Some stuff about The Go-Betweens on the Radio?

Hats off to the dude who dreamt up the ‘Listen Again’ feature that adorns BBC online radio. For a week or so one can play stuff that one has missed and quite often there are nuggets to be found. Today I have returned home from work and been able to listen to a session The Go-Betweens recorded for BBC 6Music’s Gideon Coe show yesterday. The interviews are wonderful. Grant McLennan sounds like Michael Lynagh or maybe a youthful Eddie Charlton with his kindly, measured tones. Robert Forster sounds a bit tougher and I would have it no other way. Both fellows, despite their intellect and worldliness, speak with that strange Australian habit of making every sentence sound like a question? I added a question mark erroneously at the end of the last sentence just so you can try that way of speaking at home? There, I’ve done it again? It is called ‘Australian questioning intonation’ and Stephen Fry (the greatest living Englishman?) once put it into Room 101.

The songs they played were lilting and fine.

With Friday’s Birmingham gig in mind I’m trawling the net to find a set list from their first gig of the current tour which was in Brighton last night. No luck so far but judging by their last concert in Australia we might be in for a blast of The House Jack Kerouac Built, Spring Rain as well as the recent favourite Surfing Magazines.

The guy who wrote television’s 24 is a huge Go-Betweens fan it seems and named a tower block The McLennan-Forster Building. Apparently the character played by Kiefer Sutherland says it all the time.

By hook, or, verily, by crook, I should be the proud owner of an iPod within the next week. Actually I favour a competitor of said item, the Creative Zen MP3 player which has gathered super reviews and seems easy enough to use. I know S has pooh-poohed the whole idea but I like the idea of carting round one’s entire record collection. I’m quietly excited.

I won’t be going to the Wildcard Final this Saturday. On Friday evening I shall be visiting the aforementioned Go-Betweens and on Saturday evening there is a ‘do’ to attend in Gloucester. There is, frankly, only so much excitement a man can take so the rugby trip has been sacrificed. I shall watch proceedings keenly via Sky’s telecast facility.