The Unimaginable Touch of Time
William Name | Berkeley, CA | 08/20/2002
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Originally released in May 1983 on Rough Trade, "Before Hollywood" was The Go-Betweens' second studio album. The record was, though it may be difficult to conjure it now, very much of its time and place in the history of independent pop music. At the time, Rough Trade was home to Aztec Camera, The Fall, and The Smiths (whose debut single, "Hand in Glove" was also released in May). While these other bands were decidedly British in comparison to The Go-Betweens' Australian outlook, they all shared a skeptical attitude to London and the New Wave: hostile to fashion, the media, the top-40. And yet, the strength of "Before Hollywood" resides not so much in its place within postpunk British avant-gardism - moving ever forward, crushing rock's outdated paradigms underfoot - but in its anomalous and eccentric thematics of loss and retrieval of the past.
Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, the band's songwriters, along with drummer Lindy Morrison had relocated from Melbourne to London in May 1982, and quickly saw Rough Trade release their first album "Send Me a Lullaby" and their fourth single "Hammer The Hammer" (recorded during a break in the Birthday Party's "Junkyard" sessions in January, and released again here on the second cd of this set). They spent the summer writing the songs that appeared on "Before Hollywood" and recording demos of songs that did not - e.g. "Just a King in Mirrors," "A Peaceful Wreck," "Near the Chimney" (all included here). By all accounts the summer was exceptional ("fantastic" is McLennan's word), and produced some of the group's best songs. "Cattle and Cane" - voted one of the greatest Australian songs ever - stands out, not least because it embodies the tone of album as whole: nostalgic, longing, bittersweet, but also deeply and maturely accepting of the pastness of the past.
Robert Christgau was once hooked on the chorus from "As Long As That": "I've got a feeling, sounds like a fact/It's been around as long as that." There is a distinct and pervasive sense throughout these recordings of memory and history concretizing into forms and images, words and sounds. Film is the metaphor but tape and vinyl were the reference: "Bring on the microphones/Hidden under stones/Record my sobs/In baritones" ("Before Hollywood"). Likewise, a thematic of visibility (audibility?) and invisibility runs through both Grant and Robert's songs: "Pull back the curtains/Let in the dark" ("A Bad Debt Follows You"); "I'm standing on a quay wrapped up in mist" ("Two Steps Step Out"); "In the dark/When shadows have their way" ("Dusty in Here"); "There is magic but really there's no magic/In what appears" ("Ask"). Grant's songs are filled with stars and ships, moons and trains - images of motion and and dim light from the heavens. Robert's songs use more oblique but consonant images of creativity, loss and transformation - early film ("the flicker of light"), Tin Pan Alley, mansions in ruin. The album is filled with a certain attitude towards the past and its role in artistic creativity -"Inspired by shadows/Driven by tears" - that never really settles down into a concept or statement, but circles around an empty core that is never revealed. The past is forever lost to the present.
That these songs have built into them a metaphoric sense of crumbling celluloid, yellowing images of imagined worlds outside time, impervious to restoration, is a testament to The Go-Betweens' enduring artistic sensibility. The lost gem on this reissue is, in this light, the tinny live recording of Grant's "The Exception of Deception or How the Broadway Bosses Beat Me of My Bucks" in which he sings: "And I won't say/That time stands still." But he does, and "Before Hollywood" takes us step-by-step through the pathos-ridden unsayability of time standing still."
Go-Betweens masterpiece gets deluxe treatment
Roger Griffin | 08/07/2002
(5 out of 5 stars)
"The magnificent Before Hollywood from 1982 was what critics would (and did) call the Go-Betweens' "watershed album". Forster and McLennan intertwine so beautifully as to be singing the album in one voice, the way Lennon and McCartney blur together on Rubber Soul. Lindy Morrison's drumming is incredible on this album. Like the writing, edgy but more disciplined. Lyrically Before Hollywood is romantic in the nostalgic sense. Sometimes it feels like a shared memory. This is beautiful spacious evocative music. A classic, and one which richly deserves this excellent reissue, complete with a second disc of rare single sides and demos from the period. These show the fiery side of the group, in the same vein as By Chance, and include the majestic This Girl Black Girl. There is also a bonus video of Cattle And Cane.
The design is true to the original and has informative liner notes. This is an essential purchase."
Track Listings (10) - Disc #1