The Go-Betweens

The Go-Betweens have been called “the quintessential ’80s cult band” for so long they’ve outgrown the name. For one thing, co-founders Robert Forster and Grant McLennan reformed the band in 2000 and have a new album, Oceans Apart, out this spring. More importantly, their late-’80s output shows no sign of being dated—as indicated by Jetset Records’ lavish reissue-and-expansion job on the band’s masterpieces, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express (1986), Tallulah (1987) and 16 Lovers Lane (1988).

“I think we definitely had a bit more experience—that’s a key thing,” Robert Forster says from Brisbane, Australia, where he and McLennan formed the band in 1978. “Those groups of songs sound like songs I wrote when I was, say, 29, 30, 31, and it’s obviously something that has a … depth is the wrong word, but a certain force to it that you can’t have when you’re writing at, say, 23, 24.”

At the time, the albums achieved modest sales, part of the once-inescapable logic of The Go-Betweens’ career: to make album after album of painterly, passionate story-songs with unique narrative depth, all to commercial indifference.

These days, they’re experiencing a resurgence in interest similar to the Velvet Underground—maybe in part because, like Lou Reed, they learned from writers as well as musicians. “Both Grant and I, well, we read,” says Forster, naming influences like Christopher Isherwood, John Kennedy Toole and Anne Sexton. “You look at your lyric writing and say, ‘Somehow I’ve gotta write up to that.’”