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The candle and the flame out now, 3rd of february, 2023.

                                “The Candle and the Flame is full of life, wonder and hope. The songs are uncluttered, yet musical details sprout from everywhere like green shoots.” - THE GUARDIAN

                                       “The story behind Robert Forster’s eighth solo album is already assuming classic proportions, and the Go-Betweens co-founder has outdone himself with a masterly set of songs”  -  THE AUSTRALIAN                  

‘THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME’

Fans will be able to hear songs from the ‘The Candle And The Flame’ when Robert hits the road for a string of tour dates in 2023 – tickets available here.

ROBERT FORSTER - ‘THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME'

UK, IRELAND, GERMANY & AUSTRIA TOUR - MARCH/APRIL 2023

AUSTRALIAN TOUR – MAY 2023 TICKETS ON SALE NOW

ROBERT FORSTER ANNOUNCES AUSTRALIAN TOUR  SHARES NEW SINGLE ‘TENDER YEARS’

Taken from his forthcoming album ‘the candle and the flame’ , to be released 3 february 2023, 23rd of november, 2022.

Acclaimed Australian singer – songwriter Robert Forster shares new single ‘Tender Years’ , a track lifted from his forthcoming album ‘The Candle And The Flame’ which is set for release on February 3.  

‘The Candle And The Flame’ started taking shape in 2021. Forster had a batch of songs written over a period of three years which he knew would be the basis of his next album. The songs felt strong, like they belonged together. They surprised him, too. They had different things to say, more openly personal about those closest to him.

One of those songs was ‘Tender Years’. A song Robert has written about Karin Bäumler, his wife and sometimes musical partner of 32 years and counting. 

‘Tender Years’ could be one of the greatest love songs Robert has written in a career that now stretches across nine studio albums with The Go-Betweens and eight solo albums. It is rare to hear a love song expressed with such clarity and deep emotional resonance, rarer still to hear one set to such a deliciously funky groove. “I’m in a story with her/I know I can’t live without her,” Robert sings, as a rhythmic drum and bass line drive the song on. The story is that of Karin and Robert but like so many songs with an enduring power, the personal feels universal too.

Fans will be able to hear ‘Tender Years’, first single ‘ She’s a Fighter’ and other, yet to be released songs from the ‘The Candle And The Flame’ when Robert hits the road for a string of national tour dates in May 2023 – tickets available here.

‘The Candle And The Flame’ consists of 9 songs written by Robert. Produced by Robert, Karin Bäumler (Baby You Know) and Louis Forster (The Goon Sax), the album was mixed by Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey) and features former Go-Betweens and Warm Nights bass player Adele Pickvance as well as Scott Bromiley and Luke McDonald (The John Steele Singers), who worked on Robert’s ‘Inferno’ and ‘Songs To Play’ albums.

“The recording sessions for the album were done sporadically over six months. Sometimes just one or two days a month. As that was all Karin’s strength and condition allowed her to do. So we had to record ‘live’, catching magical moments and going for ‘feel'. And that became the sound of the album.” says Robert.

Robert Forster has also announced shows in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Austria for March 2023. He is currently writing a novel and preparing the release of Volume 3 of The Go-Betweens Boxset series, ‘G Stands For Go-Betweens.’

Friday May 12 - Venue: Trinity Sessions, Adelaide Saturday May 13 - Venue: Freo Social, Fremantle Thursday May 18 - Venue: Theatre Royal, Castlemaine Friday May 19 - Venue: Brunswick Ballroom, Brunswick Saturday May 20 - Venue:  Memo Music Hall, St Kilda Sunday May 21 - Venue: Archies Creek Hotel, Archies Creek Friday May 26 - Venue: Princess Theatre, Brisbane Saturday May 27 - Venue: Factory Theatre, Sydney Sunday May 28 - Venue: Lizottes, Newcastle

ROBERT FORSTER – ‘THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME’ RELEASED 3RD FEBRUARY 2023 – PRE-ORDER / PRE-SAVE HERE

‘TENDER YEARS’

OUT NOW – LISTEN HERE

ROBERT FORSTER NEWS UPDATE 

A message from robert, 16th october, 2022.

