I can quite believe I'm the only Go-Betweens fan on the board.

cause i'm goin blind

The two reunion albums are actually pretty good.

i only know like 3 songs...

but i like the few that i've heard!

never got around to listening to the rest of their stuff

To buy Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express.

They of course supported REM on the Green tour.

You can be too fey, IMO.

Bookish, yeah - but fey? That's Robert Smith's preserve, or all those Sarah and Heavenly bands from the late 80's.

I can tolerate a certain amount of antiseptic foppishness from the music I like, but in general, place me squarely in the "rockist" camp. The Go-Betweens simply were too....unrocking for my tastes. Electric instruments were not meant to sound so tamed.

I remember buying a couple Go-Between recs a few years ago to hear what everyone was talking about; I think they might have been early ones: uncatchy riffs, then the singer (McLennan? Forster?) would sound all frail and intellectual, then when the chorus came, he just repeated the title four times over an uncomplicated chord change...this pattern held for six of the seven songs I heard before I took it off the box and filed it away. The melodies were weak, the textures underfed. And the band seemed unwilling or unable to up the energy quotient: a lot of mid-tempo VUish strumming.


I got the impression that these dudes were poets before getting into "rock," which never bodes well for me.

The later stuff is pretty lush - Rickenbackers, oboe, clarinet, piano, strings - approaching even a soul vibe.

If I've already asked you this and just forgot, apolgies, but it's a book on how Joh Bjelke-Peteren's rule of Brisbane impacted the direction of its punk-era music scene, including a good amount of interesting material on the Go-Betweens and (duh) the Saints.

http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=0702233609

I need to.