And then Cattle and Cane was on Countdown. And then everyone (of an ilk) in Brisbane wanted them forever. And then the LP was in shops. They'd done it in the U.K. If you got it from a shop that had it you probably got the one on Stunn. If you got it from Rockinghorse or Skinny's it was probably on Rough Trade, the enthusiast-led label that brought The Young Marble Giants to the world. I had it on a cassette taped from someone I knew at Uni. Supposedly, the sound of the Rough Trade pressing was superior. Mine sounded like a cassette.
The overseas production only enhanced the band's standing locally. It meant they were progressing and heading upward where we wanted them. They could still be on Triple Zed, they just might be playing in Zagreb that night. They added Robert Vickers on bass after the recording (he's in the Cattle and Cane video, miming Grant's bass part) and could get a fuller sound as a four piece. Everything was right. So we chucked it on the turntable.
A Bad Debt Follows You launches the record with a quirk of the band. A bass figure recorded flat is joined by a guitar figure, awash in amp reverb. A wash of Vox organ and strident drums. Grant Mclennan comes in with a Hispanic minor melody in an urgent voice. A complicated relationship of promises and betrayals. While the song started in a clear 4/4 but we keep getting extended bars. I didn't do any counting to report on which ones where but I know that what I register first was how dramatic it makes it.
Two Steps Step Out takes the timing way past what it was in the opener. Stops, starts, extra bar spare parts. But what it sounds like is a busy power pop song with clean guitars and vocals that range from conspiratorial hints to spacey choruses and a theme of restlessness. For all the little rhythmic asides and wrong footing in the bridge, the song is so engaging it feels as easy as bubblegum but there's way more beneath.
Robert Forster's first composition on the record is the title track. Before Hollywood begins with multitracked clean guitars and bass playing partly in unison which adds power and purpose to the descending riff. A series of pleas that build on the opening demand, "make me last". It's abstract and on the colder side but it's romantic for all that. The chorus adds an easier melody with lines ending on prolonged phrases, including the lovely: "we'll film ourselves in history and chrome." And then: "It's thunder town they'll do what they can to hold you down."
And then, after three urgent power pop bangers the record takes a turn, and not for the last time.
Dusty in Here less a song of mourning than a reflection of absence. McLennan wrote it about his father who died when Grant was a child. It is a series of statements that are not streamlined to form a pop song but separated. A new verse could easily start at the end of the previous bar but it starts from stasis each time which gives the declarations a eulogistic solidity. Ten or so years later, Michael Gira did this same thing with the Swans' song God Damn the Sun and it reminded me of this. Each verse builds a monument, block by block. There's a grandeur to it but there is an ache to the grandeur. Hearing it now it gets to me deeply and reminds me of how I took the news of my own father's death. It wasn't a flood of memories, good or bad, nor a list of things I should've said. Rather, it was a series of sensations that appeared when I lay down in the dark and let the thoughts come. No single articulate statement came from this, and the impressions whether loving or sore, felt as real as I could make them; distant and often vague, the sense of it felt right.
The bass supports the melody. The guitar is heavily reverbed and sparse. This time they are joined by a piano, also very verby. In the space between the verses and Grant's own unaffected vocal is centre and far out front. No drums. Just atmosphere. And it's not hard to mentally look up while listening and see the haze in the light of the door at the top of the stairs.
Ask is a more conventional indy rock sound of the time with hot clean guitars playing a chord riff. Bass plays the riff under the vocal in the verses with the guitar subdued. A gleefully off key chord at the end of the chorus brings thing back to convention but then everything breaks down and gets drumless and quiet. It starts up again and then falls into this strange, uncooperative gentle guitar and unfinished sentences. This time there's a little ride cymbal creeping in before the last statement of the riff and all it over for the side. "Don't shut it. Don't shut it. Don't you care?"
Side two begins with three stark acoustic notes played in unison on bass and guitar. This sets it with kick and high hat in support. The vocal comes in with the three note motif, recalling images of childhood. By the the wordless chorus we've gone through a few time changes (again, I'm not counting, some might be long). This is Cattle and Cane. Its gentle interplay and vocals along with verses made of images of a life as the guitar arrangement lifts in complexity but still feels light. After an instrumental break in this blooming mode Robert Forster delivers a short monologue of how he recalls the same but in the end he knew where he was, alone and so at home. This leads to a slowly ascending modal figure in the ethereal choir of the chorus repeating. If, by this time, you aren't floating over fields of cattle and fields of cane you will never get this song, one of the most sublimely beautiful of its era.
