Ten Rules.
The other night I finished reading “The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll”, the book of recent collected criticism by Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens. I know the Go-Betweens are no more after Grant McLennan died so suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago, but because they spent so long in hiatus as a band after they dissolved in the early 90s and reformed ten years later I’d already grown used to thinking of both of them as members of the band whether it was active or not.
The book is mostly a collection of music columns for The Monthly, I heard Robert talking at the Brisbane Writers Festival about how trepidatious he was about becoming a critic after one of the editors of the magazine called him out of the blue with the offer to write about whatever caught his fancy. He’d had one piece published ten years earlier and that was it. He described at the festival how he’d started writing no less than thirteen opening pages for a novel over the years, but now thought the short form of these collected pieces suited him much better and he’d finally come to a form of writing he could embrace.
I’ve been a fan of Robert & The Go-Betweens since starting high school so not being a regular Monthly reader I would have sought out this book no matter the quality. But the reviews are good and as a musician he brings something to the table you don’t read much of in cultural criticism, a sympathy for the creative drives and impulses, compromises and failures that rule musical production and a sense of the strength of feeling artists can have about each other’s work. Some of the more unlikely pieces are the best. The reading of the career of Delta Goodrem, the appreciation of The Monkees, the review of the most recent AC-DC album and the evocation of Brisbane in the live review of the reformation of the original Saints.
There are two pieces that are kind of eulogies for Grant that end the collection and are quite moving if you’ve followed them both over the years. If are interested in the band and the relationship of these two seek out the live DVD from a few years back called That Striped Sunlight Sound, the extra disc is a long loungeroom interview with the both of them and the dynamic between them is revealing and entertaining to watch.