Greetings from Brisbane

Dear friends, pull up chairs, this is a difficult and lengthy post. It is tough news that I wish to share with you and not for you to pick up second hand on the internet over the next months.

In early July last year, Karin Bäumler, my wife and musical companion for thirty-two years, was diagnosed with a confronting case of ovarian cancer. It was a time of shock and grief, and that same month, she embarked on a regime of chemotherapy treatment.

Ever since we met, Karin and I have sung and played music together in our home, and in these dark days we turned to music once again. I had a batch of new songs I’d written over the last years, and we started playing them together. Our son Louis often dropped in for a meal and a chat and soon he began joining us on guitar. One night, when sitting cross-legged on the couch, after we had played a song, Karin looked up from her xylophone and said, ‘When we play music, is the only time I forget I have cancer.’ That was a big moment.

In the meantime some of our very kind Brisbane friends had formed a cooking roster, leaving meals at our front door to support us through this time. One of them was Adele Pickvance, former Go-Betweens and Warm Nights bass player. On one of her meal delivery trips, I asked her to bring her bass and an amp along. She pulled up a chair in our lounge room and fell right in on the new songs.

In October, Karin was scheduled for surgery. We booked a studio, and on September 27th, the four of us sitting in a circle, recorded 10 songs live in 7 hours. Whatever would happen in the future, we would always have the tape.

Over the next months, when Karin was strong enough and Covid numbers were low, we booked odd days in the studio. Sometimes our daughter, Loretta, would come along and join us and we brought in friends to help us, too. Karin was driving the album and listening to what we’d done on each session, gave us weeks of enjoyment and a place we could retreat to, away from hospital visits and scans and blood tests. In early March, with her chemotherapy course just finished, we did our last day in the studio.

The songs we recorded formed an album that will come out early next year, and this Wednesday, the 19th, we will release a single. But we wanted you to know the story of the creation of the record first. Why it exists. Why these musicians are playing on it. Why there isn’t layers of production, instead a live, catch a moment feel to the sound. Two of the songs on the album are from that September 27 recording. We didn’t know we’d started an album but we had, in the shadow of Karin’s hospital visits.

With a challenging year behind her, Karin is feeling strong and positive now and she can’t wait for our music to go out of our house and into the world. It may seem strange making an album in these circumstances and looking back, we really don’t know how we did it, but we do know that it helped us just so much as a family. It was done in drops and gave us this other reality we could live in. Something that music is great in giving.

In the slow process of the album’s recording, we didn’t inform a wide range of family and friends of what we were doing, and we ask for their understanding in the delivery of this news.

The album is called “The Candle And The Flame”. We hope you will enjoy it!

Fondest Regards from Karin and myself,

ROBERT FORSTER RELEASES NEW SINGLE, ‘SHE’S A FIGHTER’

19th october, 2022.

Acclaimed Australian singer – songwriter Robert Forster today announces his 8th solo album ‘ The Candle And The Flame’ to be released on Friday 3rd February 2023 and available to pre-order/save here now. It’s an album for Forster that has taken a very different path in creating than his previous works. The first single, released today is titled ‘ She’s A Fighter’. It reveals only part of what became a journey of creating music with family and friends with a need to find joy and solace in the face of adversity. 

Robert explains:

“‘She’s A Fighter’ is the last song I wrote for ‘The Candle And The Flame’ album. I wrote the music for it in June 2021. I liked the tune and the quick energy of the song, but I didn't know yet what it was going to be about.

In early July, Karin Bäumler, my wife and musical companion for thirty-two years, received a cancer diagnosis.

In late July, with a series of chemotherapy sessions about to begin, Karin talked of fighting for her health and a path through chemotherapy to recovery.

The phrase, ’She’s A Fighter’ came to me.

