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 Everett True

Why do you like The Go-Betweens?

Why do you like The Go-Betweens?
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Ask a simple question…

  • Too hard; the all too rare ability to combine talent, taste, style, and wide-ranging themes in a peerless body of work.
  • 1. The work of lively minds. 2. A bridge between adolescence and adulthood (mine and theirs) which is open both ways… and if you stand in the middle, you can see both sides. 3. Self-awareness + lack of self-consciousness. 4. An understanding that poetry doesn’t fit into pop music… but pop music can fit into poetry, if you hold it at just the right angle.
  • 5. The other reasons.
  • Their attention to detail, the squiggles and swerves that elevate them above music that seems superficially similar.
  • The fucking songs.
  • The drama between the boys and the girls always made for good solid tunes
  • They had soul.
  • Before Hollywood goes places no one had gone before and no one has gone since. Weird rhythms, time signatures and structures. And yet it sounded absolutely natural. It was a botanic garden in the concrete horror of 1983. They continued with that spirit in the composition but much of the unique style fell away after that, viola and oboe notwithstanding.
  • There is something so pure and nostalgic about their music. It’s classic and yet nostalgic.
  • Tallulah
  • I’m from Brisbane, it’s the law.
  • 16 Lovers Lane
  • They had melody offset with darkness in a way that wasn’t cliched.
  • I like pop that flushes backwards.
  • I love the confidence of it. Self-belief. And how it changed and grew over time, got more “adult” and “sophisticated”, but stayed very natural. That.
  • Like the best contemporary fiction each song is deceptively sophisticated; simple language used on everyday life, but you fuckin try it.
  • True artists.
  • Obviously not for everyone. Or they woulda been huge.
  • The lyrics and the melodies and the overall feels get under one’s skin. The striped sunlit sound.
  • Because this is perfect pop…

  • When the rain hits the roof, like the sound of a finished kiss, like a lip lifted from a lip.
  • It’s in the rules.

  • The best drumming.
  • Because it sounds like home.
  • Luxurious urgency.
  • Because they went halfway round the world to Scotland to make a less grandstanding but better record than anyone else on Postcard, were roundly ignored, went home and then came back for more. I was going to say, “and also the music”, but that IS the music.
  • It’s the Brisbane sound. You have to like it.

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