From Tape Op: Issue No. 13
The Go-Betweens
by Larry Crane

1 2 3 4 5

So you did Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express and what was after that?

Tallulah.

Were those both with Richard?

Yeah.

Didn’t Craig Leon do a little bit for it. Yeah. They were not happy sessions for me at all and not for, in general, the band. The problem was Liberty Belle... went so well, everyone went, “Hit single time”, okay? And we worked with Craig and at Tony Visconti’s studio called Good Earth in Soho in London. Craig and Cassell [Webb] had just done Zodiac Mindwarp with a remake of “Spirit in the Sky”.

I remember that.

And it went to number one and so they were hot. We met them and Cassell had played tambourine in the Seeds, Craig had done the first Ramones album and the first Blondie album and they’re really nice people and they had great pedigrees and they’re in London but Craig was just so... he played keyboards and they were just so fixated on a hit record and that goal. I mean, we paid them the money to do what they wanted to do, but it was soulless. And also, they didn’t get us the hit and we sort of looked into that void and it was not something that we wanted to do.

To pursue it?

No.

Those songs they did were shimmery.

It was sort of like, you know, one person doing their bit for eight hours while the rest of the band sat around in the back room and the next day. It took something like nine days to do two tracks. It was just ridiculous.

After that was the “final” album 16 Lover’s Lane. And you did that with Mark Wallis and it’s a pretty slick album in retrospect. It’s probably the slickest of the lot but it does work for you well.

It works great. He was English. We met him when he was a remix specialist. He remixed some of Tallulah and we were just astounded with what he had done and so when we were going to make the last one, we thought we should get him and we wanted to do it in Australia. He came down to a studio called 3.0.1. which is a very famous Australian studio. They had an SSL desk but a monster live room, good gear but SSL, and he had just done the Talking Heads on their Naked album. You’ll find his name on whatever U2 album that they made around then.

The name sounds familiar but I wasn’t sure.

He was great. Very English, very meticulous. We spent eight weeks on the record which is an eternity for us. But somehow his English meticulousness and his thoroughness, normally that can kill songs if the songs are not great and sometimes, the English groups are not great songwriters [remember, we’re not talking about the 60s]. The records sound good but we gave him ten great songs and so he could fuel and craft it and weave around and it worked. It’s a record whose estimation has gone up in my mind over time and in a lot of places it’s regarded as our best album, which I don’t think is true.

I talked to somebody else who is a big fan of the Go-Betweens and I said, “You know, I’m gonna ask them how they were able to hold it together” and they were like, “Yeah, even the last album [which didn’t sound right to them] still had amazing songs on it. It’s still a great record.” So the songs are always the things
that survive.

You see, the thing was, everyone wanted him to go down. Our management especially. He had worked with U2, he had worked with these other groups and it was like, “Go make them a rock record.” And so he came back with a lot of acoustic guitar, it’s really soft and it was like, “What happened?” And Mark just said, they were the songs and that was the sound that the songs needed and so it worked out. It’s very slick, it’s very smooth and the next one that we were going to make before we broke up, well, the one I wanted to make was a reaction against that. We were going to go down and make an album with Tony Cohen.

So with the band breaking up you started your solo career. The first record, Danger in the Past, sounds great. That’s a Mick Harvey production for sure. There’s so much reverb on that record which is usually something like an 80s thing, a real dated factor. But that record still sounds really great. Was that natural reverb from that studio?

Yeah. A lot of it is and that record was very much the direction that I wanted to go in, especially with the Go-Betweens. That was where I wanted to move to, where we’re playing together in a big room with a good desk, a good engineer and people standing around playing. I always did like it. We did that record in 12 days. The recording room is an old ballroom and so you’re talking aircraft hangar size. This place is so big that they also hold gigs there very occasionally on this stage where you could fit an enormous band with ceilings that are 100 to 200 feet high. I went, “This is the room!” and we were just a three piece, myself on guitar, Mick Harvey on bass and Thomas Wydler, of the Bad Seeds, playing drums and we would just sit up in this room, just playing, with Victor Van Vugt engineering, a Neve disk with microphones and that was the whole deal. My philosophy is you don’t need time, if everything you’re recording sounds great then you spend so much less time fixing it up. If it goes good down to tape, every chord and every sound is good, then that’s recording your way. And I loved the sound of that record and I don’t think there was much reverb coming from the desk. I think a lot of it was in the room.

I always listened to that, thinking that it couldn’t be digital reverb it wouldn’t have sounded that good.

No. It’s the room.

It’s a beautiful sound, it’s really spacious, yet it doesn’t sound like giant, huge stadium rock or something. It’s very spacious and draws you in.

Spacious. It’s loud, it comes to you but because it’s analog there’s that softness that you can lean into. It’s not like that hard-edged, slapping around the face type of sound. I really love the sound of that. We recorded it in 1990. When the Go-Betweens had been on tour in Berlin in ‘87 I found out about the studio because Bowie and Iggy had recorded there and I just thought I would come down and have a look. I got in a cab and I went down and I just went, “I’ll come back here one day.” It amazed me and then two and a half years later the band had broken up, I’m suddenly living in Germany and it was like, “Let’s go to Hansa”. A strange prophesy
came true.

Did you enjoy working with Mick Harvey?

Yeah. Mick’s great. I love Mick’s philosophy of recording and I just agree with him and I think he’s fantastic. I love the way he plays instruments. He’s a very good piano player... I love the way he plays drums. He’s just someone you could give a trumpet and somehow he’d play it and maybe do one little thing on the record and it’d be great. He’s just great.

And you agree with the way he records?

Towards the end of the Go-Betweens I was getting into the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds records, the way they were sounding, and they were getting all of these old keyboards and everything sounded natural. I was just going, “This is the way I want us to sound”. I don’t want to make a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record obviously, with Nick’s lyrical thrust and everything like that, but the sound of his records... I wanted the Go-Betweens to approach recording like the way the Bad Seeds do it. And I thought that we were also a band that could do it. And the Bad Seeds record, the sound of it and the way they were recorded lies a lot in the hands of Mick Harvey, definitely, especially at that stage in the ‘80s.