I liked it. And I knew immediately that it would work with my new melody. I needed just one other line for the lyric. ‘Fighting for good.’ The song was finished.

I had written my first two-line song. I had just out-Ramoned The Ramones!

Because the song has so much meaning to us, we decided to record it as a family. The only time this happens on the album. Karin sings and plays xylophone. Our daughter Loretta plays electric guitar. Our son Louis plays guitar, bass and percussion. And I strum an acoustic guitar fiercely and sing.

And that’s ‘She’s a Fighter’.”

That coming together musically as a family is captured in the video for ‘She’s A Fighter’. “The video was shot in the same studio (Alchemix Studios, Brisbane) as the album was recorded in. So there is continuity,” Forster said. “And the way the four of sit in a circle playing, is very much how we recorded ‘She’s A Fighter’ and other tracks on the album.”

‘The Candle And The Flame’ consists of 9 songs written by Robert. Produced by Robert, Karin Bäumler and Louis Forster (The Goon Sax), the album was mixed by Victor Van Vugt (Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey) and features former Go-Betweens and Warm Nights bass player Adele Pickvance as well as Scott Bromiley and Luke McDonald (The John Steele Singers), who worked on Robert’s ‘Inferno’ and ‘Songs To Play’ albums.

Robert Forster is planning shows both in Australia and abroad in 2023 with dates to be announced soon. He is currently writing a novel and preparing the release of Volume 3 of The Go-Betweens Boxset series, ‘G Stands For Go-Betweens.’

‘SHE’S A FIGHTER’

Robert Forster (the Go-Betweens)

Robert Forster is a Brisbane based singer-songwriter and author.

In 1978, with Queensland University friend Grant McLennan, he co-founded the acclaimed pop/rock band The Go-Betweens. The group, based in London for five and a half years, recorded six albums, toured extensively, before breaking up in late 1989.

In the 1990’s, while living in Brisbane and Regensburg, Germany, Forster recorded and toured three solo albums of original material: Danger In The Past (’90); Calling From A Country Phone (’93) and Warm Nights (’96). He also released an album of his favourite songs by other artists called I Had a New York Girlfriend (’94).

In 2000, reunited with Grant McLennan, The Go-Betweens recorded their seventh album, and would record two more albums, one of which, ‘Oceans Apart’, was awarded the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Best Adult Contemporary Album of 2005.

On May 6, 2006, Grant McLennan’s passed away at the age of 48. From 2005 to 2013, Forster was the music critic for Australian politics and culture magazine The Monthly. He won the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism in 2006, and a collection of his music writings was published in 2009, titled, ‘The Ten Rules of Rock and Roll’. In 2015, Forster received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from Queensland University. The following year, his memoir, ‘Grant & I ’ was published, winning the Book Of The Year award in Mojo and Uncut in 2017. His memoir was also translated and published in Italian and German.

Between 2007 and 2019, Forster recorded three albums of original material: The Evangelist (’08); Songs To Play (’15); Inferno (’19). On February 3, 2023, his new album, ‘The Candle And The Flame’ will be released.

Robert Forster will be undertaking tours of the UK, Europe, and Australia in the first half of 2023. He is currently writing a novel, and preparing the release of Volume 3 of The Go-Betweens Boxset series, ‘G Stands For Go-Betweens.’

All venues are wheelchair accessible

Robert Forster: “Time is fluid. Everything we do during our day, we’re touching the past”

The Go-Betweens songwriter tells NME how music therapy for the love of his life became ‘The Candle and the Flame’, the most personal album he has ever recorded

R obert Forster is sitting in the living room of his home in The Gap, a bushland suburb on the fringes of Brisbane, although NME can’t say for sure. The 65-year-old former Go-Between prefers to have the camera off while speaking over Zoom. His approach to communication technology is cautious, but not disinterested: Forster posts long, sporadic updates on Facebook to his fans, more in the style of a family Christmas card than social media missive. In a recent post , he asked whether he should get Instagram.

