/ Caroline and I, Jetset / Trifekta, 2003
Part one: Robert
From the same period as the underrated Bright yellow bright orange set (admittedly it’s somewhat elusive on the ears, but I like that in certain records) it’s a shame that ‘Girl lying on a beach’ didn’t make the cut for that long player. Possibly Robert thought it was too personal, being the story of how he met his wife. So he tucked it away, rather like the photo that brackets the lyric of the song, on a CD single few people would have troubled to buy. ‘Girl lying on a beach’ is parenthetically perfect, in a way few songs are, a masterclass in songwriting economy and art. The delivery is just so, with Robert adopting the softer tone he would later use to great effect on The evangelist; less arch than usual, more intimate – a performer who knows when to hold off on the performing. And perhaps too, this late Go-Betweens song closes a bracket opened twenty-five years before by their first B side, ‘Karen’, later a live favourite perhaps precisely because it coincidentally celebrates a girl with homophonically the same name as the woman who would become his wife, Karin.
It’s high time we had a collection which gathers together the Go-Betweens’ post-reformation B sides and rarities; as B sides often do, they have little imperfections or infelicities or a slight sense of incompleteness so that you can see why they didn’t make it onto the associated albums, but of course Grant’s and Robert’s offcuts are trimmed from material of the highest quality. ‘Sleeping giant’ and ‘Erotic sunshine’ are two more great Forster songs to add to the collection, and ‘The locust girls’ and ‘Instant replay’ are a whisker from being genuine Grant McLennan classics. His ‘Stone’ is indisputably that, having a lovely, typically yearning melody that once again makes you wish Grant was still with us so that greedily, insatiably, we could have many, many more of them.
- The Go-Betweens – Girl lying on a beach
- Part two: Grant – The Go-Betweens – This girl, black girl
- A jumped up pantry boy on The Go-Betweens
- A jumped up pantry boy on Robert Forster
