Eight Pictures
The Go-Betweens formed in Brisbane in 1978. Robert Forster and Grant McLennan had met studying literature at the University of Queensland, and the sensibility of that background runs through everything they ever made. Forster described their sound as a hybrid of The Monkees and The Velvet Underground, which is precisely right. Literate, accessible pop songs delivered with amateur enthusiasm and genuine adventurousness. Lindy Morrison joined on drums in 1980, completing the lineup that would record the debut album. They recorded Send Me a Lullaby at Richmond Recorders in Melbourne in July 1981, produced by the band and Tony Cohen, who had also engineered The Birthday Party. The album was released on Missing Link in Australia in November 1981 and on Rough Trade in the UK in February 1982, where it expanded from eight tracks to twelve.
Eight Pictures is a Robert Forster composition about a camera-wielding stalker, its lyric delivered with the kind of controlled unease that became his signature. Lindy Morrison's drumming on the track is the other essential thing. A solo that reviewers have called "hilariously artless" and "almost Shaggs-like," both of which are meant as compliments and land as such. Morrison's drums are always the most underrated part of the Go-Betweens' appeal, and Eight Pictures is the clearest argument for why. The guitar work, Forster's rhythm and McLennan's lead, moves with the staccato precision the band called "metallic folk." It is one of the best things on a debut album that is itself underrated relative to everything that followed.
"Robert Forster dominates the proceedings, writing most of the songs. The highlights are early and late, all Grant McLennan compositions. This probably is the least impressive Go-Betweens proper album, but I like the way the guitars snake around each other like a Caduceus sometimes."
The Go-Betweens spent most of the 1980s in London, making six albums of such consistent quality that critics still debate their order of merit. They broke up in 1989, reformed in 2000, and continued until Grant McLennan died of a heart attack in his sleep on May 6, 2006, aged 48. Robert Forster has continued making records. In 2010, a bridge in Brisbane was renamed the Go Between Bridge in their honour. Eight Pictures is from the beginning of all of that, before the London years, before the critical reputation, before any of it. Four people in a Melbourne studio in July 1981, finding out what they sounded like.