“I have gone back and forwards with for years. Sometimes I think it’s a good idea, other times I shiver…I’ve never downloaded an App. Should i do it? Please tell me, yes or no…And if I do, I promise – NO photographs of my breakfast,” he wrote.

“I don’t want it to be some sort of content feed,” Forster says now of the would-be Insta account. “I want to be what I see and feel. I want the content to come exclusively from me.”

Beyond curiosity, the songwriter is considering the move in order to document the touring of his new solo album ‘The Candle and The Flame’, the most personal release of his 45-year recording career.

Over the past three years, Forster wrote a series of unrelated songs in a haphazard workflow.

“You’ve probably done interviews with musicians, and they go, ‘We wrote an album in three months, or three weeks’. I’m lucky if I write three songs a year,” he explains.

The songwriter was concurrently whittling away at a debut novel, set in the music industry during 1991, after a decade of non-fiction writing as a music critic and a memoirist (“I’ve been writing facts and having editors fact-check me for years. And I just wanted to make it up”). But pages were left blank in July 2021 when Forster’s wife and musical partner Karin Bäumler was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

“Friends of ours in their 50s, 60s, they’re still partying. I gave up alcohol at 40… This line ‘ I don’t do drugs, I do time ’ came to me, thinking about that”

“We were in a COVID tunnel, and then it just got more intense – a more intense experience of lockdown,” Forster says.

After long days ferrying between tests and treatment, music became the family’s only salve. In the evenings, Forster would strum the guitar and sing the songs Bäumler had heard him write in the house, and soon, she would join in. The only new song Forster could bring himself to write about the actual diagnosis was ‘She’s A Fighter’ , a chugging acoustic exaltation with only one lyric: “ She’s a fighter/ Fighting for good ”.

“It obviously struck us straight away that a lot of these older songs had an added meaning and were somehow connected with what happened to Karin: ‘There’s A Reason To Live’, ‘It’s Only Poison’, ‘Tender Years’. I can’t remember writing songs where that flip in meaning could be read into,” he says.

I ndeed, it’s almost too difficult to believe these songs were written before Bäumler’s diagnosis. ‘Tender Years’ is Forster’s impassioned love song for his life partner: “ I see her through the ages / She’s a book of a thousand pages….I’m in a story with her, I know I can’t live without her ”.

“I just had this idea of Karin, seeing someone through the ages, but making it mythical, like it was Shakespeare, with this vigour,” Forster explains.

Forster’s son Louis, the frontman of the recently disbanded Goon Sax , and Adele Pickvance, a former Go-Betweens bassist, were visiting in the evenings to bring over food and help around the house. They joined the lounge room sessions, and something began to build.

“ One night, when sitting cross-legged on the couch, after we had played a song, Karin looked up from her xylophone and said, ‘When we play music, i[t’]s the only time I forget I have cancer’ ,” Forster wrote on Facebook.

“We weren’t thinking of making an album,” he says now. “But we wanted a document.”

Bäumler had a major seven-hour operation set for September 28, and so, the family booked a seven-hour recording session at Alchemix Studios in Brisbane’s West End for the day before.

“The four of us were sitting, facing each other like a campfire, and just performing… I said to the engineer, ‘I don’t want headphones, I just want to sing into a mic, we’re doing this live’. And then no one had headphones,” Forster says.

Hearing some of the words he had written, played in that ring of familial intimacy, was overwhelming.

“‘Tender Years’, I was playing it alone. I was just holding myself together,” Forster says. “I can’t remember an experience like it where I wrote a song that jumped in meaning so much.

“Karin loved it. It was the first time she’d been out of the house since July without going to a hospital or a doctor.”

Two of the songs (‘I Don’t Do Drugs, I Do Time’ and ‘It’s Only Poison’) would remain in that original “document” format, and the rest were gradually re-recorded as a studio album. Bäumler’s chemotherapy sessions were on a tri-weekly schedule, and so they recorded one or two days every third week when she was strongest.

