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Spring Hill Fair sleevenotes
Circus records, 2002

RODDY Frame is not, one would imagine, a lyricist who often feels the need to borrow couplets. The man who wrote “The Bugle Sounds Again”, “Deep And Wide And Tall”, “Walk Out To Winter” and the other imperishably fine love songs that constitute the Aztec Camera catalogue can clearly look after himself when it comes to summarising what Plato called “Love. . . the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods” in a couple of phrases that not only rhyme but come with a tune you can whistle. A special occasion indeed, then, when such a songwriter reads over the shoulder of another.
  In 1995, during an Aztec Camera gig in Cambridge, Roddy was proceeding toward the guitar solo of “We Could Send Letters”, his stately paean to star-crossed correspondents, when he departed from his script to croon the lines “That’s her handwriting. . . that’s the way she writes.” These words are the first line of the second verse of “Part Company”, the fifth song on “Spring Hill Fair” – the third album by an implausibly great rock’n’roll band from Brisbane, Australia, called The Go-Betweens. While it is certainly sad, and unjust, that Roddy didn’t appropriate the lines in any expectation of a roar of recognition from the crowd, his tribute was all the more heartfelt for that.
  “Spring Hill Fair” is that kind of record. Not many people ever heard it, but not many of those who did would trade their copy in for anything less than an outwardly nondescript brass jug that, when rubbed in the correct direction, produced a baggy-trousered apparition that promised the instant fulfilment of three wishes. And even then, most of us would just ask for three more Go-Betweens albums.

THE assertion that The Go-Betweens are the most bizarrely and scandalously under-rated group ever to have lifted guitars would be the stuff of cliché if only it had been said often enough. If that truth is held to be self-evident, then “Spring Hill Fair” is the most under-rated album ever recorded – even allowing for the fact that a CD release was delayed for years by contractual wrangles, this long-buried treasure is consistently overlooked even by hardcore Go-Betweens aficionados, whose most ardent affections are usually split between its successor, 1986’s “Liberty Belle & The Black Diamond Express”, and the last of The Go-Betweens’ 1980s albums, “16 Lovers Lane”. This is only fair enough, given that these two albums are, respectively, the best and twelfth-best ever made by anyone, but too ignore “Spring Hill Fair” in this context is akin to painting over the entire remaining oeuvre of Picasso just because he did quite well with “Guernica” and “Weeping Woman”.
  “Spring Hill Fair”, though named after a Brisbane suburb in which The Go-Betweens had once lived, was recorded in France in May 1984. There would have been some grounds for optimism as the band embarked from their London base for Miraval studios in Provence. The Go-Betweens’ first two albums, “Send Me A Lullaby” and “Before Hollywood”, had attracted their due measure of praise from the British music press at a time when this still meant something, and The Go-Betweens had become identified with a peer group of literate, thoughtful, indie-rock songwriters that included The Smiths, Lloyd Cole, Orange Juice and Aztec Camera. They had a new record deal, having signed with the British arm of New York-based company Sire – which made The Go-Betweens labelmates with The Ramones and Madonna. And they were now a four-piece: Robert Vickers, a friend from the old country, had taken up full-time bass guitar duties a couple of years previously.
  It is certainly true that “Spring Hill Fair” possesses most of the traditional awkward, self-conscious signifiers of an indie group’s major label debut. The keyboard backwashes and programmed drums on some tracks are clear efforts to accommodate the sensibilities of mid-80s radio programmers – if not the sensibilities of Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison, whose resentment of the latter development was understandable. Whether by accident or design or – as seems more likely – natural evolution of their abilities, the songs Robert Forster and Grant McLennan wrote for “Spring Hill Fair” are, with a couple of notable exceptions, obviously melodic and conventionally structured. Though “Spring Hill Fair” is notable in The Go-Betweens’ canon for introducing a certain angular harshness to their music – jarring Television-esque guitar solos are a defining motif – none of it is difficult to listen to. The group even made the effort to dress up for the cover portrait, which showed the four of them glowering from a balcony at London’s Richmond Theatre, as if to say “Well, here we are. . . where the heck is everybody?” Not for the last time, The Go-Betweens were trying to make it easy for the record-buying public. Not for the last time, the record-buying public were looking the other way.
  And, not for the last time, it was entirely the record-buying public’s loss. Anyone with a half a brain, ears not carved from fenceposts and a more or less functioning heart – and even most radio programmers – should have only have needed to hear 41 seconds of “Spring Hill Fair” to realise that The Go-Betweens had accomplished something extraordinary. This is as long as it takes for the opening track, Grant’s “Bachelor Kisses”, to proceed from the humble, even apologetic, three-note riff that starts it off, to the subtle swell of melody that introduces a chorus that, once heard, will echo forever in a grateful memory. “Don’t believe what you’ve heard,” sings Grant to someone he clearly wishes to save from herself, “‘Faithful’’s not a bad word.” In a more enlightened parallel universe, “Bachelor Kisses” has already been recorded by Glen Campbell or George Jones or some similar avatar of wounded masculinity, and is a fixture on every jukebox in explored space.
  “Spring Hill Fair” is an album of ten songs, to which Robert Forster and Grant McLennan each contributed five – as such, it adheres to the same template as all Go-Betweens albums aside from their 12-track debut, 1982’s “Send Me A Lullaby”. All truly great bands are that ineffable bit larger than the sum of their parts, and though Robert and Grant’s styles were distinctive, they were also curiously complementary. The crassest possible analysis would have it that Grant’s songs tended toward the earnest, reflective and melancholy, while Robert’s palette was composed largely of exuberance, melodrama, and melancholy (the last of these ingredients was always the most important, as it always is in pop music). The crassest possible analysis would be partly right – they usually are – in the case of most Go-Betweens albums, but it would not apply terribly well to “Spring Hill Fair”.
  Robert and Grant sound remarkably attuned to each other here, and the songs on “Spring Hill Fair” possess a unity of musical purpose and lyrical sensibility not found on any other Go-Betweens album. There is no audible grinding of gears as one track runs into the next: when Grant delivers the infernally catchy sing-song “Five Words”, Robert immediately answers with the startlingly unabashed Glitter Band stomper “The Old Way Out”. Later, Robert’s half-spoken “Draining The Pool For You” is followed by Grant’s bleakly hilarious monologue “River Of Money”.
  It is a common delinquency of critics to impose an over-arching theme on an album, as if being a bunch of great songs wasn’t quite enough. “Spring Hill Fair” is a bunch of great songs, and that is most certainly more than enough, but it’s difficult not to notice a recurring theme of departure (“Fingers let go,” sings Grant on “Unkind And Unwise”, as cool and unforgiving as a death certificate, “I’m gone.”) A diverse cast of characters are bid emphatic adieus on “Spring Hill Fair”. Whether these songs are truly autobiographical or not, it is the sort of milieu that might well be encountered by the members of a semi-struggling rock group dwelling on the fringes of Bohemia: moneyed idiots who employ them at menial jobs (“Draining The Pool For You”), bitter friends who begrudge what they had already accomplished (“You’ve Never Lived”). It is almost as if, determined that “Spring Hill Fair” was going to be their passport to the big time, Robert and Grant had written a series of farewell notes to what they hoped and imagined they’d be leaving behind. There isn’t a song here that isn’t saying goodbye to someone or something.
  Fittingly, then, “Spring Hill Fair” also contains a generous share of The Go-Betweens’ primary stock in trade – the rueful interring of foundering relationships. Robert’s finale, “Man O’Sand To Girl O’Sea”, is as demented and furious as the rejected always are, but is redeemed by his signature self-mockery: “Feel so sure of our love,” he pants at the start, “I’ll write a song about us breaking up” (he goes on to name this mythical tune – “The Traffic Lights On The Streets Of Love” – and the only thing wrong with the bonus disc of demos and out-takes that comes with this issue of “Spring Hill Fair” is that it contains no such track). Grant excels himself with “River Of Money”, by far the oddest track on “Spring Hill Fair”, and probably the weirdest thing The Go-Betweens ever signed their name to – a backing track that sounded like Joy Division recording an “Unplugged” session overlaid by a spoken monologue that suggests there’s still a heck of a novel in there. The wilfully over-emphasised delivery of the word “Re-po-sessed” is the only example of Grant McLennan playing for laughs ever captured on tape (this, obviously, is not a criticism – great music, even when it’s as clever and witty as The Go-Betweens frequently are, is a serious business).
 
