Going on without Grant

For 30 years, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan formed the backbone of The Go-Betweens. Two years ago this week, McLennan died suddenly of a heart attack. Since then, Forster has been trying to complete the songs the pair were working on. He tells Pádraig Collinshow he overcame practical and emotional difficulties to create a new album

CARDS ON the table, I'm not the world's biggest Go-Betweens fan. There are at least a half-dozen people more devoted to the Australian band than I am. I know most of them. I've met them over the years in Dublin, Glasgow, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Especially Brisbane. I met them there at Grant McLennan's funeral in 2006 and at the extraordinary Four Ages of Robert Forster concerts in July 2007. McLennan died of a heart attack aged 48.

The Go-Betweens never sold a whole lot of records, in either their 1978-1989 or 2000-2006 eras, but the loyalty they inspired in those who loved them is almost unparalleled. People flew from as far away as the UK for McLennan's funeral. People flew from Ireland, the United States, England, New Zealand and every corner of Australia for Forster's concerts last July.

Two years on, is Forster coming to terms with the death of his songwriting partner of 30 years?

"Yes and no. One part of it I've dealt with emotionally, I think. Another part comes, and this might be more difficult, with the advancing time. It sinks in more," he says. "It's more abstract in a way in the first year or two. He's gone and you're dealing with your grief. Over time you realise what you're missing, what he's missing . . . other feelings start to come when I think of him that didn't come to me two years ago. The fact that we won't be working again.

"Things still crop up all the time that I know would amuse him, that I wish I could tell him. The enormity of it is starting to hit me. There's a certain amount of instant grief that's huge, but the enormity you can really only grasp as the years go by."

Forster's new album is called The Evangelist. The second song, Demon Days, features the line "Something's not right, something's gone wrong". It sounds like a eulogy from Forster to his dear friend, but in fact McLennan wrote these incredibly poignant words himself.

"He wrote the first five lines of the first verse and of course now, instantly, it has another meaning. But also, you must understand, when he died, I was virtually the only other person who knew that song existed. I knew he'd written this, that those lyrics existed, and it wasn't something I could run out on the street and share with everyone. Saying it was a weight is too much, but I knew this for almost a year-and-a-half before we recorded it that I had this information that was quite startling, that he could write something like that. The whole mood of the song is vaguely prophetic, that he had written something like that," says Forster.

Two other songs on the album were also co-written with McLennan.

"All this is very clear in the packaging, which I wanted to do. I wanted to credit him so when you open the booklet the first thing you see on the left is 'All lyrics by Robert Forster, except [ the three] by Grant McLennan'. He had the choruses, so with Let Your Light In Babeand It Ain't Easy, I was writing to his choruses and to his music and his song structure," he says.

When McLennan died, he and Forster had been writing songs for what would have been the 10th Go-Betweens album.

"We were working on six songs. There was one or two almost B-sidey things that I played with him once or twice. One, from memory, was called Five Minutes From Hatesville, which was a sort of Johnny Cash-type thing. There were some lyrics which he'd written for that in the lyric book."

The lyric book was McLennan's diary, which Forster got to see shortly after his death.

"I had it for one night. It was quite an extraordinary thing because I approached his family about a week after he passed away. All his effects were being collected and were being packed up to go to Central Queensland. I didn't know when I was going to see that diary again and so I said to his family 'look, he and I were working on songs, I don't know what lyrics he's got for these songs . . . can I look at the diary. Can I have the diary for one night?'

"I took the diary home and I looked into it. It was one that I knew very well because I'd see it all the time. I was looking for clues and I could tell that when he was playing Let Your Light In Babe, he was just scat singing in a way that he often did . . . He was writing the lyrics to the last couple of Go-Betweens albums mainly at the demo stage or just before recording or sometimes when we were recording; while I tended to write as I went along.

"So I wasn't surprised that there was just two lines to Let Your Light In Babe. There was an opening line that I just couldn't go anywhere with, that totally didn't relate to the song title. For It Ain't Easy, there was nothing and for Demon Days, there was those first five lines, pretty much the five lines that I was hearing when we were playing it together," he says.

When Forster, who turns 51 in June, released his last solo album, Warm Nights, 12 years ago, he did not have any children. Now he and his German wife Karin Baeumier have a 10-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. Has fatherhood changed how he writes or what he writes about? "That's an interesting point. Yes it has, especially the song A Place To Hide Away. . . All that Robin Hood and witches, it's all from reading to my children," he says.

"That sort of wish for a peaceful place - the ideal that runs a little bit through the record - I think comes with trying to have a _protective environment for the children and the family. Some sort of ideal, nest situation appeals to me a lot more thanwhen I was younger and had no children. I think it has changed me as a person."

The album's title track is about Forster moving his family from Germany back to Brisbane in 2001: "I took her out of her home, a cabin near the woods, And took her to this desert with threatening neighbourhoods."

Brisbane's not that bad surely? "No it's not, it's not that bad," answers Forster, laughing. "Threatening can also be nature coming at you, especially for my wife, who's obviously the other person in the song, coming from Germany where you hardly hear a bird tweet, there are no snakes or spiders, nothing's grabbing you or crawling on you. Even in suburban Brisbane, nature is alive and coming at you in your backyard. It's me seeing Australia to an extent through my wife's eyes."

In October 2006, Forster won the Pascall Prize for arts criticism - and Aus$15,000 (€8,900) - for his work with The Monthlymagazine. Was he shocked to win?

"Considering I didn't know what the prize was, yes. It came totally from leftfield, considering I'd been published for just over a year, it was amazing." How important is it to do writing that is not writing pop songs? "It's very important, especially given my age. I think it throws back, in a strange way, onto myself as a songwriter. I think it takes the pressure off me. I often write [ for The Monthly] from nine till 10-to-12, to go to lunch at 12, and I'll pick up the guitar at 10-to-12 and I'll play something which is great and which I wouldn't have played if I'd trudged into the room at nine o'clock thinking 'I've got to try and write a song'."

From Ghost Town, the haunting closing track of The Evangelist, about McLennan, was the last written for the album. "I wrote it in the middle of July 2007, when the whole album was set and the tickets [ to London to record it] were bought and everything was aligned and ready to happen, which was quite strange because I never write anything in the last six months before any album. I freeze. I freeze totally."

I put it to him that it's interesting he wrote it in July because that was when he did the Four Ages Of Robert Forster shows in Brisbane. Did the creativity of doing those shows inspire it? "It might have, I hadn't thought of that. Adele (Pickvance, bass player) and I had done a demo in April and that had eight songs on it. It didn't have It Ain't Easybecause I thought it was too close to Let Your Light In Babe, just the feeling of it.

But then Adele went over to mandolin on it and I could actually hear that Let Your Light In Babeon the demo sounded different to what I thought it was . . . I was working on a guitar part for It Ain't Easyand it suddenly developed into this chord sequence that became From Ghost Town," he says.

On the fourth and final night of his Brisbane concerts last July, Forster played McLennan's song Boundary Riderfrom the final Go-Betweens album, Oceans Apart. It was a phenomenally moving tribute. Afterwards Forster pointed upwards and said "he's in our heart always". Will he play Boundary Rideragain? "Certainly. I'll play Grant songs, but I'm not going to tell you which ones," he says.

When will people in Ireland get to hear what Grant songs he'll play, is he going to tour? "We are. I think it's going to be definitely in September."

The Evangelistis out now. For info, music and videos, see  www.robertforster.net,  www.go-betweens.netor  www.myspace.com/gobetweensmusic