The Go-Betweens: Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express

Week 22

THE PITCH

You like words and stories, Claire, so I give you The Go-Betweens and their 1986 album Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express.

Just like in life, timing is important when it comes to falling in love with a group and their music. So I don’t know whether you will fall for the Go-Betweens and whether the timing will be right for you, but when I first encountered them back in 1987, the timing was perfect for me. I fell hard for their literate, spiky, guitar jangle pop. Back in the 80s, it was impossible, of course, to call up a band and their entire back catalogue instantly. For a long time, I didn’t even own their music on LP, instead having a home-made C90 cassette, copied from my brother (elder brothers can be a great source of music). So I didn’t even know what they looked like, and as they were barely covered by the music press, I related to them entirely through their music. Melodic guitar pop has always been my thing, but voices are so important and I loved Grant McLennan’s warm, yearning voice, and Robert Forster’s sharper, angular tones. I didn’t always know what they were singing about, but enjoyed the glimpses into a bohemian world in far-off Brisbane, full of picaresque adventures, in their own words ‘trouble-makers on the run.’ There’s so much to enjoy in their lyrics: ‘If the devil had seen your dress/he would have changed his name/put down his fork and moved up above/why burn in hell when you can burn in love’ and ‘the light always shines the brightest/in the core of a flame’ (I could carry on…)

This album is their finest for me (although this is much debated by fans). At the heart of the band was the songwriting/guitar duo of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, and the powerful drumming of Lindy Morrison (female drummers were practically unheard of in 80s music), but there’s also a bassoon, a cello, violas and violins too, all creating a richness that goes beyond simple guitar pop.

The majority of the music I have sent you so far is 40 years old. Have you heard of the memory bump? This may explain why this music is encoded on my brain and goes back to timing again. I hope you enjoy it too – The Go-Betweens are no more and never will be again. They were always tipped for massive pop success but sadly timing didn’t work for them, and they always under-appreciated. Still, they have a small but fiercely loyal fan-base, and created a beautiful legacy of music. Grant died in 2006, but Robert is still out there touring, and sometimes comes to Glasgow…

Rachel Davison

MY RESPONSE

Thank you for the Go-Betweens, Rachel – with a few exceptions, it’s taking me a while to decide if I like a new album or not but this one settled into my head like something I’d heard and liked before from my first listening. Does it sound similar to something else I know and like? If so what? Or maybe I too am discovering that ‘melodic guitar pop’ is my thing. It’s deceptively simple – you think you know what you’re listening to and then they throw in an accordion or some strings and suddenly it all seems bigger. Can I say it sounds authentic? I’m not sure what I mean by that. I think it seems like they’re making songs about slightly random things they know and are interested in. Sometimes the lyrics are bitty and rambling so that you’re not sure what’s going on but somehow it works anyway and sometimes they drop in a line that’s so perfect someone’s probably got a tattoo of it:

When the rain hits the roof/With the sound of a finished kiss

A hole in the ground spits dirt at the sun

Driving my first car/My elbow’s in the breeze

The water so black/You could make a shroud

It’s interesting when artists manage to convey the flavour of their origins and so I was searching here for Australia. You can hear it occasionally in their vowels – in The Ghost and the Black Hat I heard the repeated line as ‘won’t you wither’ until I read the lyrics and discovered that it is ‘won’t you wear the’, a combination of Aussie vowels and the weirdness of ending a line with ‘the’. Australia is there in the stories too, the water tank and dusty creek in The Ghost and the Black Hat, the sailing ship in Palm Sunday. I’m wondering about the rain in Spring Rain. Is this particularly Australian rain, ‘Falling down like sheets/Falling down like love’? It’s welcome, surprising. Very much not like Scottish rain!

This idea of the ‘memory bump’ would explain why most of my contributors are, like you, reaching for albums from the past to engage me. Of course for me as far as music goes, the memory bump isn’t really a factor, since I simply stopped listening to anything new (or anything much) in about 1995 which means ALL the music I have stored in my head is from before I was thirty. Apart from the albums I’ve been given to listen to this year and the spin-offs of those albums, what I’ve been reaching for is largely late 70s and 80s stuff. I struggled to pick tunes for my one-track-per-year birthday playlist from those years not because – like the later years – I couldn’t think of anything, but because there were too many possibilities to choose from. I managed to piece together the soundtrack of my childhood without too much difficulty but the end of the playlist is a nonsense.

WHAT ELSE I’VE LISTENED TO THIS WEEK

Richard Hawley Coles Corner

The Wombats Glitterbug

Diner soundtrack

Mekons Curse of the Mekons

The National Sleep Well Beast

Blondie Parallel Lines

The Go-Betweens 16 Lovers Lane

The La’s The La’s