The Go-Betweens: A Recording History

The Eighties were a strange time of change for recording practices and for bands. Studios went from the extreme isolation of instruments and drums that were favored in the Seventies to the use of analog and digital drum machines, click tracks, and heavyhanded synth overdubs. Many artists were lured into this world, making records that sound as dated today as they sounded "modern" back then. The Go-Betweens were a band from Australia, in the late Seventies who were originally looking back at the Sixties for inspiration and soon found themselves moving to England and spending ten years or so courting success in the music industry that always seemed a short step away. In the early 1990 they disbanded, after moving back to Australia. Recently a compilation of their more popular songs and a collection of early recordings became available, prompting a short tour. I was lucky to catch Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, the core of the band and both fine songwriters, who performed an amazing acoustic set, and chat with Robert extensively about the Go-Between's experiences in the studio.

When was the first time the Go-Betweens went into the studio?

We went to a studio in Brisbane that's now called Sunshine Studios. It was a 24 track studio we just found in the directory. We didn't know anyone that had done any recordings. Now, it's easier to put out a CD. Records were harder to put out, it was a more difficult process and people didn't record as much. There weren't as many studios and we didn't know anyone that had actually ever been in a studio to recommend us one.

Did you have friends that were in bands?

When we started, no one. We didn't know anyone in bands. We soon met people at gigs and met other bands, but when Grant and I started, we didn't know anyone in bands. We only met other bands and musicians through playing.

What was the studio like? What was the experience?

It was a good experience. It was sort of doing a little bit of country and jingles. The Saints had recorded their first album there... I don't know if you've ever heard of a band called the Saints.

Oh, yeah, I like that band.

They recorded their single there.

"I'm Stranded?"

"I'm Stranded" was recorded there, but we didn't know that!

That's great!

We just had an engineer and were in and out in like four hours. Recording and mixing.

Was that just the first single?

We were overwhelmingly happy, you know it's the first time we had ever played with headphones on, it's the first time we ever played and went back and heard our music over big speakers. It's a very overwhelming experience. It's a wonderful experience. It's an experience that you never forget. It was not a big room, but it was big enough, it was a one-room studio where you're paneled off from the control room so it's just two rooms, but the desk was quite good and they had a decent mic collection. The guy that recorded us was a hippie guy, and hippie guys in the '70s, most times, knew what they were doing, know what I mean? It could have been a lot worse. We could have had some hideous rock guy or some guy that wanted to turn us into a top 40 band. We walked in off the streets, had money to pay for the session, and he was good. He actually engineered our first three sessions because we went back to the same studio. We went back in October, '78 and we recorded a song called "The Sound of Rain" which is on The Lost Album and then we went back and recorded "People Say", which was our second single.We did all of those at the same studio using the same engineer and then, many years later in 1992, I went back to Brisbane after recording my first solo album in Hansa Studios in Germany.

The one you did with Mick Harvey?

Yeah. It was a huge big studio in Berlin. You know, Bowie did Low and Heroes there and Iggy Pop did Lust for Life . After I was in there, U2 went in there and did Achtung Baby . Very famous studio. After that I went back to my hometown in 1992, I went back to the same studio and it hadn't moved and it was the same desk that I recorded my second solo album, Calling From a Country Phone . It was a little bit like Sun. I always imagined it was a little bit like those studios that Buddy Holly did his first recording... you know, sort of a small studio, come in and do a bit of country, we do jingles and it's not the best gear but it's got a certain sort of little funkiness about it.

Those things sound good too. For a very young band that you were at that stage they don't sound like you were being dragged along in the wrong direction; it just sounds like you sounded.

Exactly. Not a particularly polished sound but almost a funky sound.

The other songs that are on the lost album are two track recordings in your bedroom or something. Did you have a friend that brought a deck over or something like that?

Yeah, exactly. It was a little mixer on cassette and he had microphones. He was a friend who had been in a studio and it was really, "Wham-bam" you were on the mat. This was done in my bedroom where we used to practice and write all of the songs. It was like having a friend come over and just go, "Hey, I'm gonna tape. Just set up, I'm gonna tape your whole set." Which was really good, for a songwriter like myself, to hear back all of the songs I'd written. I just got to that one step removed that was really nice and I've always liked that way of recording. Just sort of playing live.

I've heard there were some other bootlegs or something of even more early stuff that was unreleased.

There's a bootleg record as well, that our record label put out and that was put out extensively in the states and it was quite embarrassing because it was like our first album, which is not particularly strong anyway and we were so hungry, this is fast-forwarding to 1980 or 1981 but we were doing demos for our album and we recorded the album in July and we threw a number of songs we didn't put on the album and so he sort of had this other recording in a way. It was all just done in one day. It was done at a studio in Brisbane. More of a demo studio.

