| Author | Message | ||
     Mark Leydon Member Username: Mark_leydon Post Number: 82 Registered: 05-2005 |
Amazing! Robert Foster has just been declared Australia's top critic, winning a prize of $15,000. See article below from today's Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/praise-for-a-pencil-pusher/2006/10/25/116174918 6810.html Go-Between Robert Forster has been declared the nation's top critic, writes Bernard Zuel. When the musician Robert Forster was approached to become the music critic for a new magazine, The Monthly, last year, his writer's résumé consisted of one entry: a column on hair care he penned for a Manchester fanzine called Debris in the late 1980s. The founding member of Brisbane's finest band, the Go-Betweens, is clearly a fast learner. Last night he was awarded the Pascall Prize for criticism, earning $15,000, a place alongside some of the most significant names in contemporary arts and lavish praise from the competition's judges. "Robert Forster is one of those rare critics so possessed of both charm and intellectual clarity that his work can be read with pleasure (and instruction) by people who are not especially interested in his subject," they wrote. "For those who are, he is a godsend because he writes about popular music with an authority and grace which would be rare in any area of criticism and is all the more striking in a field where criticism is often merely modish." A "thrilled" Forster, who writes using a pencil and an unlined pad before transferring his prose to a computer - "pencil doesn't have permanence. When I write in ink it all looks a bit too important already" - sees the prize as affirmation and as some small compensation for what has been a traumatic year. In May, his long-time partner in the Go-Betweens, Grant McLennan, whom he met when both were studying arts at Queensland University in the mid-1970s, died just as the band's reputation and sales were at renewed highs. "It's obviously good for the soul and the heart," he says of the award, which takes its name from the journalist Geraldine Pascall, who died young in 1983 and whose estate funded the prize. "In terms of Grant, there is obviously an odd synchronicity to it. My first published piece came out a year before Grant died. I don't want to read too many cosmic implications into all this but I do notice that one thing finishes and one thing begins." Having been a musician for 30 years, it could be said that Forster the critic is a prime example of the poacher turned gamekeeper. He laughs at the notion. "I've never seen this great division between rock journalists or rock critics and musicians. It always seemed bogus to me. In the Go-Betweens we knew journalists, quite a few, and there was a great common love, which was music." Forster says his experiences as a musician do influence his approach to journalism. "I tend to think that I am probably thinking a little bit more of the artist and that could come from my knowing that when someone writes about myself or the Go-Betweens I take it personally," he says. "Which doesn't mean that everything is piercing my heart, but it's quite a personal relationship." As a writer, Forster exhibits many of the qualities fans admire in his songwriting: a love of language; a droll wit; familiar ideas approached from unexpected angles; insight drawn from wide reading and, above all, flair. His weakness, he says, is a voice he feels is occasionally "a bit too personal - a little bit too idiosyncratic". Hardly a fatal flaw, if a flaw at all. What were his reference points as a writer? "There was no example really in front of me," he says. "It was 30 years of being in a band and 30 years of reading rock journalism and a good smattering of literature. Nothing more. I said to [the editor] I'll write this, if you don't like it or you don't think I can do it or I don't even finish it, well, no one's really going to know. I sent off the piece, he wrote back and said it works, it's great, we love it, it's on." And how did it feel to have that first piece of serious journalism in his hands? "It was like holding [the first Go-Betweens single] Lee Remick for the first time," he says. "It meant that much to me." | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 766 Registered: 05-2005 |
What a lovely article. I love the last paragraph. I wish I'd known that was in the Herald when I picked it up off the grass at 6 this morning! Instead I was too busy reading the sport section as usual. | ||
| Peter Azzopardi Member Username: Pete Post Number: 157 Registered: 09-2004 |
