AustLit

'Long before earning a place as one of Australia’s best-loved bands, The Go-Betweens sprang from the close creative pairing of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, who met as students at the University of Queensland. As Forster makes clear in this tender memoir, he wanted McLennan in the band not because of his musical ability – he had never played an instrument – but because of their intense friendship and shared appreciation of literature and film. ‘We’d come to The Go-Betweens as romantics, me teaching my best friend bass,’ writes Forster. When they began playing together at the end of 1977, McLennan was much more interested in cinema than in music (‘He burnt for the screen’). But McLennan quickly mastered the bass before graduating to guitar and authoring many of the band’s most enduring songs (including ‘Cattle and Cane’ and ‘Streets of Your Town’). The Go-Betweens went on to release nine studio albums. Forster and McLennan were working on a tenth when McLennan died after a sudden heart attack in 2006.' (Introduction)