SHADOWPLAY REMAKES ROBERT FORSTER part two
- Bernard Zuel
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
“I LISTENED TO BLONDE ON BLONDE a couple of years ago, which I hadn’t heard in years, and there’s mistakes on it, where you can hear the band when Dylan repeats something, like a phrase, that’s new in the song, and the band doesn’t know. You can actually hear the bass player thinking the song goes along that verse and suddenly Dylan stays on something and it’s the wrong note, but Dylan kept it,” says Robert Forster, caught up in a rave about not sweating the small stuff, which had begun from a story about doing the vocals on his previous album and spread now to heroes past and present, and on to his newest record.
“I am a big fan of Neil Young’s mid ‘70s albums where you can hear mistakes on that when Neil Young is doing all his vocals live, like Dylan, and you can hear him coming in and off the mic as he is playing guitar. Every engineer would say ‘that far from the microphone, don’t go in, don’t go out’ but Neil Young is doing that all the time.
“I started to listen to this and I came to it with the last album, that mistakes don’t matter. I’m not going to go back because people don’t really care or hear it. So you are perfecting something that doesn’t need to be perfected. And with my music, I’m not doing complicated yacht rock or dance music with 100 tracks on it and it’s all synchronised. Live ensemble playing suits my songwriting.”
That’s more of the letting go Brisbane’s pop laureate described in part one of this interview yesterday, this freeing of expectations and demands that played into the decisions around Strawberries, his ninth solo album after a stack of them in two periods with The Go-Betweens going back to the late ‘70s and ending in 2006 due to the death of the band’s co-founder, Grant McClennan.
Among those decisions, like switching from primarily personal songs to (mostly) fictional narratives, was making the album in Stockholm in two weeks with a bunch of semi-strangers under the eye of producer Peter Moren, and maybe even the slide into the rare spotted Robert Forster Boogie, as represented in the new song, All Of The Time.
“You give a Swedish band that type of rhythm and that’s what they’ll do,” Forster says with a grin at the very idea of being the boogie man when spare, angular, literate and slyly melodic has been his calling card for 50 years. “They’ll be very convincing, they will take it in that direction.
“The beauty of working with them was that I knew whatever material I give to them it wouldn’t be a wash, a pale version of anything: they really go in to what that sounds like to them, what kind of song that is, what kind of music or notes that is, and they play it fully, authentically.”
He would have had a sense of that potential from having played gigs with a few with them on previous tours of Sweden, but nonetheless it required a leap of faith that everyone involved in the studio – younger, not necessarily fans, or for that matter aware of him, with little time beyond the first week of rehearsals – would suit. Even more than that leap, it might well have required a change in the way Forster thinks, accepting that an uncomfortable or uncertain situation might be the best spark.
“I thought it would work. I have, I think, a romantic disposition and I love the concept of it,” he says. “I’m happy every now and then to just put myself in these positions. The one thought that I did have was I thought we might not get one or two songs. That as good as they are, because of the time, because it was all going fairly quickly for modern record making, that the album might come down to 7 songs. That the chemistry mightn’t be right. But I went into it very wholeheartedly, lightheartedly – it was an adventure. And I’m up for that.”
It’s unlikely that anyone who has caught even some brief examples of Forster’s career would be surprised to hear of his romantic disposition when it comes to songs, songwriting and the mythology of music generally. Setting out to make a perfectly symmetrical eight track album (four tracks on each side of the vinyl, of course, with each track’s time shown on the sleeve), in two weeks, in Sweden, trusting the idea and trusting the moment, and delivering it in 36 minutes, is pure pop romance.
“It’s sort of been at the back of my mind. There are wish lists and there is the running down of time, so if you are not gonna do it now, when you going to do it?,” Forster asks rhetorically. “Then I started to realise when I had written these eight songs, and I played them one night here, having just written the last song – which is Tell It Back To Me, the first song on the record – and I went, that feels like a record to me, that feels like eight chapters of a book. It felt right.
“I didn’t sit down to write an eight song record, it just happened, but it also ticked off a dream. So that made me even more excited.”
That playfulness is evident through the record as well, including wry lines such as “my girlfriend gave up waiting, my gardener did too” in Such A Shame, a song about an uncertain star in a perplexing world after fame hits. A song which should probably be a set text at all entertainment/fame schools, or serve as the musical accompaniment to Forster’s own 10 Rules Of Rock And Roll book.
“I remember writing that line and thinking, okay, I’m into the song now. I’ve hit the tone, I’ve got a line that has meaning and amuses me. I can write this lyric.”
Such A Shame draws on some of his life experience, even if he has only ever been allow to gaze on the inside of fame’s mansion, never allowed to stay. Is that how he approaches the novel-in-progress that has shadowed or mirrored the making of Strawberries?
“Yes, yes I am. I think it’s what I do with everything: things have to be close to me. It certainly helps with trying to create any kind of art,” he says. “I can’t really do distant.”
So are there any hints in that song about what this book, which he started back in 2017, though he didn’t tell anyone about – “I didn’t even tell myself” – will offer? Let’s keep in mind too that he wrote it longhand, in notebooks, for the first draft.
“It’s set in 1991. It’s set in the musical world. Songs are a big part of it. That’s really all I can say about the thing,” Forster says. “But what is equally important is it’s a story. I want the book to be entertaining. It’s not 500 pages of doom and gloom. It’s not 500 pages of a slow meditation on a couple of contemporary themes. It’s not that.”
That’s what it’s not, so what is it?
“The book is more like Treasure Island or Lord Of The Rings or something. But it’s quite thin. I went in with a couple of concepts, and one of them was I wanted the book to be about 60,000 words: I don’t want it to look intimidating on the shelves, I want it to look approachable. So it’s a fast moving, at times, story.”
Even after a couple of non-fiction books, including a memoir, Grant & I, and a stint as a music critic for The Monthly, writing the novel has not been quite as smooth an operation as the album.
“I’ll tell you what my editor said after the first draft: ‘where’s the poetry?’. So I’ve been adding poetry, flesh, and making it better. Making it a lot better.”
While we wait, it’s fair to say that a 60,000-word, approachable book is the writerly equivalent of an eight track, 36 minute album. There’s a pattern here. There’s Robert Forster in essence.
“It is,” he says, smiling.” Exactly.”
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Robert Forster’s Strawberries is out today.