Wow. Well done Robert. May I add that I've only missed one of his reviews in the Monthly so far. It is a strange experience for me to read his criticism when I am such a fan of his music: with every one of his insights into where an album or song works/doesn't work, according to his strict criteria and ideas of integrity, I find myself drawing comparisons to his music and seeing if it holds up. Some times I also have a problem with his voice because it often eschews the common language of rock criticism (or any of the journalism in the Monthly's pages for that matter). I especially loved Forster's piece of fiction in the current issue of Meanjin where he writes from the perspective of a friend of Normie Rowe's. The passages that play out at a recording session for one of Rowe's hit singles are total music geekdom, written by someone who has read a glut rock biographies and fallen in love with the arcane details about studio sessions and moments of artistic innovation. | ||
| Elizabeth Robinson Member Username: Liz_the_new_listener Post Number: 14 Registered: 10-2006 |
I hope Robert Forster derives the pleasure he deserves both from the award he has just received and from the fact that his fans both old and new couldn't be happier for him. | ||
| John B. Member Username: John_b Post Number: 30 Registered: 10-2006 |
Yes, lovely piece. But, living half a planet away, we Europeans will never get to read Robert's stuff unless someone posts it here. | ||
| Duncan Hurwood Member Username: Duncan_h Post Number: 67 Registered: 05-2005 |
You can get the magazine shipped to Europe. I did with the Grant tribute article. And you can always subscribe - the rest of the magazine was an interesting read IMO. | ||
| Stuart Wilson Member Username: Stuart Post Number: 1 Registered: 10-2006 |
Or maybe some enterprising publisher will put together a collection of Forster's writing? er... and who is Normie Rowe? | ||
| Michael D Member Username: Michael_d Post Number: 13 Registered: 06-2005 |
Here's a link to three of Roberts articles, near the bottom of the page: http://www.themonthly.com.au/currentIssue/index.html For those who are unable to get the magazine. M | ||
| Randy Adams Member Username: Randy_adams Post Number: 682 Registered: 03-2005 |
Welcome to the board, Stuart. I'm sure one of our antipodean friends will know much more than I can offer on Normie Rowe. He was a 60s pop star in Australia, his first record being a cover of the Gershwin standard "It Ain't Necessarily So" in 1965. He didn't write his own material (not in the 60s anyway) but he was a very decent blue-eyed beat soul singer and his backing band, The Playboys, were pretty good. Being a pop type with no internal source of material, he still managed to make some decent records by plucking obscure songs by well-known writers like Jerry Ragavoy, Barry Mann & Cynthia Weill, and Graham Gouldman. His later 60s records moved well away from his soul posturings to offer an amusing tour through the pop fashions of that extremely dynamic decade. He continued to make records through the 80s though I've personally only heard some of the 60s ones. Rowe is by no means the best that Oz can offer from the era, but he was big at the time. The fact that Robert would write something about him reflects really well on Robert as I must assume that Robert's generation of Oz music people would rather forget the likes of Normie Rowe. | ||
| Andy Member Username: I_am_andy Post Number: 3 Registered: 08-2006 |
Normie Rowe is also well known for starting a fight on a live (and popular) lunchtime chat and light entertainment TV show in the early 90's. The discussion was about whether Australia should become a republic. | ||
| Guy Ewald Member Username: Guy_ewald Post Number: 182 Registered: 02-2005 |
That is a lovely article and a wonderful honor for Robert. And who can't use an extra fifteen grand? From the few pieces I’ve been able to read, Robert Forster has a distinctive critical slant and really digs into his subject. It strikes me how few critics really “know” music by comparison, or how reluctant they are to demonstrate their knowledge. As often as not music reviews leave me wondering if the writer actually listened to the album in question, let alone digested it on any level. There was a review of the new Pere Ubu album in the Voice not long ago. The writer made a bunch of coy remarks about the title, ‘Why I Hate Women’ as well as the statement inside the insert that “this is an irony-free recording.” But he didn’t analyze the “character” David Thomas is playing in the songs and there was absolutely no comment about the writing, the performances, the music, the production… nothing. The Voice’s Music section is useless now that Robert Christgau is gone. | ||
| Chris McKenna Member Username: Maccattack Post Number: 8 Registered: 05-2005 |
I love hearing (reading) Mr Forster speak. Reading that article reminded me that he has every bit the charm that Grant had only different. |