Remembering a great song and its writer

LISTEN to Cattle and Cane. Listen to a wondrous evocation of childhood reminiscence and regret. Those of us who adored the Go-Betweens, and are shocked by the sudden death of Grant McLennan last weekend, knew Cattle and Cane as a highlight among highlights and were a bit thrilled when the song reached a whole new audience last year when U2 put it on a CD of tracks that they compiled for Mojo magazine. It's one of Bono's top three songs of all time.

In the song, Grant McLennan writes about a childhood spent on a cattle station hundreds of miles inland of Brisbane. He sings: "I recall, a schoolboy coming home, through fields of cattle and cane/To a house of tin and timber, and in the sky, a rain of falling cinders". It's like Cormac McCarthy or Richard Ford after they've been left in the outback with only an acoustic guitar.

Cattle and Cane was recently voted one of the "10 greatest Australian songs of all time", which is patent nonsense. It is the greatest Australian song of all time. And I really can't hear anything out there which would prevent the other nine places all being taken by other Go-Betweens songs.

The song was written in London in 1982. McLennan's songwriting partner in the Go-Betweens, Robert Forster, later remarked that the first time he heard Cattle and Cane, it literally took his breath away. The key to unlocking the song's meaning is contained in another McLennan song, Unkind and Unwise, from the 1984 Spring Hill Fair album. On that song McLennan sings: "He was brought up in a house of women/in a city of heat that gave its children/faith in the fable of coral and fish/told them the world was something to miss."

McLennan's father died when he was a child. The family moved to the remote outback cattle station where McLennan grew up "amongst women". He once spoke about what he was trying to get at in Cattle and Cane and how the song could be thematically connected with another masterpiece, Bachelor Kisses. "Ever since I was a boy, I absolutely detested 99 per cent of male society because of the masculine role model," he said. A line in Bachelor Kisses goes: "The world of men don't mean a thing/When all they give you is a diamond ring".

"You can talk about one-parent versus two-parent families," McLennan said. "But I don't think anyone can argue against the fact that the determining thing in the relationship between most men and women is the power wielded by men. If you listen to the songs, you'll hear how in Bachelor Kisses it's the narrator of Cattle and Cane all grown up."

From the cattle station, McLennan was sent to boarding school at the conservative Church of England Grammar School in Brisbane. This is reflected in the Cattle and Cane lyrics: "I recall a boy in bigger pants, like everyone, just waiting for a chance . . . A world of books . . . and then the railroad, the railroad takes him home, through fields of cattle, through fields of cane".

McLennan wrote the song on Nick Cave's guitar. The joke at the time (and still) is that he stole the guitar's only decent tune.

Like the very best Australian cinema, Cattle and Cane has a weird and unsettling undertow. Its subject matter is so atypically rock'n'roll and its execution so quietly insistent that it always stood out as a bit of an anomaly in the Go-Betweens canon.

With songs such as Streets Of Your Town, Spring Rain, Apology Accepted, Was There Anything I Can Do or just the entire Liberty Belle and The Black Diamond Express album, it's no surprise how people were always trying to spread the Go-Betweens musical message. Just last year, the producer of the TV show 24 based part of the fourth season around a company called McLennan-Forster in honour of his heroes.

Listen to Cattle and Cane.