Go-Betweens co-founder pays tribute to fallen friend

By Derek Caney

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - "It's all different now," Robert Forster sings on the closing track of his new album The Evangelist, his first since the unexpected death of his songwriting partner Grant McLennan.

The song, "From Ghost Town," is an elegy to Forster's friend, with whom he played for nearly 30 years in the Brisbane, Australia-based band the Go-Betweens.

In those years, the two forged a sound that combined the thoughtful tuneful folk rock of the 1960s with some of the more angular and challenging sounds of post-punk.

"After Grant died, some close friends wrote notes to me," Forster said in an interview. "The first line of (one) letter was 'It's all different now.' It was really a bold thing to write to someone."

Forster and McLennan, who met at the University of Queensland in 1976, were in the process of writing songs for their follow-up to their 2005 album Oceans Apart. On May 6, 2006, McLennan took a nap before a housewarming party and never woke up.

"People had already started to arrive for the party," the 50-year-old Forster recalled. "The people who were there were Grant's closest friends, the ones who would arrive early to help him organize, put food out and stuff. I'd arrived early. But I was told he was asleep."

McLennan's fatal heart attack at age 48 brought a tragic end to one of Australia's best-loved homegrown bands.

As the expression goes, if bands got paid for rave reviews, the Go-Betweens would be millionaires. The band fused the folk rock style of Bob Dylan's fecund mid-1960s period with the herky-jerky rhythmic styles of early Talking Heads or Wire.