FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
The Go-Betweens - 16 Lovers Lane
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FOR this next…
IN THIS PHOTO: Lindy Morrison, Robert Forster, Grant McLennan, John Willsteed and Amanda Brown of The Go-Betweens/PHOTO CREDIT: EMI
Vinyl Corner, I am recommending an album that is fairly expensive on vinyl, though it is worth investment. 16 Lovers Lane is the sixth album by the Australian group, The Go-Betweens. It was released in 1988. Prior to the recording of the album, longtime bassist Robert Vickers left the band after the other group members decided to return to Australia after having spent several years in London. He was replaced by John Willsteed. I would urge people to seek out 16 Lovers Lane on vinyl. Prior to coming to a review of the album, there is a fascinating feature that provides some background and legacy about the phenomenal album:
“CONTEXT
Having been based in London for the vast majority of their career, The Go-Betweens decided to re-locate to Sydney, necessitating a line-up change with original bassist Robert Vickers quitting the group and being replaced by John Willsteed. There was much greater and more significant disquiet within the camp, though, aside from surface-level personnel changes. Robert Forster and drummer Lindy Morrison had split up, with Morrison rapidly falling out of love with the band lifestyle. At the same time, though Forster’s songwriting colleague Grant McLennan was becoming romantically involved with violinist and multi-instrumentalist Amanda Brown. On top of that, Morrison butted heads with English producer Mark Wallis in the studio – perhaps understandably, as Wallis replaced her with a drum machine on half of the album’s ten tracks.
Despite the divisions within the camp on a personal level, in professional terms 16 Lovers Lane was a comparatively efficient and harmonious process. Both Forster and McLennan attributed this to the change of location and being back in their native Australia. “We’d spent five years in London – blackness, darkness, greyness and poverty – and suddenly for some reason we seemed to have more money in Sydney, and we all had places to live and being in a city where after five years we can go to the beach in ten minutes,” McLennan reflected in 1996. Forster agreed, saying it brought on “a burst of energy, a burst of songs”.
SUBSTANCE
The different dynamics affecting Forster and McLennan during the creative process makes 16 Lovers Lane a very schizophrenic album in terms of writing and tone, but surprisingly consistent and coherent its sound and execution – an example of how solid and durable the creative bonds within The Go-Betweens were, despite the emotional upheavals happening in their personal lives. Where previous Go-Betweens records sometimes felt like two solo records meshed together, because of their differing styles, 16 Lovers Lane is a two-headed hydra, with both McLennan and Forster borrowing elements of the other’s style and incorporating it into theirs. Furthermore, the occasionally angular production was now smoothed out with acoustic guitars and string arrangements, making it all primed for mainstream success, to potentially make them actually popular, rather than perennial critics’ favourites.
Therefore, it’s hard to distinguish who exactly has written what, particularly as all ten tracks are credited attributed to the pair of them. McLennan’s songs tend to be more unabashedly romantic, with greater melodicism and a wide-eyed delivery. The spry, furiously strummed opener ‘Love Goes On!’ with its cheery “ba-ba-ba” backing vocals, is a typical example, the energy counterpointed with a resigned, comparatively bleak lyric about the nature of love and relationships, or, more specifically, about waiting for them (“I know a thing about darkness / darkness ain’t my friend”). The passionate ‘Quiet Heart’ sees beautiful interplay between melody and harmony in its arrangement as, creating a gauzy atmosphere with yet more philosophical lyrics on commitment (“It doesn’t matter how far you’ve come / you’ve always got further to go”).
Where McLennan’s writing is raw, Robert Forster’s songs are more poised and painterly, rendered in greater detail. While his bandmate’s songs vibrate with the kind of woozy energy that comes from having fallen in love, Forster’s have a sighing, resigned quality to reflect his recent heartbreak and self-reflection. ‘Love Is A Sign’ is almost baroque in its construction, powered by mandolins and a string orchestra, and he also helms the shatteringly sad closer ‘Dive For Your Memory’. Best of all from Forster’s pen is ‘Clouds’, an absolute heartbreaker whose upbeat, gentle rhythm and brightly-lit guitar tones contrasting with great poignancy with his crestfallen vocals.
The best-known moment of 16 Lovers Lane strikes the listener as a melding of McLennan’s and Forster’s styles. ‘Streets Of Your Town’, receiving heavy radio play in the US and UK and still, somehow, not furnishing The Go-Betweens with an actual hit, is as good an indie-pop song as the the 1980s ever produced. Full of small-town drama, both fascinated and bored with the low-key life of suburbia, McLennan’s downcast, almost muttered observations are beautifully set off against Amanda Brown’s bright, cooing backing vocals.
LEGACY
The Go-Betweens split up shortly after the sessions for 16 Lovers Lane, dismayed and disheartened by the almost complete lack of public response to their magnum opus. Forster and McLennan reformed the band with a different line-up more than a decade later, releasing three more albums from 2000 to 2005 before parting ways once more. To this day, they remain one of the most scandalously overlooked bands of their era.
