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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Grant & I Inside and Outside the Go-Betweens by Robert Forster Grant & I review – Robert Forster writes moving, definitive portrait the Go-Betweens deserve. F ifty pages into this long-awaited memoir, songwriter, critic and author Robert Forster gets very meta. “If a film of Grant & I is ever made, it could start here,” he writes. It’s 1978, and he and Grant McLennan, the co-founders of the Go-Betweens, are driving from Brisbane to Sydney for the first time. After crossing the Tweed river into New South Wales, McLennan dashes into a shop, and emerges triumphantly waving a copy of Playboy, which was banned in Queensland at the time. Of course, this being the Go-Betweens, they’re reading it for the articles – in this instance, Bob Dylan’s first full-length interview in three years, which McLennan ecstatically reads to Forster as the car races past canefields on their left, Mount Warning on the right (“Cue thundercrack,” Forster says). The Go-Betweens always were the most self-referential of groups, as well as the most literate. Grant & I would make the most bookish of buddy films. That’s not to say they were square. “On many occasions dark rock bands would encounter the Go-Betweens expecting namby-pamby, book- besotted, cocoa-drinking wimps, to find themselves partied under the table. We were a rock’n’roll band,” Forster declares. Yet it’s both a strength and a weakness that this often very moving book avoids the cliched recounting of rock’n’roll excess – until those excesses inevitably begin to catch up with them. The obvious stylistic inspiration for Grant & I is Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which centres on her enduring friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. But whereas Smith’s book skirts around her years of fame (like Dylan’s Chronicles, another reference point), Forster revels in his: each album, each single of the Go-Betweens’ career is lovingly charted – if only they had actually charted. This is a tale of cult stardom, of missing hits and hits-that-missed. Grant McLennan and Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens. The heart of the memoir is their close friendship. Photograph: Penguin Random House. At one point, Forster writes of “the lengthy entry in the rock encyclopaedia that we felt the group deserved”. With Grant & I, he has all but written it himself. Some of the best passages of this book are clear-eyed critiques of his own band’s work as they navigate the usual artistic pitfalls: grinding poverty, unrecouped advances, unsympathetic producers, and drum machines used to tame a true original – Lindy Morrison, with whom Forster was in a relationship for eight years. The heart of the book, though, is about a close friendship with someone who remained unknowable: a “naive boy” who kept a close watch on his inner life, only to pour it out in songs such as the revered Cattle and Cane and its companion, Dusty in Here. Both songs reference McLennan’s father, who died when he was six. Yet as Grant & I (and the band’s career) unfurls, McLennan recedes; as his friendship with Forster is attenuated to a few words or glances, it’s easy to lose sight of him. And in this, there is an omission. The shadow of heroin hangs over this book, but we don’t know of it until Forster drops the bombshell of his own diagnosis with hepatitis C, a likely consequence of his own dabbling with the drug. It’s well known in rock circles that McLennan was a long-term user; Steve Kilbey’s book Something Quite Peculiar speaks bitterly of McLennan introducing him to opiates, and the journalist Clinton Walker has also written of his habit. It’s obviously a charged topic. Yet towards the end, as McLennan begins to fall apart physically and emotionally – alcohol, Forster notes, was “eating him out, destroying him, and he knew it”, and songwriting sessions between the pair occasionally lapsed into therapy – it’s impossible for anyone familiar with the Go-Betweens’ story not to question the toll it took not just on McLennan, but on everyone in and around the band, not least his best friend. The awful ending is already known and, as Forster has conceded publicly, McLennan’s death at the age of 48 from a heart attack came as a shock, but not a surprise. That’s another rock’n’roll cliche, and it’s to Forster’s credit that he avoids it in the beautifully written final chapters, which still manage to build tension leading up to the tragedy that finished the band 10 years ago. “I’ll carry it on,” Forster says, a promise to ensure the group’s legacy is not forgotten. Grant & I : inside and outside the Go-Betweens. Robert Forster has written a