[Article on Rough Trade. Robert Forster talks about each of his albums. Lindsey would have been dream producer, he says]
Uncut Magazine
Robert Forster, Album By Album by John Mulvey January 18, 2016
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THE GO-BETWEENS BEFORE HOLLYWOOD ROUGH TRADE 1983
After a clutch of cult singles and a good, if rather awkward, debut album (1981’s Send Me A Lullaby), Robert Forster, Grant McLennan and drummer Lindy Morrison fetch up in London and sign to Rough Trade. Soon, they are dispatched to Eastbourne, where Forster and McLennan’s timeless songcraft is uncovered by their first proper producer.
We had to make a classic. Our first album was not a classic album, and you don’t know how many chances you’re going to get.
We’d never really worked with a producer, and we talked with Geoff Travis about our fantasy candidates, people like Lindsey Buckingham and Robbie Robertson. But John Brand walked into our rehearsal room, taped us, then walked back the next day with the songs written out and with arrangement ideas; no one had ever done that with our music.
John had been working for Virgin with groups like Magazine and XTC, and realised everything we were doing was in fours and eights, it was all classic. That’s what Grant and I had been brought up on: Neil Diamond writing for the Monkees, the first Blondie Album, David Bowie, Creedence. We knew how songs were constructed.
And so Grant and I had the songs, most of them written in London and then recorded in Eastbourne. The studio was called ICC, a very good Christian studio that no longer exists; 24-track, two-inch tape. I don’t know how John found it. The album he did before Before Hollywood was High Land, Hard Rain, Aztec Camera walked out the door and we walked in, and John made two classics.
It was the album we always thought we could make, and a very big sonic jump from Send Me A Lullaby. I don’t know if we made a jump like that in the rest of our career, except maybe to 16 Lovers Lane.
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