Not very professional? After that, you worked with Tony Cohen in Australia.

He did Send Me a Lullaby , our first album. When I went back to Brisbane to do the album back in Sunshine Studios in '92, Tony did that too. So I went back to my first day at the studio and I went back to my first ever producer.

How did you hook up with Tony?

He did those early '80s Missing Link records. Tony was doing everybody. Tony did the Birthday Party, and the Birthday Party were on this label too, and so Tony was the only guy seemingly under the age of 30 in Australia who was adventurous in the recording studio and was sympathetic. He was very good also. So Tony made a lot of records and recorded the Birthday Party and we had heard what Tony had done with them so we were happy to work with Tony.

You were songwriters and that's where the focus of the band. Through the 80s, one of the most horrible recording eras that I can think of, you managed to maintain a pretty good natural sound. You kept things down-to-earth sounding, like a real record, not using big huge gated drums or terrible things that were popular at the moment. And to that end, it's only a handful of producers, like John Brand and Richard Preston that you used quite a bit. How did you hook up with them in the first place?

Very good point you've made which not many people realize, and I appreciate you making that observation.

The records hold up now.

Yeah, because it's true! And everything you've said about the 80s... don't forget we were in London which was where some of the most hideous crimes that were ever committed to recording. We could have easily turned into the Thompson Twins. But John Brand... we were in London in 1982, signed to Rough Trade records, who were a great label at the time, and they picked us up after the first album, after working with Tony Cohen engineering. And we came up to London. This was gonna be our big album and we were not happy with our first album, we didn't particularly like it. But somehow we got a deal out of it. So we were very much, "We've got to make a great second album". And we really wanted to. John had worked with a lot of Virgin records, in the late '80s, had done a lot of engineering on, I can't remember the groups, but it was a time of the Simple Minds, XTC, that whole sort of Virgin records in the late 70s, when they were a big label. And John had got tired of that and wanted to produce and he made a quite astounding jump. He just went to the biggest indie and the most wellknown indie in town, Rough Trade and said, "Hey, I'm a commercial engineer...". He used to work at the Manor, where all the stuff was done up in Oxford in a huge big studio. And he was just working with all the budgets that were fifty thousand pounds, a hundred thousand pounds and he said to Rough Trade, "You know, I'm commercial, I've worked with Virgin, I've worked in big studios, I wanna produce, I'd like to work with some bands and with you." and they played him some stuff and the first album that he did was an Aztec Camera album. And we were friends with Roddy [Frame of Aztec Camera] and everything and then they said, "Well, the Go-Betweens are gonna make a record, do you want to do them too?" And he came to one of our practice sessions, liked what he heard and so John did us too [ Before Hollywood ]. He had this deal where we went down to this place called ICC, down in Eastbourne, which is a Christian stuio and in a way it was a little bit like Sunshine... a funky one-room, not too big control room, I can't remember what desk, good mic collection and really cheap, like two thousand quid a week, like four thousand dollars a week. We did the album there and he was great. He was the first person, ever, who worked, when we were rehearsing, walked into our rehearsal room and taped us, and then came back the next day and had the whole songs written out.

Charted out?

Yeah. Completely. Like this one song, there's an eight bar introduction on it, okay, which was really great, like we went, "Uh huh, so this is what he just does." You know, like Tony never did that. We had never done that on our singles, obviously. And John was very pro. It was the underground weird band with the slightly commercial producer, and somehow we made him sound interesting and he made us sound better than we were in a way. It was a nice marriage.

You enjoyed working with him?

On that album, yeah.

You worked with him after that too. On the next album.

On the next album.

Was that Spring Hill Fair?

Yeah. It was not so... we couldn't decide, and had a larger budget and John went back to his old ways, we were suddenly in SSL, huge big studio-land. He was like, "Now we're going to make a proper record." and I was like, "Our last record was very proper and was very great". It had worked out the first time and then we went down and then we spent a week of him trying to gate the drums and set click tracks. The first and second albums, there's no clicks. It was just really natural, this is why this record stands up, you know, it's all Hammond organs, acoustic guitars, real drums and it's really super, it's really tight but it's a hundred percent natural and it just comes out of it.

It's a standard, real sound.

He must have started to smell the Top 40 and he sort of gets back to his Virgin background more.

Was that a struggle?

Yeah, huge.

