Robert Forster live
Photo: Redferns, Jordi Vidal. All rights reserved.
The 65-year-old songwriter from Brisbane wrote some of the brightest and best songs of the decade with friend Grant McLennan for their band The Go-Betweens in the 1980s. Unlike Bruce Springsteen and many others, it wasn’t the conflict with his parents’ home that drove him as a young songwriter, it was a love of music, literature and film. The typical Go-Betweens fan is – as drummer Lindy Morrison explained at the time – “German, male, between 20 and 26, earnest.” Since there weren’t enough serious German early 20s in the world, the band broke up in 1989 after many great ones reviews and too few records sold.
Robert Forster released several solo albums such as Danger In The Past (1990), produced by Mick Harvey at the Hansa Studios in Berlin. 2000 returned Ranger and McLennan will return as The Go-Betweens with the album The Friends Of Rachel Worth. This second, much more successful band phase ended abruptly in May 2006 with McLennan’s sudden death.
Ranger continued as a solo artist, writing as a music critic for Australian magazine The Monthly, releasing solo albums and the memoir Grant and I (Heyne Hardcore) about his friendship with McLennan. In February 2023, the album “The Candle And The Flame” was released, which was created while his wife and musical partner Karin Bäumler was suffering from serious cancer. Their children, Loretta and Louis, who was the singer, songwriter and guitarist for the band The Goon Sax until 2022, were also involved.
On his current tour Ranger also accompanied by Louis. But while the son meets old friends at the tour stop in Berlin, Robert took the time to talk to us in a Neukölln bar, the Posh Teckel, about his tour, his life, his visit to Abbey Road Studio and other projects such as the third part of the “Go-Betweens Anthology”, two upcoming reissues from his solo work and to speak a novel he is working on.