When was the first time the Go-Betweens went into the studio?
We went to a studio in Brisbane that's now called Sunshine Studios. It was a 24 track studio we just found in the directory. We didn't know anyone that had done any recordings. Now, it's easier to put out a CD. Records were harder to put out, it was a more difficult process and people didn't record as much. There weren't as many studios and we didn't know anyone that had actually ever been in a studio to recommend us one.
Did you have friends that were in bands?
When we started, no one. We didn't know anyone in bands. We soon met people at gigs and met other bands, but when Grant and I started, we didn't know anyone in bands. We only met other bands and musicians through playing.
What was the studio like? What was the experience?
It was a good experience. It was sort of doing a little bit of country and jingles. The Saints had recorded their first album there... I don't know if you've ever heard of a band called the Saints.
Oh, yeah, I like that band.
They recorded their single there.
"I'm Stranded?"
"I'm Stranded" was recorded there, but we didn't know that!
That's great!
We just had an engineer and were in and out in like four hours. Recording and mixing.
Was that just the first single?
We were overwhelmingly happy, you know it's the first time we had ever played with headphones on, it's the first time we ever played and went back and heard our music over big speakers. It's a very overwhelming experience. It's a wonderful experience. It's an experience that you never forget. It was not a big room, but it was big enough, it was a one-room studio where you're paneled off from the control room so it's just two rooms, but the desk was quite good and they had a decent mic collection. The guy that recorded us was a hippie guy, and hippie guys in the '70s, most times, knew what they were doing, know what I mean? It could have been a lot worse. We could have had some hideous rock guy or some guy that wanted to turn us into a top 40 band. We walked in off the streets, had money to pay for the session, and he was good. He actually engineered our first three sessions because we went back to the same studio. We went back in October, '78 and we recorded a song called "The Sound of Rain" which is on The Lost Album and then we went back and recorded "People Say", which was our second single.We did all of those at the same studio using the same engineer and then, many years later in 1992, I went back to Brisbane after recording my first solo album in Hansa Studios in Germany.
The one you did with Mick Harvey?
Yeah. It was a huge big studio in Berlin. You know, Bowie did Low and Heroes there and Iggy Pop did Lust for Life. After I was in there, U2 went in there and did Achtung Baby. Very famous studio. After that I went back to my hometown in 1992, I went back to the same studio and it hadn't moved and it was the same desk that I recorded my second solo album, Calling From a Country Phone. It was a little bit like Sun. I always imagined it was a little bit like those studios that Buddy Holly did his first recording... you know, sort of a small studio, come in and do a bit of country, we do jingles and it's not the best gear but it's got a certain sort of little funkiness about it.
Those things sound good too. For a very young band that you were at that stage they don't sound like you were being dragged along in the wrong direction; it just sounds like you sounded.
Exactly. Not a particularly polished sound but almost a funky sound.
The other songs that are on the lost album are two track recordings in your bedroom or something. Did you have a friend that brought a deck over or something like that?
Yeah, exactly. It was a little mixer on cassette and he had microphones. He was a friend who had been in a studio and it was really, "Wham-bam" you were on the mat. This was done in my bedroom where we used to practice and write all of the songs. It was like having a friend come over and just go, "Hey, I'm gonna tape. Just set up, I'm gonna tape your whole set." Which was really good, for a songwriter like myself, to hear back all of the songs I'd written. I just got to that one step removed that was really nice and I've always liked that way of recording. Just sort of playing live.
I've heard there were some other bootlegs or something of even more early stuff that was unreleased.
There's a bootleg record as well, that our record label put out and that was put out extensively in the states and it was quite embarrassing because it was like our first album, which is not particularly strong anyway and we were so hungry, this is fast-forwarding to 1980 or 1981 but we were doing demos for our album and we recorded the album in July and we threw a number of songs we didn't put on the album and so he sort of had this other recording in a way. It was all just done in one day. It was done at a studio in Brisbane. More of a demo studio.
Not very professional? After that, you worked with Tony Cohen in Australia.
He did Send Me a Lullaby, our first album. When I went back to Brisbane to do the album back in Sunshine Studios in '92, Tony did that too. So I went back to my first day at the studio and I went back to my first ever producer.
How did you hook up with Tony?
He did those early '80s Missing Link records. Tony was doing everybody. Tony did the Birthday Party, and the Birthday Party were on this label too, and so Tony was the only guy seemingly under the age of 30 in Australia who was adventurous in the recording studio and was sympathetic. He was very good also. So Tony made a lot of records and recorded the Birthday Party and we had heard what Tony had done with them so we were happy to work with Tony.
You were songwriters and that's where the focus of the band. Through the 80s, one of the most horrible recording eras that I can think of, you managed to maintain a pretty good natural sound. You kept things down-to-earth sounding, like a real record, not using big huge gated drums or terrible things that were popular at the moment. And to that end, it's only a handful of producers, like John Brand and Richard Preston that you used quite a bit. How did you hook up with them in the first place?
Very good point you've made which not many people realize, and I appreciate you making that observation.
The records hold up now.