L istening to the record, the connective tissue between the songs seems to be memory. ‘I Don’t Do Drugs, I Do Time’ is Forster’s attempt at flattening temporal perspective, à la Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up In Blue’: “ I’m walking to school in ‘69 / The next day, I’m 35 / And one day we’re all going to go to Fez ”.

“Friends of ours in their 50s, 60s, they’re still partying. I gave up alcohol at 40 because I had a Hepatitis C diagnosis,” Forster says. “This line ‘ I don’t do drugs, I do time ’ came to me, thinking about that: equating it to the cliches of drug-taking, like changing colours and hypersensitivity. That really spacey state where your thought process just explodes.

“It’s something I can tap into. I find the past and how it plays out in the present totally fascinating. The past always seems very close to me. I think time is fluid. Everything we do during our day, we’re touching the past. ‘Dive For Your Memory’ on ‘16 Lovers Lane’ [The Go-Betweens’ 1998 album] is probably the first time I really got into that.”

“That The Go-Betweens are one of those bands that is shorthand for how another group sounds, I find really mind-blowing”

Forster will tour the album through the UK and Bäumler’s native Germany in March, performing with the London-based Louis, taking the “spirit of that first seven hour session” on the road with them. The music Louis made with The Goon Sax often prompted comparisons to his father’s music, thanks to its bookish lyrics and jangly temperament. But his father maintains he takes more after his mother as a musician.

“There’s a lot more music in Karin’s family, there’s none in mine,” Forster says. “When he was very young, I didn’t really have to do much. I just showed him a couple of chords on a nylon-string guitar when he was about six, and he was away.”

But Forster’s influence via The Go-Betweens – who will mark their 50th anniversary in 2027 – on the rest of Australian music is undeniable. It is nigh-on impossible to walk into a Melbourne music venue on a Friday night without hearing at least one band mumbling and jangling their way through a Forster and Grant McLennan impression. The songwriter doesn’t have any problem with it either.

“That we’re one of those bands that is shorthand for how another group sounds, I find really mind-blowing. I’m very touched by that,” Forster says. “That term dolewave means nothing to me but… The Go-Betweens were on the dole for the first few years of their existence, so there’s that.”

Forster is in the midst of compiling material for a third and final volume of ‘G Stands for Go-Betweens’, the anthology series which contains remastered albums, demos, unreleased songs, live sessions and essays. The forthcoming edition covers the last era of the band before McLennan’s passing, from 2000 to 2006, when they reformed with new members.

“Off the cuff, there’s at least 75 to 80 tracks that have never been released before,” Forster says. “There’s songs of Grant’s that never got beyond the demo… because of the advent of mobile phones, there’s a lot more visual documentation of that time. A lot of things are going to be revealed.”

The period, which culminated in one of the greatest losses of Forster’s life, only grows in poignance the further he gets from it.

“I’m just happy we did it, in light of Grant’s passing,” he says. “The fondness I have for just that we had that time to work together and hang out, grows… I think we were really getting better too. Where Grant was when he passed away, he was writing his best songs in years.”

Like his friend, Forster’s well of creative inspiration doesn’t seem to be drying up. Music, he says, is the “other reality we [can] live in”.

“I’m getting older and moving through life. I really don’t have to look too far for subject matter. I just track my own changes through time.”

Robert Forster’s ‘The Candle and The Flame’ is out today via EMI . He tours the UK and Europe in March and Australia in May

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Robert Forster tour dates 2024

Robert Forster is currently touring across 1 country and has 4 upcoming concerts.

Their next tour date is at Brunswick Ballroom in Brunswick, after that they'll be at Brunswick Ballroom again in Brunswick.