You can't dance to Cattle and Cane. After books and interviews have explained it to me, McLennan wrote according to the way he felt the song should go. Robert went along with that and when Lindy sat down behind it she possibly sighed and thought, "here we go," but found a way into it, whatever the time signature and supported it. And supported it in a way that wasn't just find a place for the kick and just sizzle the high hats or just keep playing, whatever it does, like Bonzo in Black Dog. The drumming is the real finish of this number, the most awkward time shifts feel right and the sighing of the ride takes it right into all our warm afternoons.
You can't dance to it but they put it on Countdown. I used to think it was a Countdown Studios special, done by people who thought a song about growing up in Queensland should be all Akubras, boots and barns. But it was made independently. Countdown played it (it really did seem to fit into the dressed set video that the show would do). The lighting is magic hour, the barns slatted walls, the hay and the band miming as well as anyone in an indy video did. Perfect for the show but also perfect for the dreamy warmth of the song. It worked on tv (Countdown was pretty influential) but it failed to play on radio outside of the community and subscriber stations (aka alternative radio). It just didn't fly on the air. Then again, nor did Passionate Friend or The Back of Love, Fireworks or Back of Love. The failed singles would not only make a great mix tape I've shoved so many of them together in a flac folder on my phone that it goes for hours. In this out of sorts era where the worst of post punk was absorbed by the mainstream to sell water crackers, the best languished in the shadows, to be loved unreservedly for evermore.
By Chance has Robert Forster in hard 4/4 and dual guitars variously riffing or arpeggiating in an edible tone soup. Relationships are long lists of questions and assertions but most of all hazard.
The jazziness of As Long as That emphasises the retreat from rock forms with a figure of bass and drums before so much as a breath of vocals. Smooth close vocals trade the mic with reverby distant lines (courtesy of lines being sung by each of the vocalists). "Were you born or just conceived?" What might sound, with the strident vocals and minor tonality, to be recriminative, a love gone sour song, is really is more of an expression of awe at how this other person is bringing the sensations of the world into intimidating focus. "Think of someone and double it. That's what I did." Is this about Lindy Morrison, then partner of writer Forster? That takes on different meanings at different times. What is left is the statement of someone describing intimacy as though it were a psychedelic experience.
On My Block features clean bright guitars and a vocal that goes from a taunting verse to a smoother chorus. Trouble with a tryst at the local decaying manor house? Even an abstraction of the wholesale destruction of older architecture in Brisbane at the time? Can't say. It reminds me of Summer in Brisbane.
That Way adds a Hammond-ish organ sound to provide some cream under the guitars and vocals. It sounds like a band moving to its next step, touring, travelling, more writing and recording, all climbing the Atlantic to adventure. That way. Bands present and future like The End and Dies Pretty in the keyboard sounds and busy pace, it's a solid "let's go!"
And they kind of did and they kind of didn't. For me, The Go-Betweens are what I said about Cattle and Cane: greatness isn't always rewarded but it endures. I mentioned Young Marble Giants before and for me to do so when talking about another band is an accolade. The two bands do not sound like each other but they are alike in how they will commit to investigating the details of what they observe around them and how their nerves respond. This might rise to a strident statement but more typically is kept tightly packaged in an appealing wrapper for the adventurous listener to discover. While I like some of these songs less than others (you'll be able to tell that by the level of detail I give them here) I never tire of listening to this record.
I can say that of Colossal Youth, The White Album, Dummy, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or Murmur. The edge that Before Hollywood gets is due to my proximity to the manger we were all away in, back in the Bjelke Petersen '80s when being in a band that didn't have a double denim set of covers was a chargeable offence, when standing in the shadows of the blaring LoveYouBrisbane blitzkrieg was to be choosing personal safety over a life of self-shrivelling conformity. I always seem to end up overstating all this but the memory of it always lies in wait for recurrence and springs in attack when I go past again. Is it really proportionate to lump this on to a little indy album with skeletal arrangements, quiet vocals and abstract lyrics? Well, yeah, because, in the weirdest way, to this fan at least, that felt more durably resistant than any sloganeering loudmouths who only ever punched at the bars of the cage and left. If you ever liked this album but haven't listened to it for years, give it another spin. It'll feel like an old fiend who hasn't changed a hair, knocking on your door. All you have to do is open it again.
