Strips of your ’toon
“I found the results very moving”: Robert Forster endorses the new Go-betweens comic book
“IT was a leftfield idea, but I immediately got what they were doing,” Robert Forster says of Thank You For A Lovely Day, the new anthology adapting an album’s worth of songs from his old band The Go-betweens into comic strips. “Grant [ Mclennan] and I weren’t great musicians, so lyrics were really important to The Go-betweens, and set us apart. When this idea came up of 11 graphic artists’ visual representations of 11 songs, I thought our lyrics would work really well in this context. I found the results very moving, because I’d never seen songs interpreted in this way.”
The Go-betweens’ allusive, enigmatic songs about, as Forster wryly summarises, “foreign literature, movie stars and librarians”, inspire wildly diverse approaches. Noah van Sciver turns “Love Goes On”’s lovelorn “cat in the alleyway” into a Robert Crumblike feline, slinking through the lyrics’ exploding calligraphy. Forster singles out Bim Eriksson’s version of his song “The Clarke Sisters”: “It isn’t just a visual representation of the lyric, it’s flipped to have a private detective as narrator. People have really gone into this with artistic freedom.”
Christopher Tauber’s take on “Bye Bye Pride”, Mclennan’s reverie on his Queensland adolescence, has the song’s “teenage Rasputin” obsessively watching piles of VHS tapes in his bedroom, before finally braving the pastel-hued Pacific streets outside. “Grant would love it,” Forster says, “because he was obsessed with film, TV and visual imagery. This would mean so much to Grant, to see another artist play with his words visually.”
“Go-betweens songs are very rich in images, like in a good comic,” says artist Klaus Cornfield, who has expanded “Streets Of Your Town” to explain the band’s importance to his own musical adventures in indie-pop bands such as Throw That Beat In The Garbage can!. “So many comics about songs don’t touch me, and I felt they were missing something personal.”
He shows an adoring audience watching The Go-betweens play, with Forster and Mclennan as cute, hip cats. After a career of cult obscurity, these are the biopics the band never had, in low-budget pen-and-ink. “That is quite touching to see,” Forster admits. “I’m really surprised how much this means to me. It’s like another artform has come in and run with what we’ve done, representing The Go-betweens in a really good way.”