Why do you like The Go-Betweens?
Ask a simple question…
- Too hard; the all too rare ability to combine talent, taste, style, and wide-ranging themes in a peerless body of work.
- 1. The work of lively minds. 2. A bridge between adolescence and adulthood (mine and theirs) which is open both ways… and if you stand in the middle, you can see both sides. 3. Self-awareness + lack of self-consciousness. 4. An understanding that poetry doesn’t fit into pop music… but pop music can fit into poetry, if you hold it at just the right angle.
- 5. The other reasons.
- Their attention to detail, the squiggles and swerves that elevate them above music that seems superficially similar.
- The fucking songs.
- The drama between the boys and the girls always made for good solid tunes
- They had soul.
- Before Hollywood goes places no one had gone before and no one has gone since. Weird rhythms, time signatures and structures. And yet it sounded absolutely natural. It was a botanic garden in the concrete horror of 1983. They continued with that spirit in the composition but much of the unique style fell away after that, viola and oboe notwithstanding.
- There is something so pure and nostalgic about their music. It’s classic and yet nostalgic.
- Tallulah
- I’m from Brisbane, it’s the law.
- 16 Lovers Lane
- They had melody offset with darkness in a way that wasn’t cliched.
- I like pop that flushes backwards.
- I love the confidence of it. Self-belief. And how it changed and grew over time, got more “adult” and “sophisticated”, but stayed very natural. That.
- Like the best contemporary fiction each song is deceptively sophisticated; simple language used on everyday life, but you fuckin try it.
- True artists.
- Obviously not for everyone. Or they woulda been huge.
- The lyrics and the melodies and the overall feels get under one’s skin. The striped sunlit sound.
- Because this is perfect pop…
- When the rain hits the roof, like the sound of a finished kiss, like a lip lifted from a lip.
- It’s in the rules.
- The best drumming.
- Because it sounds like home.
- Luxurious urgency.
- Because they went halfway round the world to Scotland to make a less grandstanding but better record than anyone else on Postcard, were roundly ignored, went home and then came back for more. I was going to say, “and also the music”, but that IS the music.
- It’s the Brisbane sound. You have to like it.
