At the end of the band's career a compilation was released, simply entitled 1978-1990. It covered everything from their first 7"'s (the brilliant, scrappy, 'Lee Remick', 'People Say' and 'I Need Two Heads') to the single release of 'Love Goes On' in 1989. It's a good overview, with one album taking on the biggest tracks from the studio LPs and a second album covering the singles, B-sides and rarities, and that's where the most interesting stuff is. Of course, there's McLennan's legendary 'Cattle and Cane', which people often suggest is the most evocatively "Australian" pop song ever written (although the band's early debt to the Cure is pretty evident), and the lovely 'You Won't Find It Again', but there are also wonderful songs in one of Forster's final Go-Betweens numbers 'Rock and Roll Friend' and the melancholic 'This Girl, Black Girl'.
In 1999 tapes of recordings that McLennan and Forster had made in 1978 with the intention of putting out an album surfaced and were released, in all their cruddily recorded glory, as 78 'til 79: The Lost Album. Most of the material was recorded live to a two-track tape recorder (in other words, in exactly the same way that we all did when we were young...) and it's a mixed bag. Unsurprisingly it's the stuff that's slightly better recorded that stands out ('The Sound of Rain', 'Lee Remick', and 'People Say' in particular) but it's evident throughout (even when the sound drops out because the tape was so knackered) that McLennan and Forster were already pretty adept at turning a pop melody and although this is all self-consciously artsy and deliberately underwritten, the seeds of great songwriting are discernible here.
In 2000 Forster and McLennan got back together and, with the help of US indie act Quasi, recorded a new album, 12 years after the release of 16 Lovers Lane. The Friends of Rachel Worth (2000) is a delicate pop-rock album, which has all of the grace and style of the later previous albums, but also has a patience and maturity befitting their advanced ages. There's no urgency and there's no grit to The Friends of Rachel Worth, but to be honest that's entirely appropriate and entireyl fitting and just makes for a comforting listen. McLennan's opener 'Magic In Here' is another of his glittering pop melodies and it's a lovely, unhurried and unfussy reintroduction to a band who's reputation never diminished over the intervening years. There are lots of great, gentle songs here, with the wistful, nostalgic touches that were always evident in their work brought to the fore. 'Surfing Magazines' is a lovely, rolling pop song, 'The Clock' harks back to Forster's ragged style, but with a comforting smoothness, and 'Going Blind' is the kind of song that any number of Beachwood Sparks style US bands dream about being able to write. There's a suprisingly heavy reliance on acoustic guitars which always played a more supporting role previously, but it goes with the casual maturity on show generally and although some felt that there wasn't enough of the band's clever cynicism on display, it's actually just proof that Forster and McLennan were able to grow old gracefully. The pair released two more albums as the Go-Betweens, in 2003 and 2005 respectively, but very sadly McLennan passed away in 2006 at the age of 48, leaving behind some wonderful songs and a reputation as both a foremost songwriter and an all-round decent bloke.
On so on to something very different, it's Italian prog-rock soundtrack pioneers Goblin. Now, I love Dario Argento's film Suspiria with a real passion, but it wouldn't be the work of maverick genius that it is without the exceptional score by Goblin (indeed all of Argento's films with Goblin soundtracks are elevated by them), and neither would his earlier film, Profondo Rosso (1975) be as good as it is without Goblin's contribution. The awe-inspiring Italian reissue label Dagored put out a number of Goblin's soundtracks with astonishing new packaging, the second of which was the Profondo Rosso soundtrack, and it's fantastic. It rips off pretty much everything going (the track 'Mad Puppet' is built around a riff and sound stolen directly from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells) and its shameless prog-rock thefts only go to enhance their already surprising deftness with an overblown sound. The title track is brilliantly propulsive and works as a piece of grinding prog as well as it does a scene setting piece of instrumental score, 'Wild Session' is a sinisterly groovy bass, buzzing keyboard and sax freak-out, and 'Deep Shadows' shows an equally heavy debt to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and 60's garage rock. It's a fantastic and fantastically over-the-top record, which actually holds up amazingly well, both as a nervy soundtrack to a tense piece of giallo filmmaking and as an exercise in European prog.
Certainly Goblin's greatest achievement came two years later, soundtracking Argento's finest movie, Suspiria. The film itself is a kaleidoscopic trip into Argento's fevered imagination and Goblin's supremely spooky soundtrack was the perfect complement. The opening title track, whose first half, with it's anxious, strummed mandolins, booming, ritualistic drum and squealing keyboard is a masterclass in creating tension, and when it breaks open into a pounding, claustrophic rock piece halfway through it ups the tension even further. Taken out of context it can possibly sound a little silly (alright, very silly), but it's nonetheless a superb example of the art of soundtrack writing. 'Witch' has rattling, clacking percussion, electronic noises, deep, throbbing hums and mysterious shrieks and wails and is another great example of how to sound completely spooked-out. It's all really quite pioneering stuff, considering that horror soundtracks had previously relied almost exclusively on orchestras to create the requisite unease, and using a rock band was an unusual choice, and one which you wouldn't have imagined could have done such a supreme job of sounding so terrifying. 'The Sighs' is another great example, it sounds exactly like a nightmare. The second side isn't quite as compelling, with the sleazy sax breaks on 'Black Forest' sounding pretty dated, and 'Blind Concert''s squelchy bass is a bit daft, but nevertheless the Suspiria soundtrack is still one of the great examples of just how rock music and film can, occasionally, work seamlessly together, while each can still stand alone.
