Grant McLennan
The Go-Betweens cannon. You must be very proud. Do you like the fact that's it's an undiscovered treasure?
"I think it's fantastic. It's just there, like this beautiful seam of melody and sound, waiting for a boy or a girl or someone from another planet to walk in and be dazzled by it. And the love affair begins. It's great. I feel the same way about music I discovered. You feel fantastic. But we are immensely proud of it. Of course, me and Robert had to listen back to the songs and compare them to the previous pressings and stuff. Just hearing all the songs in a row, you can hear the developmant. I still dig a lot of the songs."
But no hits. It's still unfaithomable.
"I know what you are saying . Looking back and seeing that none of it is charted, a lot of people would say that's unsucessful. But 'Marquee Moon' sold nothing, and I know much I still enjoy listening to Television. It dosen't really matter. To me the things I like, and that a lot of my friends like, are the things that maybe have fallen under the floorboards a bit. Our music was never connected with any kind of movement. There's a guilelessness to our music which I'm happy with."
Failure must've been galling at the time.
"I always thought to myself, what are we doing wrong? But by extention, what are we doing right? We were thinking, God, what's wrong with melody, what's wrong with guitars, what's wrong with ambition? I agree, it does say more about the 80's than it does about us, but then out of the '80s have come some good things today."
What's your favortie Robert Forster song?
There are some many! I'll just say at the moment - 'Rock & Roll Friend'. But then I could go back to 'People Say', the second single, which is a fantastic piece of pop music, or 'Karen' - a great individual slice of liberatiuon of R&B. Then I could go through every album...I enjoy all his songs."