The Go-Betweens are one of Australia’s most revered bands, having given us iconic releases like Before Hollywood and of course, the immortal 16 Lovers Lane and its timeless singles ‘Streets of Your Town’ and ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?’
But whilst the late ’80s yielded the Brisbane group’s most defining work, it was also when Australian music industry icon Michael Gudisnki, the chief of the Go-Betweens’s label, Mushroom, thought it was time to intervene and split the group.
As The Music reports, in Grant & I: Inside And Outside The Go-Betweens, the new memoir from Go-Betweens member Robert Forster, the guitarist recounts how his idea to give the band a flamboyant, eye-catching frontman didn’t sit well with their label.
According to Forster, some of the tactics he employed to become a Bowie-like flamboyant showman included dyeing his hair grey and wearing a dress on stage, something Forster did during the band’s tour supporting alt-rock legends REM.
“The dress had made one appearance after Perth, in Sydney,” Forster writes, via The Music. “There Michael Gudinski took Grant aside after the show. ‘You run the group, right?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Grant. ‘Get rid of the guy in the dress.'”
McLennan stood behind his bandmate and when the band hit Los Angeles for a subsequent show, Forster donned the frock once again. According to the guitarist, the band’s American label’s reaction was “one of shock and displeasure”.
“Grant was signed after the band’s break-up to the White Label, a boutique branch of Mushroom Records,” Forster writes of their eventual organic split. “He now had the platform to make hits, and could count on the confidence of Michael Gudinski. I was out of the way…”
Nowadays, Gudinski would much rather get rid of Australia’s scalpers. The Mushroom boss recently issued a statement in which he condemned the practice of buying up tickets and reselling them at exorbitant prices on resell websites.
