---

I'm a certified Go-Betweens fan, and I'm grateful that the core members, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, are back on tour, so understand that my aversion to this album is based on 1) the poor sound quality, and 2) the poor songs. There are couple of decent songs here that were released as singles back in the late 70s, but there are too many songs that constantly remind the listener that at the time Forster and MacLennan were all of 20 and recording these songs on a two-track in a bedroom. For some of the best offbeat love songs of the 80s, see the official Go-Betweens catalog.

Rating: 4

- Peter Gorman

Robert Forster and Grant McLennan
June 12, 1999: Double Door, Chicago, IL

Daylight was still visible outside on Milwaukee Avenue, and the small but vocal crowd rocking the Double Door hadn't seen nearly enough. After all, a 45-minute set and two brief encores seemed a paltry offering from the re-grouped leaders of a band the Midwest hadn't seen together in years, and might not see again for years more.

Even exquisite if bare-bones versions of Go-Betweens classics like "Bye Bye Pride," "Head Full of Steam" and "Streets of Your Town," as well as a couple of promising new tunes, hadn't sated the appetite of the audience. They clapped, stomped, shouted out the titles of favorites they never dreamed they'd be hearing live again.

It only took a moment for Robert Forster to take the stage again. Tall, dark and nattily dressed in the cream colored suit, he casually tossed his jacket over the mic stand, took a seat on a stool and picked up a guitar. Grant McLennan followed, looking casual and workmanlike, a blacksmith to Forster's country gentleman. He left his guitar lying in its case, and picked up his microphone.

Forster counted down, and strummed a few familiar measures before McLennan started to sing:

"I recall a schoolboy coming home/Through fields of cane/To a house of tin and timber"...

Certainly, I'd heard "Cattle and Cane" before, hundreds of times, and so had most of the audience. But not like this. This night, it was stunning, at once the coda for a childhood long gone, an elegy for a band that made some of the most memorable music of the 80's, and a sort of promise that, although brief, this our-and-a-half would pleasantly haunt the mind long after the particulars were forgotten.

"I recall a bigger brighter world/A world of books/And silent times in thought"...

The room was silent, rapt. The song progressed, gentle, mournful, incandescent. As it drifted to a close, McLennan sang the song's penultimate line, "Further, longer, higher, older," and stretched out his arms, both acknowledging and accepting the passage of time, even as he and Forster seemed to defy it.

Then the two men quietly left the stage. They offered no promises, no oblique references to the future. But no one was thinking about the future, at least not yet. They were still transfixed by the past.

– Rob Brookman

Artists l Essays l The List l Sites & Sounds

New Issue l Best Of l Fave Links l About Us