Yeah, because it's true! And everything you've said about the 80s... don't forget we were in London which was where some of the most hideous crimes that were ever committed to recording. We could have easily turned into the Thompson Twins. But John Brand... we were in London in 1982, signed to Rough Trade records, who were a great label at the time, and they picked us up after the first album, after working with Tony Cohen engineering. And we came up to London. This was gonna be our big album and we were not happy with our first album, we didn't particularly like it. But somehow we got a deal out of it. So we were very much, "We've got to make a great second album". And we really wanted to. John had worked with a lot of Virgin records, in the late '80s, had done a lot of engineering on, I can't remember the groups, but it was a time of the Simple Minds, XTC, that whole sort of Virgin records in the late 70s, when they were a big label. And John had got tired of that and wanted to produce and he made a quite astounding jump. He just went to the biggest indie and the most wellknown indie in town, Rough Trade and said, "Hey, I'm a commercial engineer...". He used to work at the Manor, where all the stuff was done up in Oxford in a huge big studio. And he was just working with all the budgets that were fifty thousand pounds, a hundred thousand pounds and he said to Rough Trade, "You know, I'm commercial, I've worked with Virgin, I've worked in big studios, I wanna produce, I'd like to work with some bands and with you." and they played him some stuff and the first album that he did was an Aztec Camera album. And we were friends with Roddy [Frame of Aztec Camera] and everything and then they said, "Well, the Go-Betweens are gonna make a record, do you want to do them too?" And he came to one of our practice sessions, liked what he heard and so John did us too [Before Hollywood]. He had this deal where we went down to this place called ICC, down in Eastbourne, which is a Christian stuio and in a way it was a little bit like Sunshine... a funky one-room, not too big control room, I can't remember what desk, good mic collection and really cheap, like two thousand quid a week, like four thousand dollars a week. We did the album there and he was great. He was the first person, ever, who worked, when we were rehearsing, walked into our rehearsal room and taped us, and then came back the next day and had the whole songs written out.
Charted out?
Yeah. Completely. Like this one song, there's an eight bar introduction on it, okay, which was really great, like we went, "Uh huh, so this is what he just does." You know, like Tony never did that. We had never done that on our singles, obviously. And John was very pro. It was the underground weird band with the slightly commercial producer, and somehow we made him sound interesting and he made us sound better than we were in a way. It was a nice marriage.
You enjoyed working with him?
On that album, yeah.
You worked with him after that too. On the next album.
On the next album.
Was that Spring Hill Fair?
Yeah. It was not so... we couldn't decide, and had a larger budget and John went back to his old ways, we were suddenly in SSL, huge big studio-land. He was like, "Now we're going to make a proper record." and I was like, "Our last record was very proper and was very great". It had worked out the first time and then we went down and then we spent a week of him trying to gate the drums and set click tracks. The first and second albums, there's no clicks. It was just really natural, this is why this record stands up, you know, it's all Hammond organs, acoustic guitars, real drums and it's really super, it's really tight but it's a hundred percent natural and it just comes out of it.
It's a standard, real sound.
He must have started to smell the Top 40 and he sort of gets back to his Virgin background more.
Was that a struggle?
Yeah, huge.
How was Lindy [Morrison, the band's long-time drummer] with that sort of thing? Was she hating having to play with the clicks?
Yes, she was. It was just John and us at the studio and we spent the first week just messing around with drums. Now that I look back on it, we almost just told him to go away, but we were down in the south of France. we were down there in the south of France where John had booked this studio. The studio was owned by a guy named Jacque Lucier who is very famous in Europe. He made these contemporary versions of Bach that sold by the truckload and he built the studio down in Provence, down in southern France. He'd built a studio in his chateau and he had his own vineyard. He owned his own wine and so we're down there drinking his wine but it kind of went into a storm. There was a breakdown, there would be John on the phone to London with the manuals out, and we're sitting there going, "We should be recording...". There was a French guy who was co-engineering and we should have just told John to go away and just work with the French guy.
It feels like such a drastic move, at that stage of the game. I'm sure that's hard.
Between those records we recorded some demos. We went into a small studio in London in 1983 and we did some demos because we thought we were going to do the next record on Rough Trade. We went to a studio called Pathway, which is where Elvis Costello did his first album, and it's a very, very funky 8-track in London. Great little 8-track and we met Richard Preston who was the house engineer and these demos sounded really good. After the fiasco with John, on Spring Hill Fair, we just went, "Let's go back to Richard" who we really enjoyed working with and so for our next album we wanted to go back to basics and none of this bullshit.
Like click tracks?
Yeah. All of that, we just decided to just skip.
I just thought that was funny because when I first started buying all of your records I always thought that maybe Spring Hill Fair was a later record than it was, because of the sound of it. When I figured out the chronology of it I thought that was curious and now it totally makes sense.
We sort of went back to a more smaller, funkier studio in London. We went back to acoustic guitars, vibraphones, piano, accordions. This was in late 1985.
Do you feel that, in any way, instrumentation-wise and in the way that you were looking at it that it was a reaction to any other stuff that was going on at the time... or was it more your instinct that made records like what you had listened to?
It was more instinct. It wasn't "Everyone is making synthetic, bing boingy records" that we had to do, we were just following our instincts and we were following the things that we loved.
You think of records that you always liked.
Yeah. And I can't begin to tell you what we would have been listening to.
I always thought of things like, you were saying, that it was possibly Television.
Ah, shit yeah.
Or your voice was the first I had ever heard that reminded me of that.
Yeah.
Or even in some ways things like, you know, Dylan or The Band and stuff like that kind of stuff.