How was Lindy [Morrison, the band's long-time drummer] with that sort of thing? Was she hating having to play with the clicks?

Yes, she was. It was just John and us at the studio and we spent the first week just messing around with drums. Now that I look back on it, we almost just told him to go away, but we were down in the south of France. we were down there in the south of France where John had booked this studio. The studio was owned by a guy named Jacque Lucier who is very famous in Europe. He made these contemporary versions of Bach that sold by the truckload and he built the studio down in Provence, down in southern France. He'd built a studio in his chateau and he had his own vineyard. He owned his own wine and so we're down there drinking his wine but it kind of went into a storm. There was a breakdown, there would be John on the phone to London with the manuals out, and we're sitting there going, "We should be recording...". There was a French guy who was co-engineering and we should have just told John to go away and just work with the French guy.

It feels like such a drastic move, at that stage of the game. I'm sure that's hard.

Between those records we recorded some demos. We went into a small studio in London in 1983 and we did some demos because we thought we were going to do the next record on Rough Trade. We went to a studio called Pathway, which is where Elvis Costello did his first album, and it's a very, very funky 8-track in London. Great little 8-track and we met Richard Preston who was the house engineer and these demos sounded really good. After the fiasco with John, on Spring Hill Fair , we just went, "Let's go back to Richard" who we really enjoyed working with and so for our next album we wanted to go back to basics and none of this bullshit.

Like click tracks?

Yeah. All of that, we just decided to just skip.

I just thought that was funny because when I first started buying all of your records I always thought that maybe Spring Hill Fair was a later record than it was, because of the sound of it. When I figured out the chronology of it I thought that was curious and now it totally makes sense.

We sort of went back to a more smaller, funkier studio in London. We went back to acoustic guitars, vibraphones, piano, accordions. This was in late 1985.

Do you feel that, in any way, instrumentation-wise and in the way that you were looking at it that it was a reaction to any other stuff that was going on at the time... or was it more your instinct that made records like what you had listened to?

It was more instinct. It wasn't "Everyone is making synthetic, bing boingy records" that we had to do, we were just following our instincts and we were following the things that we loved.

You think of records that you always liked.

Yeah. And I can't begin to tell you what we would have been listening to.

I always thought of things like, you were saying, that it was possibly Television.

Ah, shit yeah.

Or your voice was the first I had ever heard that reminded me of that.

Yeah.

Or even in some ways things like, you know, Dylan or The Band and stuff like that kind of stuff.

That's exactly what we we're listening to.

Just some things that had a natural feel. You listened to The Band and those guys wouldn't blast it and they sound great.

Yeah, definitely.

So you did Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express and what was after that?

Tallulah .

Were those both with Richard?

Yeah.

Didn't Craig Leon do a little bit for it.

Yeah. They were not happy sessions for me at all and not for, in general, the band. The problem was Liberty Belle... went so well, everyone went, "Hit single time", okay? And we worked with Craig and at Tony Visconti's [ #29 ] studio called Good Earth in Soho in London. Craig and Cassell [Webb] had just done Zodiac Mindwarp with a remake of "Spirit in the Sky".

I remember that.

And it went to number one and so they were hot. We met them and Cassell had played tambourine in the Seeds, Craig had done the first Ramones album and the first Blondie album and they're really nice people and they had great pedigrees and they're in London but Craig was just so... he played keyboards and they were just so fixated on a hit record and that goal. I mean, we paid them the money to do what they wanted to do, but it was soulless. And also, they didn't get us the hit and we sort of looked into that void and it was not something that we wanted to do.

To pursue it?

No.

Those songs they did were shimmery.

It was sort of like, you know, one person doing their bit for eight hours while the rest of the band sat around in the back room and the next day. It took something like nine days to do two tracks. It was just ridiculous.

After that was the "final" album 16 Lover's Lane. And you did that with Mark Wallis and it's a pretty slick album in retrospect. It's probably the slickest of the lot but it does work for you well.

It works great. He was English. We met him when he was a remix specialist. He remixed some of Tallulah and we were just astounded with what he had done and so when we were going to make the last one, we thought we should get him and we wanted to do it in Australia. He came down to a studio called 3.0.1. which is a very famous Australian studio. They had an SSL desk but a monster live room, good gear but SSL, and he had just done the Talking Heads on their Naked album. You'll find his name on whatever U2 album that they made around then.

The name sounds familiar but I wasn't sure.

