Welcome Back! Robert Forster
The Ex-Go Between Returns Alone.
By Mike Barnes

"I never considered giving up music. I always knew I was going to record - it was just more of a question of what and when," says Robert Forster on the rumors that had spread since the death of his partner Grant McLennan and the end of their group, The Go-Betweens, in 2006. "I knew that Grant had left some fantastic songs unfinished, so at least I wanted his songs to go out to the world."

Formed in 1978, The Go-Betweens were Australia's classiest, most erudite pop group throughout the 1980s. They regrouped in 2000, signing off; as it turned out with 2005's enthusiastically received Ocean's Apart. On Forster's first solo album in 12 years, The Evangelist, he has completed three of McLennans's songs. Forster admits this was something he occasionally did after Go-Between's rehearsals when, enthused by his partner's melodies, he would go home and write lyrics.

"Grant would be gracious enough to accept them with a wry smile, as if I'd jumped in on his thing a bit," Forster recalls. "I'd been doing it now and again for the last couple of years, and suddenly the situation arose, with Grant's death, that I was writing lyrics to three of them. It was quite spooky, like in a way I was led into it."

"It Ain't Easy" is a wonderful tribute to his friend, freewheeling through a gallery of vivid images. "It's a very jaunty song, very typical of Grant," Forster explains. "I just thought that because he loved pop so much it would be a nice idea to put a portrait of him within the frame of a pop song/"

The Evangelist, produced by Mark Wallis, who worked on Go-betweens albums 16 Lovers Lane and Ocean's Apart, sounds markedly more stripped down and spontaneous. "I talked a lot about the sound with Mark," Forster says, "I wanted big elements: piano, acoustic guitar, voices, strings. The drums are only on half the album and I wanted it sparse, which I think is my natural sound anyway." Forster has also recently turned his hand to rock journalism, winning an award for his work for Australian magazine The Monthly. But, given the finely observed scenarios and characters of his songs, had he thought about turning his hand to fiction?

"Yes, next year I'm going to write some stories, but there are not unpublished novels in the drawer. I've tried to write a book and it sort of peters out after a few pages. I didn't know if I've got a fiction-writing mind, you know? You see, I have no imagination," he concludes poker-faced. "I don't know if you need imagination for all kinds of writing, and I'm trying to find the one that doesn't."