Presumably having seen Suspiria, George A. Romero approached Goblin to score his Dawn of the Dead (the soundtrack being released in Italy as Zombi in 1978). In keeping with Romero's more tongue-in-cheek approach, the soundtrack is more varied than that for Suspiria, including some silly things such as a bar-room knockabout in 'Torte in Faccia' and a pulsing bit of corny rock in 'Zaratozom', but even so, it's still all really pretty good. Openers 'L'alba dei Morti Viventi' and 'Zombi' are nearly worthy of the Suspiria soundtrack and there are plenty of fine moments, but Goblin really do match the brief - where Suspiria is about unknown supernatural malevolence, Dawn of the Dead is based on good old lumbering zombies, so it's a different kind of creepy that Goblin needed to come up with and they really succeeded. The other big difference is that most of the pieces on Zombi are fairly brief, designed as simple mood setters as opposed to the 7 minute build-ups of the Suspiria work, and as such it's much clearer that this music was designed to suplement rather than exist in its own right, but be that as it may, it's still fine stuff, and all a clear influence on horror soundtrack writers and film directors to come, especially John Carpenter.
Three of the core members of Goblin reunited to record the soundtrack for Argento's 1982 movie, Tenebre. It's another good bit of paranoid, spooked out rock, but this time the brief is more about claustrophobic atmosphere (the story is about a serial killer and has no supernatural elements) and once again, Goblin live up to the brief pretty admirably. The slight difficulty is that this is about context more than ever and of these four soundtracks it's certainly the one that stands alone the weakest. It also suffers a little bit from technological updates (and as we all know, nothing turned out to be more dating to a record than the hot new technology of the late 1970's/early 1980's), and focuses a bit too much on rock posturing. There's great stuff here, don't get me wrong ('Flashing' is a decent scene-setter with some good Kraftwerkian keyboard action), but it rarely reaches the real peaks of their earlier work.
Right, we'll have to race through the hundreds of God Is My Co-Pilot records I've got because hardly any of them have any internet presence and almost all of my copies are on vinyl. As pioneers (and virtual sole practitioners) of a kind of spazz/squonk/queercore/noise outfit, God Is My Co-Pilot were a fascinating creation, representing a kind of US underground which was much truer to the spirit of real experimentalism than pretty much anyone else. As an unpredictable amalgam of punk, jazz, freeform noise and musique concrete, they created a massive body of work in the course of just seven years (partly because this stuff was probably pretty easy to do, but that's not the point). It's either totally pointless, maddening or truly inspirational depending on your taste and personally I think it's all fantastic stuff. Still challenging, still confrontational, still energising, and always surprising, it's the sound of real lives expressing themselves as honestly as possible in their messy, clumsy actuality. It's also really good fun and although I suspect the band themselves were probably utterly po-faced and joyless, it's actually strangely funny a lot of the time. The fact that it's all about gender politics and musical presumption is important, because this is underneath it all, heartfelt stuff and it's worth bearing in mind that although it sounds like noise, it's still intended to be heard. Anyway, that about covers the whole of the following, which I can't find more than a handful of 30 - 60 second songs from: I Am Not This Body LP, How I Got Over 7", Gender Is As Gender Does 7" (all 1992), My Sinister Secret Agenda 7", Probable Cause split-7", Getting Out of Boring Time Getting Into Boring Pie mini-LP (all 1993), Sharon Quite Fancies Jo 7", More Pretty Girls Than One 7", How To Be LP and Rough Trade Singles Club 7" (all 1994).
I can't even find cover images for How To Be and the Rough Trade Singles Club 7". Anyway, the only God Is My Co-Pilot record that I can really talk about now is the 1993 album Speed Yr Trip, which I have on CD. Speed Yr Trip is more of the same, unpredictable, shouty, short, sharp and brutal missives from the gender gap. Bearing in mind that only three of the album's 26 songs is over the 2 minute mark you'll see what I mean when I say that these are vicious little bites, but whose aim is to create an atmosphere of engagement. There are moments when it all seems surprisingly lucid (the tightly structured 'Woman Enough' for instance) but these are few and far between. In any event, it's all exciting stuff, and bears comparison with Japan's foremost exponents of spazz rock, Melt Banana, whose brain-bendingly erratic output is more visceral, but less intellectually engaged than God Is My Co-Pilot's.
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