Grant and Me
I've been reading Grant and Me by Robert Forster. The pair of them were in 80's Australian indie band The GoBetweens and this is the story of their romance.
One of the most infuriating things about reading an autobiography is the stuff that the author elects to leave out. We get Forster's childhood in repressive, hidden Brisbane where he excels at cricket and is made library monitor. His meeting with Grant McLennan is a mythological meeting with a soul brother. Robert teaches Grant the bass and he is immediately both committed and gifted. He casts his band like he would a film: he needs a woman to complete this Jules et Jim menage. He gets one: the coolest female drummer in town who also becomes his first girlfriend. They play a gig and everyone likes them. Grant works lunchtimes in a record shop and the shop owner immediately starts a record label and puts out a GoBetweens single that gets great reviews. They move to London on a whim and, in a happy accident, end up on Postcard records as part of the sound of young Scotland! Missing his girlfriend Robert now wants to move back to Australia but it doesn't matter because Geoff Travis now wants sign them to Rough Trade, slightly ahead of The Smiths.
Forster is an artful writer. There is an economy of style, a cleanness to his prose and winning ironic distance. He just about gets away with this and then you think...what? Do you realise how implausible this sounds? This is a Boy's Own adventure in rock stardom. I wonder if he sat down to write this marvelling at his glorious dumb luck. I mean to start out in Brisbane is like starting out in Tattooine. He should never have had a career. It makes me feel bad for never having a career as a pop star - I only started out in Basingstoke! Its not ideal but it seems a bit more likely than Brisbane.
At no point does Forster actually talk about his art in any depth. He "finds a nice hook" or "his guitar line beds in well with Grant's melodic bass". The song Lee Remick is about the actress Lee Remick but he never explains why an 18 year old Australian boy thinks that writing a song about Lee Remick is a good idea. He fails to unpack Lee Remick. This is infuriating to me.
I'm a dunder-headed man and I'm dangerously susceptible to conspiracy theory. These two things mean that I look at the world as a series of problems to solve and that there are secrets that, if I could just uncover them, I would have the keys to the castle. I want to know how Robert Forster became Robert Forster. When he opens his mouth where does his voice come from? What effect is he trying to produce and does he succeed? What is it he is trying to communicate? This is not in this book. Of course it isn't. There is no conspiracy. There is no key. There are no easy answers. Robert Forster doesn't think about being Robert Forster. He is Robert Forster. His story doesn't seem unlikely to him because it happened to him, its just the content of his life.
The modern malaise is the tendency for fans to be constantly disappointed by the things they're supposed to be fans of, being offended that the thing that they got was not the exact thing that they wanted. I wont be that prick. Grant and Me is the story of 80s indie besties writing songs for each other. Its a love story and its a shame we will never get Grant's version. There's a half missing.
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| "I just thought that Lee Remick was cool, John..." |
One of the most infuriating things about reading an autobiography is the stuff that the author elects to leave out. We get Forster's childhood in repressive, hidden Brisbane where he excels at cricket and is made library monitor. His meeting with Grant McLennan is a mythological meeting with a soul brother. Robert teaches Grant the bass and he is immediately both committed and gifted. He casts his band like he would a film: he needs a woman to complete this Jules et Jim menage. He gets one: the coolest female drummer in town who also becomes his first girlfriend. They play a gig and everyone likes them. Grant works lunchtimes in a record shop and the shop owner immediately starts a record label and puts out a GoBetweens single that gets great reviews. They move to London on a whim and, in a happy accident, end up on Postcard records as part of the sound of young Scotland! Missing his girlfriend Robert now wants to move back to Australia but it doesn't matter because Geoff Travis now wants sign them to Rough Trade, slightly ahead of The Smiths.
Forster is an artful writer. There is an economy of style, a cleanness to his prose and winning ironic distance. He just about gets away with this and then you think...what? Do you realise how implausible this sounds? This is a Boy's Own adventure in rock stardom. I wonder if he sat down to write this marvelling at his glorious dumb luck. I mean to start out in Brisbane is like starting out in Tattooine. He should never have had a career. It makes me feel bad for never having a career as a pop star - I only started out in Basingstoke! Its not ideal but it seems a bit more likely than Brisbane.
At no point does Forster actually talk about his art in any depth. He "finds a nice hook" or "his guitar line beds in well with Grant's melodic bass". The song Lee Remick is about the actress Lee Remick but he never explains why an 18 year old Australian boy thinks that writing a song about Lee Remick is a good idea. He fails to unpack Lee Remick. This is infuriating to me.
I'm a dunder-headed man and I'm dangerously susceptible to conspiracy theory. These two things mean that I look at the world as a series of problems to solve and that there are secrets that, if I could just uncover them, I would have the keys to the castle. I want to know how Robert Forster became Robert Forster. When he opens his mouth where does his voice come from? What effect is he trying to produce and does he succeed? What is it he is trying to communicate? This is not in this book. Of course it isn't. There is no conspiracy. There is no key. There are no easy answers. Robert Forster doesn't think about being Robert Forster. He is Robert Forster. His story doesn't seem unlikely to him because it happened to him, its just the content of his life.
The modern malaise is the tendency for fans to be constantly disappointed by the things they're supposed to be fans of, being offended that the thing that they got was not the exact thing that they wanted. I wont be that prick. Grant and Me is the story of 80s indie besties writing songs for each other. Its a love story and its a shame we will never get Grant's version. There's a half missing.
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