Coming on at the astonishingly early time of about 8.30 with the promise of playing for ‘a very very long time’ Robert Forster arrived alone, dressed in a scarf despite all the doors of The Gov being latched tight. The set up behind him suggested that he would bring a band along at some point to support him but for the time being it would be just him and his acoustic guitar. He played a smattering of songs from his new album along with some older gems by himself as he was progressively joined by his bass player and then his side man on keyboards and lead guitar. Soon after they went for a 15 minute break that lasted 8 minutes after which they were joined by their drummer (who looked astonishingly like the muso version of Jonathon Taylor Thomas). Slowly the vibe lifted from the initial totally Evangelist sound to slowly incorporate the rest of the band together in small steps. Eventually songs were introduced by Forster with the promise that the band was about to rock out. This never really happened, but in context of the whole night, by the end of the gig there had been a few moments of full band interaction. For the most part it was these moments that lifted the gig to something better than it would have been with just Forster.
I admit that my expectations of the concert, especially on hearing Forster’s new record, The Evangelist was that we would be treated kaleidoscope of searching emotion. But there was no grief and no pain that wasn’t accompanied by The Go-Betweens’ ‘beaten down but the world is still funny’ bent. The Evangelist is a beautiful record, in fact it’s something truly astonishing and every rave review you’ve read is probably deserved. Hence I was taken aback. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The perverse humour of Forster’s songs became the focus. Something for Myself was an amazing example of this, drawing its greatness from its unassuming perversity with lines like “Told not to pick at, society’s glue, Think I’ll sniff it, That’s what I’ll do, for myself”. And it set the flavour for the night with a mix of solo work and a lot of latter day post-comeback Go-Betweens songs. Maybe Forster felt that these songs where written in his best creative period, maybe there recentness and Grant’s death just made it obvious to play these songs now.
You can learn a lot about a band or musician by what songs they choose to play and when they choose to play them live. And strangely, Forster chose five songs (maybe more) from the first comeback LP of the Go-Betweens, The Friends of Rachel Worth. This seems relatively logical as its a Go-Betweens album on which Robert’s songs overshadow Grant’s. Beautiful versions of Spirit and He Lives My Life were played along with more up-beat tunes from the same album like the minor Triple J hit Surfing Magazines and probably the hardest rocking song of the gig, the strangely cathartic German Farmhouse. But perhaps the best song drawn from the LP was When She Sang About Angels which was unfortunately introduced via a swirling and seemingly punch-lineless story about seeing Patti Smith live in London. Here his trademark sense of humour was on show. Dry but not droll, black but not nasty, it is that most unique type of humour that can leave you feeling happy with life but also drained by its happenings in equal measure.
There were other moments that pushed out from the acoustic ether to be astonishing. Especially the ode to a musician and a lover, Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend, whose beautifully wobbly chorus truly left an imprint on the wide-eyes that watched.
Songs drawn from his new album, were stripped of their sparseness and traded in for some well-placed warmth. The more raw emotions that populate The Evangelist, maybe the Cohenesque elements were left behind, maybe because live there wasn’t supposed to be the shadow of McLennan that so beautifully haunts the album. If It Rains and Did She Overtake You became different songs, more reflective than on record they sucked you in, but then left you there dreaming along to the most subtle musical shifts throughout the night.
Two encores later the band left. From the solo acoustic beginnings of the night, to the full band “onslaught” at the end, we’d walked through the world in Robert Forster’s slightly camp-foppy way and we walked out happier, contented with the state of things, knowing that on a Wednesday night there were very few better things to be doing than staying warm with Robert Forster.