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• 🇦🇺 Australia

Upcoming concerts (4) See nearest concert

Brunswick Ballroom

Metro Social

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Cafe & Pop Torgal

London Omeara

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Recent tour reviews

superb show, played a melange of his songs from various years - engaging, energetic, I always gain new insights when I see/hear the songs performed live - I had the very privileged opportunity to see him 30 years ago, and I imagine i recall many mannerisms to be the same - lordy, if one gets the chance to see this legend - do so - with all haste

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Awesome show. Awesome man. Awesome venue. To see a Brissie legend up close, still at the top of his game, in such an intimate setting, was perfect! Hope he plays the Junk Bar again soon.

Absolutely fantastic, the band were on top form. A two hour show of his solo stuff and classics from the go betweens.

I can’t wait to see him again in Whelans in November.

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Robert Forster

Sat, 25 May 2024, 6pm

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ROBERT FORSTER

Although commonly considered the darker, artier half of the creative force of  the Go-Betweens  — the  Lennon  to  Grant McLennan ‘s  McCartney , as it were — singer, songwriter, and guitarist Robert Forster has a knack for crafty pop songs along with the brooding ballads he contributed to  the Go-Betweens ‘ albums, while his solo career — that began with 1990’s Danger in the Past — blended a healthy mix of both styles. By the time the ’80s band reunited in 2000, Forster had issued three more solo albums, including the self-produced Calling from a Country Phone (1993). The band’s reunion netted three critically acclaimed albums before  McLennan ‘s untimely death in 2006. Forster soldiered on as a music journalist and author, then resumed recording and releasing uniquely thoughtful and melodic solo albums that included 2008’s  McLennan -haunted The Evangelist, 2015’s rambling Songs to Play, and 2023’s emotionally raw The Candle and the Flame, an album of songs about aging and life experiences informed in part by wife and musical partner Karin Bäumler’s concurrent struggles with cancer.

“bittersweet songs with added resonance”

The Guardian

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Robert Forster

The candle and the flame, songs to play, performances.

Robert Forster: me and my bridge

O ne day in 2009, Robert Forster took a call from his manager, bearing some highly unexpected news. It concerned an unusual tribute being planned for the Go-Betweens, the band Forster co-founded with Grant McLennan in Brisbane, Australia, in 1977. The Go-Betweens had been accorded some curious marks of respect before (the writer of TV's 24, for example, sneaked a company named McLennan/Forster into the fourth series), but this was on a different scale entirely.

"He said that there'd been a poll to find a name for this bridge they were building – and that Go Between bridge was looking like being the winner. He said lawyers had been in contact with him to say they were going to name the bridge after us. I was," he adds, a little unnecessarily, "just stunned."

And so it was that a 117-metre four-lane, three-span, twin-concrete-box girder bridge with dedicated pedestrian and cycle pathways ended up being named after Australia's finest exponents of bookish guitar pop. There's a YouTube clip of Forster at the bridge, nattily besuited as ever, but looking a little baffled beneath his hard hat. His expression isn't surprising: partly because, as one British journalist noted, naming a bridge in Brisbane after the Go-Betweens is as improbable as calling a roundabout in County Durham the Prefab Sprout Gyratory; and partly because Forster always looks like that. His face seems to naturally arrange itself into a puzzled expression, his brow permanently knotted. He looks that way on stage, too, as if he's not 100% certain why the audience are there.

And he looked like that the last time I met him, seven years ago, in exactly the same London bar. Then, he was promoting the Go-Betweens' album Bright Yellow Bright Orange in the company of McLennan, who smoked and drank effusively while Forster again looked a little perplexed, nursing a carrier bag full of alcohol-free lager. The pair talked long into the night about their legendary lack of commercial success, despite critical acclaim, about their new album, and, with insanely infectious enthusiasm, about the songs they'd written for its follow-up.

As a long-term Go-Betweens nut, I found something hugely satisfying about the way their differing personalities appeared to embody the songs each wrote. McLennan was warm, thoughtful and nostalgic, and in interview at least, took a rather romantic view of the world, which is exactly how I hoped the man who wrote Bye Bye Pride or Cattle and Cane or Bachelor Kisses might be. Forster seemed less straightforward, wry and intense, as you would have expected from his oeuvre, which has an off-kilter, brooding nervousness shot through with dry humour. Twin Layers of Lightning, Apology Accepted, Draining the Pool for You: these sounded like songs written by a man with a permanently knotted brow.

