A Head Full of Steam

“In the nave of a structure built for worship, it’s easy to feel the honesty, poignancy and compassion that’s threaded through Foster’s material, especially when turning ordinary vignettes of life into song.”

by Diane Coetzer

November 30th, 2019

I never went to Vondelkerk intending to write about Robert Forster’s only Amsterdam show on his late 2019 An Acoustic Evening with Robert Forster tour. I’d bought a pair of tickets for the show because I had considered the chance to see an artist I love in the company of my youngest daughter to be one of the joys of having moved to the Netherlands from Johannesburg a handful of months back.

But how could I refuse Forster’s request to write one when he learnt that I was a music journalist? It happened during my attempt to take a photo of him with Emmylou to send to her dad back in South Africa. He’s loved Forster and The Go-Betweens since Before Hollywood arrived at a record store in steamy Durban back in the 80s and we were heartsore that he wasn’t there with us, sitting in that front row. Unsurprisingly I bungled the shot and had to call for help from a kind man who had also taken up Forster’s invitation to meet up after the show. “Is your mom in IT?” Forster asks Emmylou with dry humour. “Actually, I’m a music journalist,” I say. “Are you going to write a review?” he replies. “If you do, please mention the guitar solo.”

Forster might have been joking – about the review and also the guitar solo - but I’ll take November 30th, in a nineteenth century Gothic revival style church in the city where my grandfather grew up, as the day that Robert Forster asked me to write about him.

Of course, this is not a review in the strict sense. I’ve written many hundreds of those – about new and old albums and big and small live shows - in my twenty-plus years as a music journalist. That’s because there is simply no criticism here: when I entered the Vondelkerk that night, I’d come bringing nothing but love. And I wasn’t alone. Even before the 90-minute performance began, the communal sharing of devotion to The Go-Betweens and Foster had begun. Outside in the near-freezing cold, on the steps of the church, we’d met Farida and Peter, she (like Emmylou and I) South African, he Dutch, and both the kind of music fans that make playing live a sustaining part of artist’s career. They’d flown to Dublin to see Forster (and were travelling back to Ireland to see a trio of under-the-radar bands in a few weeks). Peter – so very lucky Peter - had seen The Go-Betweens too.

Because, like me, she sings along to the songs Forster guesses Emmylou’s most loved album. “You know 16 Lovers Lane really well,” he says to her – and it’s true. The album has soundtracked our family life in Johannesburg, and our cherished road trips up and down the beloved country, and it contains her favourite song “Love is a Sign” which Forster plays. Off the same album, he also performs “Clouds” and “I’m All Right” and closes the show with “Dive For Your Memory” which feels, more than any other moment, like a sonic retrieval of Forster’s songwriting partner Grant McLennan. As these and others (including the glorious “Head Full of Steam” off Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express) unfold, Emmylou and I don’t need to be in a church to know we’re hearing hymns in musical heaven.

I’ve always loved Forster’s solo material as much as The Go-Betweens and it’s all I can do to not call to him (he’s so close, just an arm’s length or two from where I’m sitting) and demand he play “Beyond Their Law” off his second solo record, 1993’s Calling From A Country Phone because, more than just about any other, the song captures my relationship with Emmylou’s absent father who - lucky, lucky bastard - saw the Go-Betweens too. But he does play “121”, which is as rollicking as it is on record, and “Demon Days” off The Evangelist, the final song written by Forster and McLennan shortly before McLennan died in 2006.

In the nave of a structure built for worship, it’s easy to feel the honesty, poignancy and compassion that’s threaded through Foster’s material, especially when turning ordinary vignettes of life into song. The warm dry wit and humanity though, are accentuated in this setting. From Inferno, the album that he was touring, he plays “Life Has Turned A Page” and it’s where the guitar solo that Forster had issued a disclaimer about (“normally you need a band for a guitar solo … but I’ll be playing mine with nothing”) turned up and we all sang along. Like his voice that night, the solo was perfect. Wonderfully unaccomplished - or under-accomplished - and all the more gorgeous for that.

In an evening of musical treasures, another track off Inferno - the elegiac “One Bird in the Sky” - leaves a deep impression. Our son Zach has chosen to live and work in the bush and lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about life choices that exist beyond the commonplace and expected – and also birds. On that night, the song’s lyrics – “I'm here floating in the sky/I judge the moment to arrive/ Time to hit the ground/Time to walk around/Time to do my thing/Eat only what I eat, breathe only what I breathe/And then leave” – moves me in ways I don’t anticipate. Later I realise that birds also make an appearance in “Dive For Your Memory” - “I'd dive for you/Like a bird I'd descend” – and I’m suddenly undone by an image of my partner’s brother who went missing at sea in the remote southern ocean. The nearest landmass to the last known point of contact with Anthony was Australia where Forster grew up and still lives.

And there it is. Even if he’s singing about a particular Brisbane experience of seeing “good looking people wearing Lee Cooper jeans” in “Surfing Magazines”, I’m thinking about watching the Gunston 500 at Durban’s Bay of Plenty, the scent of coconut in the air as Shaun Tomson, Wayne “Rabbit” Bartholomew and Mark Richards wax up their boards. When he’s singing about “Driving my first car/My elbows in the breeze” on “Spring Rain” I’m taken back to my first car. She was called Flo and let me down frequently, but I loved her nonetheless, never getting over my delight at having my very own car to drive to University. And as the notes of “Inferno (Brisbane in Summer)” come twanging my way, it’s the fevered dreams of hot, hot Umhlanga Rocks nights that flood my mind. Forster’s memories remind me of, feel so much like, my own.

* I wrote this almost a year ago, intending to publish it here but never quite got there amidst the stuff of life in a new country. Reading back on it I’m struck by how much has changed in 10 months. Emmylou’s Dad is finally with us, after remaining in Johannesburg for several months longer than anticipated due to South Africa’s stringent lockdown. But the joy of seeing an artist play live without restrictions seems like something from another era.

© Diane Coetzer