THE GO-BETWEENS - The Forum, London

There are those that would argue that the Go-Betweens invented beauty, that they were the first to realise that a tenderly jangled guitar and lyrics steeped in poetry can capture the idealistic joy of true love. And most of them are here to re-live the past glories of Australia's finest cultural achievement. But for all those dreamers who merely had their souls enriched by the Go-Betweens legacy - Belle And Sebastian, Field Mice, The Auteurs - this has nothing to do with the dry self-congratulation of nostalgia and absolutely everything to do with reaffirming your faith in both grace and sensitivity. It is as current as your latest infatuation.

Two quiet icons lie at the core of the band. The obvious focus is Robert Forster, a knowing charmer who's made a career out of wearing bad shirts and coming over both as playboy and poet. His ungeeky good looks form the crux of the GBs: the knowledge that while many of the cutie romantics are singing about imagined love with a perfect girl, Forster is licking the wounds of actual experience. His is a heart that's been tied up and held for ransom again and again, and still he hasn't learnt to be overly bitter. Instead, you can hear him chasing devotion and making the same glorious mistake in nearly every song.

One life-changing songwriter should be enough, but to Robert's left is Grant McLennan, a man who takes Forster's faith in idealism and then runs riot with it. The fact that he resembles a builder who's just wandered in to bash out a few songs while he waits for the concrete to set, is equally cruical to the GB's appeal. For those who feel that suave Forster moanining about dating goddesses has the potential to be rather irritating, there's the down-to-earth, as-ugly-as-the-rest-of-us McLennan to take thoses everyday moments and - voila ! - turn them into something to treasure. To embody the redeeming dreams of every plain person present.

It's hard to pick out highlights when the entire gig is enough to have everyone sobbing and grinning with epiphany, but here goes. "Head Full Of Steam" is awash with the sheer leap-before-you-look irrationality of romance, as is the joyus "Spring Rain", a flag-waving anthem for the happily hopeless. "Right Here" is the simplest gooey emotion - the pain of missing the one you love - made to fill a vast room of affectionate strangers, while the final (fourth!) encore, "Apology Accepted", is the most precious expression of insecurity ever. It's also confirmation of just how vital the GBs are now, as a living, breathing, creative entity. This isn't emotional archaeology, but young music for people who just happened to grow up. And grow up beautifully.

IAN WATSON - Melody Maker, 28th June 1997

THE GO-BETWEENS - London Kentish Town Forum

"... Consider that The Go-Betweens first split up nigh on a decade ago and that they originally formed in the late '70s and it becomes somewhat obvious that they are far, far removed from their wide-eyed screamy teenies. Expect not mucho pandemonium of the rawk variety, frankly. And indeed, fresh from the Fleadh, The Go-Betweens give it some severely mature pop/rock welly before a decidedly devotional audience who still cherish their original Rough Trade singles like the Super Mario brothers never happened.

The Go-Betweens now number four, with perennial singing guitarists Grant McLennan and partner-in-chime Robert Forster joined by drummer Russ MacLennan and bassist Adele Pickvance. And a feistily nostalgic racket they create too, all heartfelt acoustic strums, lithe jangles and crushingly lovelorn chord changes as they cruise through the aged and the raged, from 'Cattle And Cane' to 'Right Here', from 'Lee Remick' to 'Bye Bye Pride'.

All sounds unnervingly familiar, right? Well, no, not really. And here's the rub: no matter which record company bankrolled them or how many indie pop kids proclaimed them to be genius, The Go-Betweens remained stoutly incapable of getting anywhere near having a hit single - they never even cracked the Top 75. And now? Now they're just another bunch of couldabeen/wouldabeen popsters, albeit with added pizazz, passion and nifty tunes such as 'Rock'n'Roll Friend', 'Love Is A Sign' and a stomping 'Karen', safe in the knowledge that a clutch of piss-poor charlatans have spent the past ten years stealing their commercial thunder."

SIMON WILLIAMS - NME

Listening to favorite records from an earlier period in your life is more than a simple act of nostalgia. Sure, certain singles and albums can bring back memories of certain situations. But when a group is somewhat obscure, not an ever-present classic-rock fixture, and you've been away from their music for a while, something else happens: you don't hear the songs exactly the way you did the first time -- even the last time -- you listened to them.

This little observation stems from the reissue of a half-dozen '80s albums -- 1981's Send Me a Lullaby, 1983's Before Hollywood, 1984's Spring Hill Fair, 1986's Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, 1987's Tallulah, and 1988's 16 Lovers Lane (reissued in the UK only) -- by the Australian group the Go-Betweens. All six spent serious time on my turntable during my mid to late teens. Hearing them now I feel bemused pity for a teenager drawn to such an "adult" group. For the Go-Betweens' brand of rock is definitely not teenage. Grant McLennan and Robert Forster sing in almost grandfatherly tones -- the former calm and kind, the latter achy and cranky. The group's cello-laden folk-punk has an antique, early-20th century feel. And their subject matter -- aging sisters who sleep in the back of a feminist bookstore, for instance -- hardly speaks to the raging hormones and self-involved emotional grandeur of juvenile experience.

But I wasted most of my teenage years being mature; I responded to the Go-Betweens instinctively, even if I didn't fully understand them. Also, rock music was more literate (and in its worst instances, literary) in the '80s than it is today. The Go-Betweens were just one of many artists -- Orange Juice, Lloyd Cole, Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera, and the Smiths -- who cared, with varying results, about lyrics and language. Though American critics salivated over Elvis Costello's wordplay for wordplay's sake, less celebrated figures like Kirsty MacColl (too female), Morrissey (too gay and adolescent), and Forster (too eccentric) offered keener human insights -- they never suffocated their songs with cleverness.

