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tirsdag den 4. juni 2019

Ode til Robert Forster i Mod Strømmen


“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.

Stil ind, kl. 18.00, d. 6. juni, på enten FM 98.9 eller via Tunein eller den direkte livestream.

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