MY first copy of “Spring Hill Fair” arrived in instalments. In 1985, a friend of mine at my school in Sydney gave me a spare of the vinyl album which, for reasons he wasn’t too clear on, was dressed only in the grey inner sleeve with the lyrics printed on it. A few months later, while looking through the racks of a second-hand record store, I found the sleeve of “Spring Hill Fair”, adorned with a sticker apologising for the fact that the record inside was actually Cyndi Lauper’s “She’s So Unusual”, but the sleeve for that had gone missing, and this Go-Betweens one had been lying about, so here it was, take it or leave it (it was that kind of shop). I took it, to the counter, and explained that I wished to purchase the sleeve, but not the album inside it.
  “I’m not surprised,” said the shop assistant, without looking up from his newspaper.
  I attempted to explain that it wasn’t just that Cyndi Lauper was such a profoundly dreadful singer, it was that some awesome cosmic force had clearly intervened to unite my inner sleeve with his outer sleeve. I mean, it wasn’t like there were that many copies of “Spring Hill Fair” ever printed. What were the odds?
  “Just take the bloody thing,” he said (it was, as we have learned, that kind of shop).
  I was happy in the way that only unexpectedly gratified teenage indie rock trainspotters can be. Indeed, I could only have been happier at that instant if someone in a silver suit had arrived from the future on a jet-pack and told me that, when I was roughly twice the age I was that day, I’d be asked to write sleevenotes for a reissue of the same album. It says much for “Spring Hill Fair” that when the call came, there was no need to dig it out and embark on a studious reacquaintance – it had made a dramatic first impression half a lifetime ago, and we were still in frequent touch.

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