Forster's monologues, delivered in the voice of a forlorn playboy, are pitched between poetry and conversation, between wet-eyed drama and dry humor. Faced with everyday misery, any lyricist can come up with a couplet like "Yes, my world's tumbling down / Stone by stone to the ground" but few would think to add "Please take out the garbage"; at the end, like Forster does on "You Can't Say No Forever" from 16 Lovers Lane.

While the 18-year-old Midwestern me didn't grasp Forster's scathing portraits of West Coast psychology, the 28-year-old Californian me understands them all too well. Two examples: Tallulah's "The House that Jack Kerouac Built," a withering look at withered bohemia; Spring Hill Fair's "Draining the Pool for You" which depicts a Hollywood party where the only intelligent person is the guy hired to clean the pool. "Your interest in freaks / The side show, the low life, holds nothing for me / Because I've seen it / Almost been it, and it's not my cup of thrills." Forster sings during the latter number.

Apt words from a group whose songs face solitude and mortality not with Goth-rock pretense but straightforwardly. Both Forster and McLennan have numerous ditties about funerals and spinsters, but they bring contrasting views to the subjects. McLennan's best love songs fuse irresistible tenderness with irresistible hooks: "Bachelor Kisses" (Spring Hill Fair) is like Roxy Music's Avalon with a heart; "Quiet Heart" (16 Lovers Lane) is the sensitive confession Springsteen tried for with "I'm on Fire"; But Forster is the idiosyncratic romantic -- he knows how to make a listener/lover obsessive.

It's hard for me to pick one Go-Betweens album to recommend. All swirling chimes and strings, Tallulah has a Phil Spector magnificence. The melodies on 16 Lovers Lane are luminous and bell-pure. But Spring Hill Fair is my favorite, perhaps because it's the first one I bought. A survey in the most recent issue of Puncture notes that "the kind of people who like the Go-Betweens are also the kind who don't hear them as an acquired taste, who believe ... everyone else would hold them dear as well, if their attention could only be drawn in the direction of these songs, these sounds."

True: As a teen I wrote a silly fanzine rant berating "stupid earthlings" for ignoring the group. Unfortunately, these reissues will probably be neglected, just like the original albums. All the same, they prove that great music doesn't die easily.

Some bands just seem to outgrow thier natural life through sheer influence. Something profound dictates that as thier reputation accumulates people remember them as a far more important feature of their given era than they actually were at the time. Usually, it turns out to be a beneficial process for all concerned: we've witnessed it with The Velvet Underground apropos the Sixties, and Big Star with regard to the Seventies. Now it's looking as though The Go-Betweens could be the latest addition to the cult godhead canon.

Unlike say, the Velvets, it wasn't rampant avant-gardism that made The Go-Betweens out of step with their time, more a gentle melodic sensiivity requiring (probably too much) patience and understanding.Hailing from Brisbane,they made six wispy, understated albums of critically-worshipped folk-pop before splitting in 1989. In the process, they did for Australia's jangly what The Smiths and R.E.M. did respectively for Britain's and America's, only minus the commercial plaudits.

But now they're back.Initially,the plan for twin emotional troubadours Robert Forster and Grant McLennan to reunite was a one off gig,to be performed in Brisbane under the tongue-in-cheek moniker,The Australian Go-Betweens - a break from thier solid if unspectacular,solo careers. As word got around and gigging tastes were re-aquired, though, things escalated.

They've been missed. The Go-Betweens' final three albums were flush with crisp, emotion-heavy folk music but suffered from typically Eighties-style icy, aloof production. What we find Forster and McLennan (the sole representatives from the original line-up,joined here by - unrelated - drummer Ross MacLennan and bassist Adele Pickvance ) doing tonight is replacing those icy edges with a hitherto untouched personal warmth. Hence "Right Here" and "Bye Bye Pride" - from 1987's frosty but shiny Tallulah - sound as though they've been handed a metaphorical pair of mittens. Even the skeletal chill of early songs like "Cattle and Cane" feels significant.

It's the material from Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express - the album the band recorded while cold and near starving in London in 1985 - that really heats the place up tonight. Forster sings "Spring Rain" and "To Reach Me", exhibiting a stern vocal style and the kind of wistful, poetic inclination that Ron Sexsmith might love. Prowling the stage at a dark,authoritative six-foot plus, he also cuts it as the world's best-looking fortysomething rocker (although if anything,The Go-Betweens' bookish demeanour was always counter to any rock star aesthetic).

By contrast, McLennan is a smaller, balding figure, and his songs might seem to err on the bland side. He is the convivial balladeer to Forster's caustic mysterian. Yet clearly his mellifluous input provides an essential foil. And when, on "Quiet Heart", he seems to take Forster's tougher soul and make it his own, there are few more yearningly dependable sounds available to the human race.

Neither one of these men sounds like the most naturally gifted musician ever, but , with their opposing chemistries, they've created a subtly stunning musical niche; a modest relationship-documenting pastoral pop which, while too careful and honest back then, now its simplicity makes sense.You could call it music for quiet people, but tonight - embraced by the biggest British crowd it has ever seen, and played with new passion - it made some noise. When can we have some more.

TOM COX - UNCUT