And More B-Sides: The Go Betweens' Stop Before You Say It.

When the Go Betweens came back from Scotland with this single my impression was that they'd gone there to do that. I still don't know if the recording was part of a larger foray into the jewel set in the silver sea but for all the depth of information I fathomed (not deep) they went, recorded this and came back.

4ZZZ made a lot of it and mostly they played the A which, quite frankly kept me from buying it. It was lightly whiney and seemed self-consciously quirky and anti-pop. The chorus with its intentional amelodic trailing off seemed like a waste to me from the folk who had brought us the great Lee Remick/Karen, People Say/Don't Let Him Come Back.

Of those it was closest to Karen but Karen was better at it, a constant tension building to a chorus without a melody in earshot but plenty of drama whose intensity seemed tighter for all the sparseness of its arrangement. But the passable verses of this one led to the statement that just sounded like an affected non-sequitur, something conjured for their peers to approve of. Appeals to good taste that led to Picasso knew where. But someone slipped once on Triplezed or thought like I did and played the B.

Stop Before You Say It begins with a spiky rhythm in the instrumental trio with an upfront melodic bass and then Robert Forster in an icy voice sings about someone very creepy over a plain picked bass. He's that cold you can skate on his skin. You scratched his cut and put your finger in. When he speaks someone interrupts (what'd you say?) So he hugs the chair and his blood comes up.

Then the trio thickens up and even chugs a little for the chorus. And you can break his heart (the other voice higher, down in the mix repeats it in a different melody) and again but he feels nothing. Then the introductory riff repeats and suddenly I'm reminded of the Young Marble Giants.

Sparseness was the word we used of the Go Betweens. They seemed to leave things out on purpose, so you'd imagine them yourself or see through the gaps to their imaginations. This was the time when one of them coined the phrase about Brisbane music that it was the striped sunlight sound (I think on a Triplezed interview). There was a mix of the laidback Queensland way of things and the intensity of reacting against it that permeated the air of any gig I went to at the time.

Well, I won't go into them too much here but the other reasons why the ol' Bundy Rum 'n' reggae public face of the Sunshine State was proved a lie to anyone under thirty and in the margins of culture back then by the inevitable police presence at any gig outside of the few venues in the CBD that allowed bands of interests to play there and certainly any gig setup by the bands themselves in spiky Andy Hardy fashion at places like the Blind Hall or AHEPA. That said, I'll have to confess that beyond a certain recognisable tension in early Go Betweens material I hear no obvious protest. That was for self-styled punk bands who already in 1981 seemed as revivalist as Ol' 55 or Shakin' Stevens.

But The GoBs had moved on and this song was proof. While the chorus ends in a look-at-me-but-don't-look-now feyness the chorus of Stop is left deliberately unstated. We get it twice. The call and response and then he feels nothing and then badump dododododo badump on the bass and drums. Then a sweet guitar figure, all singlecoil thin and unsustained before freezing down for the last verse which is the same as the first. Except this time you get the final line. Badump - Whatcha gonna do? Stop before you say it. The bass trails off for a few notes but it isn't like the whine of the A-side end, it feels more like the inertia, the notes stumble out after a sudden stop.

So why was this the B-side? True enough, people who bought indy singles played both sides as the songs were usually thought about and worked on rather than perfunctory covers or strained jokes. And it was a short time before the B was just another version of the A (I can remember people being angry that New Order did this on Blue Monday).

But even call this an A when it was the more arresting of the two and far more indicative of the direction they'd take on their debut LP Send Me a Lullaby? Was the call and response chorus too sixties? Too Nuggets for the folks down at the Exchange? I only ever met Lindy out of the then trio (she hadn't played on the single, that was the drummer from Orange Juice on their label Postcard) and though she wasn't I had the impression that they were stuck up aesthetes. I no longer harbour that view but liked how the Jonathon Richman goofiness and Brisbane plainness belied all that. Stop Before You Say It was the B-side because it was the more commercial because the perversity of that was as affordable as a busride to town from Auchenflower because they could because something had to be the A-side because even the straight National-Party-voting world where that meant something needed to be shown that it had been a decision more considered than the flip of a coin.

And the better song endures because it can.