INTERVIEW – ROBERT FORSTER

Even though sales may not have matched the critical acclaim, Robert Forster’s career is enviable. Over 45 years since The Go-Betweens’s debut single and nearly 20 years after the tragic early death of Grant McLennan with whom he shared one of the great songwriting partnerships, he has been enjoying a prolific, late period surge and […]
In a small alternative universe populated by erudite pop classicists, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan are revered alongside Lennon and McCartney as songwriters of the highest order. For unfathomable reasons, the songs they wrote as The Go-Betweens never entered the public consciousness in the way that their champions anticipated. Since McLennon’s tragic sudden death in […]

ALBUM REVIEW: THE GO-BETWEENS – G STANDS FOR GO-BETWEENS: VOLUME 3 2000-2006

BOOK REVIEW – THANK YOU FOR A LOVELY DAY: 11 THE GO-BETWEENS SONGCOMICS (EDITED BY GUNTHER BUSKIES AND JONAS ENGELMANN)

When Robert Forster and Grant McLennan announced a reunion in 1999 having split The Go-Betweens at the end of the 1980s, I greeted it like the equivalent of Lennon and McCartney getting back together. While they never achieved the commercial success that their songwriting deserved, amongst their devoted following they attained legendary status.  Seventeen years […]
‘G Stands For Go-Betweens’ is the recently released boxset from the group that helped to define the sound of indie guitar bands, Sadly with the passing of founder member Grant McLennan, The Go-Betweens ceased in 2006, but the phenomenal songwriting partnership of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan is immortalised in the latest edition of the […]

INTERVIEW Q & A: ROBERT FORSTER – THE GO-BETWEENS

ALBUM REVIEW: G STANDS FOR GO-BETWEENS VOL 2

In an ideal world, The Go-Betweens should have been as big as REM – they had melodies bursting from their pores, and in the songwriting partnership of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, two of the finest songsmiths around. They wrote tunes that shimmered with guitar riffs jangling, and tales of love won, lost and yearned […]
-THE PRINCIPAL HOTEL, MANCHESTER- Recent years have brought changes to the top of Oxford Road. The Cornerhouse is now a university building and The Palace hotel has become The Principal. As I pass the legendary former cinema en route to this weekend’s Louder Than Words festival just across the road, on the strange alternate-reality scale […]

LIVE: LOUDER THAN WORDS: ROBERT FORSTER IN CONVERSATION – 12/11/2017