In Brisbane again, twenty-seven
years and nine records later, the phrase came back to them when
kicking around names for the band's first DVD.
"When we first started I was writing those first pop songs, Lee Remick and Karen, and it was a way of describing in a few words what we were doing," says Robert Forster of the phrase's origin. "We were twenty and very much caught up in the romance of music and image. To us at that time 'striped sunlight sound' captured a feeling - Brisbane, guitars, bright light coming into a room through louvres. Sun, shadow and sound."
The newly released Go-Betweens DVD explores this concept in more detail through an intimate acoustic session, in which Grant McLennan and Robert Forster discuss and play songs, from their earliest singles to those from their 2005 ARIA winning album 'Oceans Apart'. In addition to this, the DVD features a full live concert recorded at the Tivoli Theatre in Brisbane in August this year. Forster was emphatic that, though they could have recorded a concert anywhere, the DVD really had to be centred around Brisbane.
"Definitely," says Forster. "I couldn't imagine our first ever DVD being The Go-Betweens live in Liverpool or in Zurich. We could have done it too. 'Let's do Berlin, let's do San Francisco, let's do London' - it could have happened. But it had to be Brisbane. It's just part of our psyche."
The Go-Betweens had considered releasing a DVD a few times since Forster and McLennan reformed in 2000, but they didn't want just a cheap composite of live footage and clips. "We're not the sort of band that goes with every new technology, that have to be the first people there," he says. "We're often the last people there and that can be a good thing."
Forster says that the success of 'Oceans Apart' was a signal that the time was right to look again at the idea of releasing a DVD. "It had to be something with substance. There's not a lot of film of the band so the idea of being able to capture a full show in front of cameras and have that as a document for all time was a real driving force."
The live concert shows the band in fine form, performing songs from all The Go-Betweens albums. The packed Tivoli Theatre audience is lapping it up, and the sea of mostly young faces seem as taken with the older songs as the new material.
"It was a really good show," Forster says. "My nerves are the main thing I remember, and I think you can see that in my performance. But I do get better as the show goes on. I wish I was a little more funky at the start. Because I can be funky. Grant is great. And the rest of the band, Glenn [Thompson, drums] and Adele [Pickvance, bass] are fantastic."
The live concert contains songs that span all Go-Betweens albums, and the acoustic session traces their path from early beginnings to the surprise reformation to where they are now. Forster explains that playing a song from the past takes him immediately to the time it was written.
"As soon as I start to play a song on stage, it's on," he says. "If we're doing German Farmhouse, which I wrote in '96, I'm there in the room where I wrote it, I know what the song's about. Playing it live actually transports me back to that moment. Spring Rain - I'm in London in 1985. Here Comes A City - I'm on the beach where I wrote it in 2004, and I'm on that train trip in 2001. It's very, very visual, it's very, very real, and it's part of the reason a concert can be so exhausting. Mentally you're skipping all around the place, and it really does throw you into that time and place. It's like shuffling through photographs."
Forster explains that the interviews included on the DVD give fans a further insight into the time each song was written. In fact, it was while Forster and McLennan were recording these interviews and acoustic sessions that the phrase 'That Striped Sunlight Sound' popped up again, for the first time in years. Once again they were in a lounge room in Brisbane, looking forward to another productive phase for The Go-Betweens. "It's eerie the way that the circle is complete."
Steven Hocking
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'That Striped Sunlight Sound' is out now through EMI.
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