Seven years on, everything bar the location and Forster's expression has changed. The songs they talked about that night went on to make up perhaps the best album the pair ever released, 2005's remarkable Oceans Apart. The critical hysteria it provoked was expected, but not the mainstream recognition – at least in Australia, where it won an Aria, the equivalent of a Brit. And then, a year after its release, McLennan suddenly died of a heart attack, aged 48, his death bringing the Go-Betweens to an end after 29 years. In a hint of the unexpected outpouring of establishment love for the band, a love that would eventually lead to the whole Go Between bridge business, Peter Beattie, the Queensland premier, delivered a eulogy in the Australian parliament.

What's more, Forster is now a rock critic: The Ten Rules of Rock and Roll, a collection of his reviews and essays for Australian magazine The Monthly, has just been published. Forster seems as surprised by this as anyone. He says the offer from the editor of the Monthly – whose contributors include Clive James and former Australian PM Kevin Rudd – arrived out of the blue five years ago. "I had no form at all. He just went on a hunch. He very much enjoyed my music. I think he could probably sense, through interviews or whatever, that I could perhaps do this."

Coiffure like Blake Carrington

The sum total of Forster's previous excursions into journalism had comprised a short review of a Bob Dylan album, and two insanely detailed articles on haircare – a subject that's apparently as close to his heart today as it was in the mid 80s, when he famously refused to leave a hairdresser's salon until his coiffure had been dyed the exact same shade of grey as that of Blake Carrington, Dynasty's lead character. "I did a radio show last night and some people emailed some hair questions," he nods. "I always have to explain to whoever's presenting: there will be hair questions coming. But there have not been any great revolutions in haircare since the 70s. You know, in the 60s and 70s, there were revolutions in just about everything. There's been hair dyes and hair sprays blah blah blah, but the basics of haircare are still pretty much the same as what Vidal Sassoon was doing in 1965."

He says his nascent journalistic career helped him come to terms with McLennan's death. "The editor asked me if I wanted to write something about Grant, which meant, for the two months after he died, I was actually just sitting on the veranda, with a duty to write this piece – which was so therapeutic. It helped me a great deal." What no one could have predicted was quite how well Forster would take to his new role: within a year of taking up the Monthly's offer, he had been awarded Australia's prestigious Pascall prize for critical writing.

Reading The Ten Rules of Rock and Roll, you can see why. Forster is a fantastic writer: urbane, witty, blessed with an empathy for his fellow musicians that he translates into acute observations ("The Velvet Underground were the first band I ever heard who wrote songs better than they could play them") rather than a willingness to pull his punches. "Oh no – the fact that I'm a musician wouldn't sway me to be more sympathetic. I know making a record can be tough, because I've been there, but I also know that struggle is just part of what you do, You're not going to make great art without a struggle."

He's also extremely funny, as evidenced by the piece from which the book takes its title. It contains the following advice: "Never follow an artist who describes his or her work as dark"; "No band does anything new onstage after the first 20 minutes"; and "The band with the most tattoos has the worst songs". He nods: "It's the sheer volume of tattoos that's the problem. It's not like the old days, when maybe someone from the Sensational Alex Harvey Band would have maybe an anchor on his bicep. It's full body now. So obviously the bands are in the tattoo parlour a lot. I think they should be in the practice room."

The greatness of the Pips

There is also an essay called 10 Bands I Wish I'd Been In, which singles out Gladys Knight's backing group the Pips. "I've always loved those dance moves, where the singer sings about a telephone and they all go –" he mimes the internationally acknowledged hand gesture for talking on the telephone. "It always looks great. What do you do for a living? Well, I gesticulate. I do hand gestures and leg gestures to a singer. How abstract an existence is that?"