deeply personal reflection and celebration of his friendship and collaboration with Grant McLennan in ‘the Go- Betweens’. Covering the background stories to some of their most well known songs, their adventures in London, Glasgow, Europe, and the US, and dealing for the first time with the devastating personal consequences of the band’s break-up… “He would have talked film, and told me that he worked part time at the university cinema – the Schonell; I would have countered with music, that I owned an electric guitar and had just started a band … “ Robert Forster met Grant McLennan at the University of Queensland, Australia in the mid 1970s as two undergrads with a shared passion for music, film, poetry and pop culture, and a reputation for duelling sword fights across city traffic. After a bizarre audition and early rehearsals into a cassette player, they formed The Go-Betweens in 1978, and created a strand of Bohemian Pop Music full of literary allusions and local references that stood out amidst the exploding local punk rock scene at the time. Over the next eleven years the band bloomed, to release a number of singles and six acclaimed albums on some of the best Indie labels of the decade – Postcard, Rough Trade, Sire and Beggars Banquet. The markers of mainstream success alluded The Go-Betweens ; there were no stadium tours or top forty hits, despite a fine run of singles from ‘Cattle and Cane’ to ‘Streets Of Your Town’ via ‘Spring Rain’. Instead the band’s music was loved by a devoted audience that grew album to album, world tour to world tour, until the band broke up in late 1989. Now, forty years after they first met and eleven years after Grant’s tragic passing, Robert Forster has written a deeply personal reflection and celebration of his friendship and collaboration with Grant McLennan. Covering the background stories to some of their most well known songs, their adventures in London, Glasgow, Europe, and the US, and dealing for the first time with the devastating personal consequences of the band’s break-up. Grant & I also chronicles both songwriters movements and work in the nineties, for them to restart The Go-Betweens in 2000. The group were to make three more albums, their last, ‘Oceans Apart’ branded an ‘Instant Classic’ by Mojo in 2005. Beyond his time as a Go- Between, Robert documents the moments that flame his own anxieties and jubilations – from his failed University career and first love, to his Hepatitis C diagnosis, and starting a family with his German wife. Brilliantly told with heart, humour and great reverence, Grant & I is an extraordinary portrait of an intense, creative and sometimes fraught friendship that represented a genuine meeting of artistic minds. Grant & I is wise and witty, poignant and insightful, self-deprecating and knowledgeable, proving Robert Forster to be as natural a storyteller and prose writer as he is a songwriter. You can hear Robert Forster perform and talk of his musical life, art and books at the Shaw Theatre in London on Monday 25 th September. Grant & I : Inside and Outside the Go-Betweens. Available. Expected delivery to the Russian Federation in 13-17 business days. Description. Grant & I is the story of the friendship and collaboration of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, who gave Australia The Go-Betweens, one of our best and most influential bands. It was named Book of the Year 2017 by Mojo and Uncut magazines. The Go-Betweens, one of Australia's most talented and influential bands, very nearly wasn't. Grant McLennan didn't want to be in a group, and couldn't even play an instrument. That didn't stop the singer-songwriter duo of Forster/McLennan becoming one of the most acclaimed partnerships in Australian music history. Just as The Go-Betweens always defied categorisation, Grant & I is like no other rock memoir. At its heart is a privileged insight into a prolific artistic collaboration that lasted three decades, and an extraordinary friendship that rode out the band's break-up to remain strong until Grant's premature death in 2006. Unconventional in lineup and look, noted for near misses and near hits, always a beat to one side of the mainstream - the band's unusual beginnings were followed by twists that often confounded its members as well as fans and record companies. The story of The Go-Betweens is also the story of the times, and Grant & I is a wonderfully perceptive look at the music industry and a brilliantly fresh take on the sounds of the era. As distinctive a writer of prose as he is of songs, Robert Forster is wise and witty, intimate and frank, astute and knowledgeable. There could be no better tribute than Grant & I to this partnership and band who remain loved and revered.