11 The Go Betweens Song Comics

Thank You For A Lovely Day: 11 The Go-Betweens Song Comics by Robert Forster, Gunther Buskies and Jonas Engelmann.

Publisher: Ventil Verlag.

Release Date: Out Now.

Australia’s sleekest and most romantic rock band get a visual re-imagining, in a fascinating tryst between eleven of their compositions and comic book art.

Throughout their musical tenure, the Go-Betweens virtually had the term cult band sewn into their stage clothes. Although real success always eluded them, their svelte albums usually graced the top ends of most critics end of year lists. For very good reason. Their songs were like synopsises for an unmade Jean Luc Goddard film, full of pathos and drop-dead cool that stood them out amongst their contemporaries. If you knew about them, you knew. More often than not their fans guarded them to their hearts like a romantic secret, seeing lead members Robert Forster and Grant McLennan as songwriting deities who favoured subtlety and deft turns over the alternative cliches of more successful and frankly less talented music press favourites.

It’s no surprise then that Forster (McLennan sadly passed away in 2006) has decided to take a more creative route with the bands feted legacy with this book, although the two worlds colliding probably have more in common than you might think. The comic book fan and his music equivalent have a lot of duality. Both worship at the altar of heroes who make small bedrooms feel like the highest castle and who crucially get them through the barbed wire years of alienated teenage life.

With eleven tracks on offer here, it’s interesting to note how the artists incorporate the bands original vision and also their personal thoughts on their music. With detailed liner notes too on each track by Forster, laying bare the history of fan favourites like ‘Lee Remick’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’, there’s an authenticity that will instantly appease hardcore fans of the band. In terms of the comic strips themselves though, do they ultimately work? Can the doomed romance of a Go-Betweens song be replicated through illustration or is it a case of one art form jarring against the next?

For the most part, this experiment gels superbly. Visually, as you would expect, all of the strips are absolutely stunning. From pop art to traditional slice of life, the styles never really repeat themselves and are at times surreally moving in their depictions of characters frozen within the confines of a Go-Betweens song. The best of these is Ulf K’s minimal but haunting take on ‘Quiet Town’ depicting a couple splitting up and heading in different directions, their stars finally and fatally aligning to Scorpio Rising in the distant sky. There are notable mentions too for Bim Ericksson’s strange and slightly disturbing strip that accompanies ‘The Clarke Sisters’. Ericksson’s admission that he knows nothing of the Go-Betweens music echoes what Oska Wald also confesses to in the notes for his illustration ‘German Farmhouse’. Both strips seem wilder and less reverential than the rest, as if the two artists, untethered from Forster and McLennan’s original vision have been allowed a free reign. There’s an energy in both that makes them stand out in the collection. The further away it seems these two are from the Go-Betweens music, the more interesting things they have to say.

Where things get slightly choppier, is the opposite of that equation, the artists who are genuine fans of the band. Whilst still interesting visually, there are a couple of strips in this collection that seem flat and fail to tell their own story. Whilst Phillip Waechter’s illustration of ‘Karen’ and Sarah Lippett’s take on ‘Here Comes A City’ are both hazy and half-formed however, the majority of material captured within this book is a great deal more striking and cinematic. The core idea of fusing rock music and comic book art is ultimately an inspired one, giving both a different dimension and is also a timely reminder that all subcultures in the end must crossover to survive. With the record industry marginalising and shrinking to within an inch of its life by the month, any way to promote new artists and revitalise former bands back catalogues should be celebrated, and if this book is anything to go by, it’s certainly a blueprint that other likeminded musicians should sit up and take notice of in the very near future as they try to adapt and not die in these harsh cultural times.

~

Words by Craig Campbell, you can read more book reviews at his author profile. He also tweets here