One of the stranger fascinations of the book is the way it inadvertently uncovers the sheer oddness of pre-punk Australian pop and rock. Those band names: Swanee, Cheetah, Hush, Sherbet, the Ferrets. In one essay, he enthuses about a nostalgia tour of forgotten 1970s artists, a subject he's keen to write more about. "The bands, the stories – it's completely underappreciated, even in Australia. You can't walk into a newsagent and pick up a magazine that tells you about Australian rock in the 60s and 70s. It's a completely unknown landscape – it's absolutely fascinating."

So is he now a critic or a musician? He is unsure. Spurred by the desire to complete the songs McLennan was working on at the time of his death, he released a solo album, The Evangelist, in 2008. He may make another album next year, although "songwriting has become more of a hobby" now that criticism takes up most of his time. "I'm not sitting down at 9am, like I did for 25 years, going, 'I've got to write a song.' I enjoy it more. There's been a real liberation of myself as a songwriter and it's come from music criticism. It's rare to get a second career opportunity in your late 40s. I'm very lucky. People have you in a box, half of which you've made and half of which is just perception, and it's hard to break out of."

For a moment, that brow unknots, and he smiles broadly, which is understandable, given the book, the awards and indeed the bridge. "I'm very lucky," he repeats. "Very, very lucky."

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Robert Forster Announces 2023 Tour, Releases New Single ‘Tender Years’

Robert Forster , former singer of  The Go-Betweens  and acclaimed solo artist, has shared a new single and announced a May 2023 Australian tour in support of his forthcoming album. Forster wrote the new single, ‘Tender Years’, a groove-heavy folky love song, about his wife and collaborator Karen Baümler, with whom he has been in a relationship for 32 years.

The film clip, below, sees Forster in the kitchen preparing breakfast for two. Muesli, linseed, papaya and coffee. Cute and healthy. Forster’s new album,  The Candle And The Flame , is due for release on Friday, 3rd February. It is his eighth solo album and his 17th overall when The Go-Betweens’ back catalogue is included.

Robert Forster – ‘Tender Years’

The new album is a real family affair, including production from Forster, Baümler and their son Louis Forster, whose band  The Goon Sax  announced their  split  earlier this year. The album was mixed by Victor Van Vugt ( Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds ,  PJ Harvey ) and was recorded with former Go-Betweens bass player Adele Pickvance.

Forster will be jetting off in March 2023 for shows in the UK, Ireland, Austria and Germany, but will return to Australia for a national tour in support of the new record in May.

Robert Forster ‘The Candle And The Flame’ Australian Tour 2023

Friday, 12th May – Trinity Sessions, Adelaide

Saturday, 13th May – Freo Social, Fremantle

Thursday, 18th May – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine

Friday, 19th May – Brunswick Ballroom, Brunswick

Saturday, 20th May –  Memo Music Hall, St Kilda

Sunday, 21st May – Archies Creek Hotel, Archies Creek

Friday, 26th May – Princess Theatre, Brisbane

Saturday, 27th May – Factory Theatre, Sydney

Sunday, 28th May – Lizottes, Newcastle

Tickets  here .

Further Reading

Robert Forster Announces New Album, Shares First Single ‘She’s A Fighter’

Brisbane’s The Goon Sax Have Announced Their Breakup

These Aussie Classics Just Officially Became ‘Sounds Of Australia’

The post Robert Forster Announces 2023 Tour, Releases New Single ‘Tender Years’ appeared first on Music Feeds .

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A Virtual Tour of St. Petersburg

Welcome to our tour of St. Petersburg! Here we will introduce you to Russia's greatest historical and cultural treasure, its "Northern Capital" - the famous "Venice of the North". Virtually unharmed by the 1930-50s period of Stalinist reconstruction, downtown St. Petersburg is crowded with splendid palaces, impressive historical monuments, tree-lined avenues and beautiful bridges. Although not yet 300 years old, St. Petersburg is a city crammed with historical and cultural associations and a refined air of mystery.

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