He was great. Very English, very meticulous. We spent eight weeks on the record which is an eternity for us. But somehow his English meticulousness and his thoroughness, normally that can kill songs if the songs are not great and sometimes, the English groups are not great songwriters [remember, we're not talking about the 60s]. The records sound good but we gave him ten great songs and so he could fuel and craft it and weave around and it worked. It's a record whose estimation has gone up in my mind over time and in a lot of places it's regarded as our best album, which I don't think is true.

I talked to somebody else who is a big fan of the Go-Betweens and I said, "You know, I'm gonna ask them how they were able to hold it together" and they were like, "Yeah, even the last album [which didn't sound right to them] still had amazing songs on it. It's still a great record." So the songs are always the things that survive.

You see, the thing was, everyone wanted him to go down. Our management especially. He had worked with U2, he had worked with these other groups and it was like, "Go make them a rock record." And so he came back with a lot of acoustic guitar, it's really soft and it was like, "What happened?" And Mark just said, they were the songs and that was the sound that the songs needed and so it worked out. It's very slick, it's very smooth and the next one that we were going to make before we broke up, well, the one I wanted to make was a reaction against that. We were going to go down and make an album with Tony Cohen.

So with the band breaking up you started your solo career. The first record, Danger in the Past, sounds great. That's a Mick Harvey production for sure. There's so much reverb on that record which is usually something like an 80s thing, a real dated factor. But that record still sounds really great. Was that natural reverb from that studio?

Yeah. A lot of it is and that record was very much the direction that I wanted to go in, especially with the Go-Betweens. That was where I wanted to move to, where we're playing together in a big room with a good desk, a good engineer and people standing around playing. I always did like it. We did that record in 12 days. The recording room is an old ballroom and so you're talking aircraft hangar size. This place is so big that they also hold gigs there very occasionally on this stage where you could fit an enormous band with ceilings that are 100 to 200 feet high. I went, "This is the room!" and we were just a three piece, myself on guitar, Mick Harvey on bass and Thomas Wydler, of the Bad Seeds, playing drums and we would just sit up in this room, just playing, with Victor Van Vugt [ #48 ] engineering, a Neve disk with microphones and that was the whole deal. My philosophy is you don't need time, if everything you're recording sounds great then you spend so much less time fixing it up. If it goes good down to tape, every chord and every sound is good, then that's recording your way. And I loved the sound of that record and I don't think there was much reverb coming from the desk. I think a lot of it was in the room.

I always listened to that, thinking that it couldn't be digital reverb it wouldn't have sounded that good.

No. It's the room.

It's a beautiful sound, it's really spacious, yet it doesn't sound like giant, huge stadium rock or something. It's very spacious and draws you in.

Spacious. It's loud, it comes to you but because it's analog there's that softness that you can lean into. It's not like that hard-edged, slapping around the face type of sound. I really love the sound of that. We recorded it in 1990. When the Go-Betweens had been on tour in Berlin in '87 I found out about the studio because Bowie and Iggy had recorded there and I just thought I would come down and have a look. I got in a cab and I went down and I just went, "I'll come back here one day." It amazed me and then two and a half years later the band had broken up, I'm suddenly living in Germany and it was like, "Let's go to Hansa". A strange prophesy came true.

Did you enjoy working with Mick Harvey?

Yeah. Mick's great. I love Mick's philosophy of recording and I just agree with him and I think he's fantastic. I love the way he plays instruments. He's a very good piano player... I love the way he plays drums. He's just someone you could give a trumpet and somehow he'd play it and maybe do one little thing on the record and it'd be great. He's just great.

And you agree with the way he records?

Towards the end of the Go-Betweens I was getting into the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds records, the way they were sounding, and they were getting all of these old keyboards and everything sounded natural. I was just going, "This is the way I want us to sound". I don't want to make a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record obviously, with Nick's lyrical thrust and everything like that, but the sound of his records... I wanted the Go-Betweens to approach recording like the way the Bad Seeds do it. And I thought that we were also a band that could do it. And the Bad Seeds record, the sound of it and the way they were recorded lies a lot in the hands of Mick Harvey, definitely, especially at that stage in the '80s.

That came out really great. The record I don't have, your second solo album, where did you record that?

It was at Sunshine. That was going back to Brisbane, the one I did with Tony Cohen. I just wanted to go back to my hometown and record after the big Berlin thing. The material that I was writing just lead me in this direction, I just wanted to go back to a studio that did jingles. That might do the odd country act. I wanted to get back to that. In my personal life, my wife and I wanted to move back to my hometown and I started to go out to venues and look at musicians in my hometown and I made that type of record.

Are you happy with that one?