But, even if the royalty cheques don’t roll in for Robert Forster and Grant McLennan in the way they should, their legacy is still tangible. Everybody who’s since dealt in literate, emotional guitar-pop owes a debt to The Go-Betweens. From bands who emerged at the start of the Nineties, like Teenage Fanclub, later going into Belle & Sebastian’s ‘twee’ aesthetic, the chamber-pop of Alex Turner’s side-project The Last Shadow Puppets and the sonorous, ringing guitars that power Real Estate, 16 Lovers Lane continues to be a keystone.
Sensitive, poetic and written with the kind of wide-eyed generosity that doesn’t really exist in a post-sincerity music scene, 16 Lovers Lane is one of the great lost classics of popular music. Forster and McLennan wrote about love in a strikingly original way, and one that no other bands have really done since. Halfway between the giddy headspin of newfound love and the total, crushing dejection of heartbreak, it’s an album for all fans of indie music that deals with affairs of the heart”.
To round things off, I want to source a review for the stunning sixth studio album from The Go-Betweens. The band’s final album, Oceans Apart, was released in 2005. I think they are a band that everyone should familiarise themselves with and investigate. This is what AllMusic said about one of their very best albums:
“Arguably Australia's greatest pop group ever, The Go-Betweens seemed to save the best for last when they split in 1989. (They reunited in 1999, and have issued two more studio recordings since that time). 16 Lovers Lane is simply breathtaking; it is a deeply moving, aurally sensual collection of songs about relationships and the broken side of love that never lapses into cheap sentimentality or cynicism. Songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan had always been visionary when it came to charting personal and relational melancholy and heartbreak, but here, their resolve focused on charting the depths of the romantic's soul when it has been disillusioned or crestfallen, is simply and convincingly taut. While it's true that the group was going through its own version of a soap opera-styled romantic saga, that emotional quagmire seemingly fueled its energies and focus, resulting in an album so texturally rich, lyrically sharp, and musically honest, its effect is nothing less than searing on an any listener who doesn't have sawdust instead of blood in his or her veins.
Opening with McLennan's "Love Goes On," the stage is set for a kind of refined yet primal emotional transference that pop music is rarely capable of revealing. As he sings: "There are times when I want you/I want you so much I could bust/I know a thing about lovers/Lovers lie down in trust/The people next door they got problems/They got things they can't name/I know about things about lovers/ Lovers don't feel any shame/Late not night when the light's down low/The candle burns to the end/I know a thing about darkness/Darkness ain't my friend/Love goes on anyway," the doorway to the heart and its secrets opens. In the grain of his voice lie the flowers in the dustbin whose names are desperation and affirmation. With its hyperactive acoustic guitars, Amanda Brown's cooing string arrangements, and the deftly layered, subtly played brass instruments, the tune becomes a gauzy anthem; it celebrates the ravaged heart as a beacon of strained hope in the entryway to a hall of bewilderment. He follows it with "Quiet Heart," a song whose opening was admittedly influenced in structure by U2's "With Or Without You," but blows it away lyrically and with its subtly shifting melody and harmony between the guitars. Brown's multi-layered strings actually stride the backbeat's pulse. His protagonist speaks to an absent lover. His ache offers a view of his own weakness, desperation, and an all-consuming tenderness: "I tried to tell you/But I can only say when we're apart/How I miss your quiet, quiet heart."
Forster seems to underline McLennan' s raw emotionalism with his painterly, nearly baroque, "Love Is A Sign," where images from visual art, remembered scenarios, and real life brokenness intermingle effortlessly with the elegance of mandolins, a string orchestra, and a shimmering bassline. With "Streets Of Your Town," the Go-Betweens scored a minor hit in the U.K., and even got played on American radio for a moment, but despite the fact that it has the most memorable hook on a record filled with them, it merely underscores how constant the quality is on the record. Evidenced further by "The Devil's Eye," and the shattering closer "Dive For Your Memory," 16 Lovers Lane is melancholy and somber in theme, but gloriously and romantically presented. Despite the fact that band has but a cult following, even in the 21st century, the Go-Betweens have nonetheless given us a far more literate, magnificently written, performed, and produced slab of pop classicism, than Fleetwood Mac's wonderfully coked out, love as co-dependency fest, Rumours”.
If you can get the album on vinyl, I would suggest spending a bit extra than you might otherwise do. There is always the option to stream the album. With incredible musicianship from the band (Amanda Brown – violin, oboe, guitar, vocals, tambourine; Robert Forster – vocals, rhythm guitar, harmonica; Grant McLennan – vocals, lead guitar; Lindy Morrison – drums; John Willsteed – bass guitar, guitar, Hammond organ, piano), and some of The Go-Betweens’ best songs, it is an album that you need to have in your life! If the Australian band are new to you, then 16 Lovers Lane is a…
GREAT place to start.