At the Royal Northern College for Music, a small crowd gathers at around 7:30. Mostly men, many of them look like they are meeting up for the first time in years, or the first time since the last Go-Betweens concert. With their lattes and bottled beers, they talk animatedly about, from what I hear, Man City and their 6-0 thrashing of Portsmouth. There’s an announcement that Robert Forster’s show will start at 7:45, without a support act.
In the half-empty Haden Freeman Concert Hall, a kind of hexagonal lecture theatre, Forster appears, on time, and solo at first under the hall’s huge organ. He begins with quiet acoustic numbers from the new album: low-tempo and underpowered, they bring home again how his songs can be ill-served by unconfident arrangements. Slowly the band assembles, and the show builds real momentum thanks to his Rochdale-born bass-player, 21-year-old drummer and comedian keyboardist.
The sound in the concert hall is weirdly bouncy, though, so that the guitar or bass or drum take turns dominating the vocal. In spite of this, or maybe because of this, they play loud throwaway songs like ‘Surfing Magazines’ and ‘German Farmhouse’ from Warm Nights, with great riffing abandon. Forster’s an engaging performer, fiddling with plugs and slowly finding his way around and out of the hall’s makeshift stage, introducing the band and, at one point, telling a long, obscurely pointed story about trying to get in to see Patti Smith play in the Serpentine: the moral of the story is that he watches ‘famous rock journalists’ cheat the queue until he, his wife and a couple of hippies are the only people left outside.
Go-betweens’ songs like ‘Spring Rain’, ‘Quiet Heart’, ‘Clouds’ and ‘Head Full of Steam’ are terrific and ‘Demon Days’ from the new album holds its ground alongside them. The show closes with an encore of ‘Heart out to Tender’, the only song from Forster’s outstanding solo debut, Danger in the Past, and a stomping run through ‘People Say’.
As we file out towards the car parks, there’s a concessions stall selling t-shirts, cds and, incredibly, cassettes. A sign says that Robert will be there for a signing ‘6 minutes’ post-show.