I am. The songs probably aren't as good. The songs probably aren't as strong as on Danger in the Past . I like the sound of it. It's a smaller, homey sound. It's like a Neve desk and a small recording room. It's a little more boxy which is the sound I wanted to go for. I didn't want to make another big record. The sound of the record is more important to me. I wanted to go for lo-fi later on. It's the way I wanted to go. I wanted to make more Brisbane, let's-put-a-couple-of-mics-up-around-a-lounge room record. More casual, a little bit more time. I should have followed my convictions a little bit more. There's a record of mine that I produced, I did that. I should have maybe of gone a little bit more funkier. I like it. There's sort of a dark star of everything that I'd gotten.

Then there was Warm Nights, that last record, with Edwyn Collins producing, right?

He is a complete and utter studio sound obsessive. He buys gear on the road, like when he's on the road he goes to vintage sound shops. And buys things that he takes back to his studio. You know, like, the record company people are trying to get him to do interviews and he goes off and buys gear. He's got a 16-track Neve that he bought years ago for a ridiculous price that people would now pay in the millions. He's got a great microphone collection.

You did the whole record on his personal studio?

It was the first record that he had done in the studio. I just wanted to go for more rhythmic sound, a lot more muddy sort of "Creedencey". I was listening to a lot more Atlantic records like the late 60s, early 70s. Just two mics on the drums and a really warm bass.

The title sounds like the sound of the record. I always think of that one as being a fuzzy warm record.

 Edwyn's always been a big Al Green fan and he's listened to and appreciates a lot more 70s black music than I have. It's a lot more swampy and a lot of it we just did as a three piece like the drums, bass and guitar. We kept everything like most of those tracks were just the three of us playing and then we'd come in and we'd overdub really lightly. I really like that record. It's my favorite... I have to say Danger in the Past is my second favorite.

One of the reasons I thought about doing the interview is that the GoBetweens records and your records had a real different feel to them.

Yeah, my three albums of original material have been Berlin, Brisbane and London and it's been Mick Harvey, myself, Edwyn Collins producing. With records it's really like casting to me, the songs start to get a feel. I want to talk about form. I can imagine going down to Tucson, there's a feel in that Calexico album and it's just amazing. You just get into it. You know the Band albums that you were talking about. You just get into a feeling and you've just got to follow it. Sometimes you might want to make an 80s digital gated drum-type record.

It's ironic.

Now it's ironic. Edwyn and I will be recording those drums and Edwyn will just go "bum, bum, bum" and he'll get the gated drum sound just for a joke. He is really lucky because when his studio opened, people would come in, like the big producers around town would go in and go, "What the fuck is going on here? We're never gonna bring anything in here." But the good thing about is he had earned enough money off "A Girl Like You." He built the studio he wanted to build and so he doesn't have to buy all the latest toys.

To sell the studio.

Yeah, to sell the studio. Because he doesn't need anyone else to come in. His studio reminds me a lot of Lee "Scratch" Perry with his studio in the 70s. It's exactly the sort of thing it is and it's personal. It's like, "This is the sound of the studio and not fishing for top 40 acts. Not fishing for some sort of generic indie rock thing. This is the way I want my records to sound" and it's a very personalized thing and that's what I love about what he does.

I like that. It had a great feel. How long did you spend on that?

It was actually quite long. It took about six weeks but he was still involved with the promotional period of "A Girl like You". This was still going on. And so, there'd be things like him taking two days off to go to Sweden and then he'd come back and then "This TV show wants you..."

A lot of interruptions while you were trying to work on it.

And it was the first album he did so when I walked into the studio on the first day, he had a soldering iron and was on the ground. I was like, "Okay, alright, we're not gonna be getting sounds in the first two hours." But that's what's great about Edwyn, he's very much a producer/engineer and he's very much out there on his hands and knees putting the mics beside the Fender speakers. He's very hands-on.

The only other solo record is the covers record which you produced. Was that done with Tony Cohen?

No. That was done at a studio, a good studio down in Melbourne. The record I'm not that keen about.

It's not your songs, first off, you know. I think some of them were great, I think the Grant Hart cover is one of my favorites.

Yeah, that's good. There's a few good things on it, but I hadn't written any songs for a long time and there were a lot of songs from around 1989-90 and I recorded the album in 1994 so it was already past the period that I was covering.

You were infatuated with these songs?

Yeah. It was about five years old, I don't know what I was doing. It was one of those things to start things off that I shouldn't have done.

The title is from Jonathan Richman. But you didn't do that song on there.

No, no. I tried to do one of Jonathan songs but I wracked my brain for months trying to think of songs and I wanted to do a song of his called "Important in Your Life" because it was like a great song.