“An attentive silence
came over the room as we began the song, brought on by the hypnotic beat of the
long introduction; I was sensing a power I’d never known as I stepped to the
microphone to deliver the opening lines: “I just want some affection/ I just
want some affection/ I don’t want no hoochie-cooche mama/ No back door woman7
No Queen Street sex thibg”
I’d been waiting a
long time to say that. Here was a declaration from a twent-year-old,
anti-roc’n’roll in its dismissal of sex clichés, and with a local reference
thown in. it went on: “Helps me find Hemingway / Helps me find genet/ Helps med
find Brecht/ Helps me find Chandler/ Helps me find James Joyce7 She always
makes the right choice”.
The audience was
unused to this kind of language coming off a Brisbane rock stage. Even
nonbelievers - those hostile to how plain we looked in our white shirts and
black trousers, and to the rawness of our playing - were aware that something
special was happening. We had a few supporters in the crowd - ,y brother, who
had mimed on the bass while Mal played guitar on ‘Sweet Jane’, Mal’s
girlfriend, who I could see was following the song’s story and laughing on
certain lines, and sitting halfway back at the end of a row of seats was Grant
We didn’t win the
heat. Later I learnt that The Saints had entered the same competition years
before and they didn’t win their opening round either. It didn’t matter; a few
realisations came from our performance. You didn’t need much instrumentation if
you were throwing interesting lyrics over hooky chord changes; if anything,
‘noise’ got the way. And we had been billed, through a misunderstanding - Beckett
not travelling far well out of academia - as The Go Dots. I liked the change”
- fra ‘Grant & I. Inside And Outside The
Go-Betweens’ af Robert Forster.
Det er noget af en mundfuld, vi
forsøger at gabe over nu på torsdag. Idéen om et program om Robert Forster er australske
Matthew Møllers, og udsprang af Forsters besøg i Lille Vega i slutningen af
april. Det er dog først nu, at vi har fundet en dato, hvor alle kan. Eksamener
og andre af livets tildragelser kom i vejen. Udover Møller, deltager Jan Damage
Petersen og undertegnede.
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