A few words about Grant McLennan

 

 

A FEW WORDS ABOUT GRANT MCLENNAN

Originally written 7th May 2006 and published on now defunct Myspace blog; republished 6th May 2016 as I still remember it like it was yesterday. I have posted it here in its original form, with a couple of newly added editor's notes in italics.

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm busy cutting and pasting bits and bobs from my past week into some kind of order (at the time I was writing a weekly music blog on Myspace which I generally posted on Sunday evenings) whilst flicking around a few bands' forums whilst thinking I should really have a bath and generally wishing I hadn't had all those jugs of cocktails last night. Another unremarkable Sunday afternoon at Aubergine Towers. I click onto one forum to see if anyone else I was out with last night is feeling as rough as I am and one thread title stops me in my tracks.

Grant McLennan RIP

Did I imagine that? I open it and there's a link.

“On Saturday 6th May, legendary Australian singer songwriter Grant W McLennan died in his sleep at his home in Brisbane…..”

I was a teenager when the sounds of The Go-Betweens first filtered into my life around the time of the album "16 Lovers Lane", which still remains to this day one of my favourite albums ever. As well as having recorded more outstanding songs than most bands could dream of, I was always amazed by the fact that a band could boast two such incredibly talented yet complementary singer-songwriters; it seemed almost greedy of them, and it would be well over a decade before British Sea Power became only the second band to feature twice in my personal all time top ten of such things. (Separate but complementing singer songwriters that is. Obviously as a teenage Stranglers fan I'd grown up with the idea that bands with only one lead singer were missing a trick).  And has there ever been a lyric written as evocative in its simplicity as "Cattle And Cane"? I'd never been outside of Northern Europe, rarely in fact outside of North West England, but you only need to soak up those words to feel the Australian sun on your back.

If you read my ramblings on a regular basis you'll remember my reminiscences about the stormy revival and implosion of the Chameleons - with the Go-Betweens it never really felt like that. They split up, they got back together, they did other stuff, but there was just this kind of feeling that, like New Order in a way, (yes I wrote this in 2006, OK?)  they would always exist, always come home to each other. It seems that more often than not, when a band has been going for decades, that anything they release feels like a pale shadow of their former glories and I honestly could not name a great many bands who have produced some of their best work well into middle age, but last year's "Oceans Apart" absolutely blew me away. I was smiling to myself when I read a few magazines' end-of-year reviews and realised I was not the only person who thought that. At a time when I was gradually and grudgingly having to accept that I'd never see my 20s again, at least half the songs on this stunning album evoked a feeling of lost youth and reminiscence.

It was going to be OK, this middle age thing, because Grant McLennan and Robert Forster were with me all the way.

I laughed out loud watching Series 4 of "24" when the sinister corporation behind whatever atrocity it was that Jack Bauer was having to deal with was named as "Forster McLennan". It might actually have been "Forrester" rendered short of a syllable through Kiefer Sutherland's drawl, but I'd like to think that was for legal reasons and that somewhere in the scriptwriting room was a fellow Go-Betweens fan. (I can't even begin to describe how excited I was when a couple of years later confirmation popped up on the band's Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Go-Betweens - Evan Katz, I salute you).

One post-British-Sea-Power-gig morning in Brighton I was flicking though the local freesheet waiting for my mate I was staying with to wake up, when I noticed the Go-Betweens were playing in the town that night. There were no northern dates and I started thinking about staying down one more night and watching them, but with my job at the time under threat of redundancy I figured either throwing a sicky or booking a same-day holiday might not go down too well on my record, and drove back up the A23 and away from them.

I never realised it would have been the last chance I ever had.

I never met Grant McLennan or Robert Forster. I never wanted to. Much as I still love the music of the Chameleons, the experiences of 2002-03 changed some things. They had been heroes and now they were human beings, they had faults and flaws and the irritating little tendencies real people do and whilst I still count myself as exceedingly privileged to have got to know the people behind some of the music that soundtracked my life, some stars had fallen from my sky. Grant and Robert remained there, and that's where I wanted them.  I do however have a favourite personal memory of Grant - they last time they played in Manchester, in spring 2003 at Academy 3, sound gremlins were rendering his guitar almost unplayable and on reaching a part of the set where Robert took the lead on a couple of songs, he handed the errant instrument to one of the road crew and wandered offstage. At the front of the crowd and in front of me was a fan who was clearly so intensely moved by the set that he had his eyes closed, singing along with his hand on his heart. Grant slipped out of the side door and almost unnoticed into the audience to the point where I was almost frozen to the spot when I found him standing beside me. He leaned over and tapped the lad on the shoulder. "Pretty good aren't they?" The lad turned around, initially looking aggrieved that someone had broken into his own little personal space - and then he saw the grinning face of his hero and smiled back enthusiastically - probably pretty speechless himself. Grant then aimed a couple of incomprehensible heckles at his partner and foil, before the roadie finally beckoned him back to his now fixed guitar. Maybe you had to be there but it was a great moment.

I had been thinking about the band recently after hearing echoes of their sound in a young Manchester band called Amida who randomly contacted me when I first set up (the Myspace music blog), and have been blowing the dust off a few of those old albums as well as "Oceans Apart". My job's more secure these days with the redundancies pretty much having come to an end, and I can't help thinking that one dodgy day off probably wouldn't have mattered that much in the grand scheme of things, but there's no point having regrets. Thank you Grant for a legacy of songs that is almost incomparable. And maybe up there in Australian indie rock heaven David McComb is waiting with a few tinnies and a guitar.

POSTSCRIPT, 6/5/16

Four years later I finally made it to Australia and saw those wide open spaces with my own eyes. As I documented here - http://cathupthedownescalator.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/longest-awayday-australia-music-and-me.html - Grant and Robert were never far from my thoughts, as we travelled by train across thosands of miles of open country or wandered up to Sydney's Darlinghurst district in search of the bars the young singers were hanging out in when they first moved from Brisbane. Brisbane itself did not feature in that trip - there just wasn't time - but we always said we'd go back one day. It's not happened yet, but it will.