The Go-Betweens - Cattle and Cane

Another article filched from The Guardian. There's a lot of good stuff there. Another very important song to me and a lot of people of round about my age who grew up in the early eighties and had their mindset shaped by music. As good as it gets really in terms of saying something incredibly deep about life; here about childhood and memory. This band gave the name to this blog and I'll have to write more specifically about them at some point. I saw them a few times in that decade most memorably at a small gig in Kingston Polytechnic in 1986 with my sister, her friend and a couple of my own friends from university. The band, amongst the best in the world at that point were dramatically unappreciated. The Smiths and R.E.M had taken the place in the spotlight that they should have fully shared. They remained a group for critics and musically obsessed youth. My memory of this night was especially us wandering into the room which was fully lit and watching them rattle through a soundcheck. A truly wonderful band.

Old music: The Go-Betweens – Cattle and Cane

A song about growing up on a rural Queensland cattle station can strike chords far from Australia

 

• Roger Browning  

 

• theguardian.com, Wednesday 5 October 2011 15.46 BST

 

               

 

My relationship with the Go-Betweens, and in particular this song, dates from 1982. The farm Grant McLennan – half of the front pairing of the Go-Betweens, alongside Robert Forster – grew up on, in northern Queensland in Australia, was a long way from my childhood home, in the southernmost part of New Zealand's South Island, but the impressions they left felt the same. The song was recorded and released as the first single off of their second album Before Hollywood, which established their international reputation. Cattle and Cane rose to No 4 on the UK indie chart in 1983. It is one of the classic songs of the 80s.

In 1983, McLennan described writing Cattle and Cane: "I wrote (the song) to please my mother. She hasn't heard it yet because my mother and stepfather live (on a cattle station) and they can't get 240 volts electricity there, so I have to sing it over the phone to her. I don't like the word nostalgic; to me, it's a sloppy yearning for the past, and I'm not trying to do that in that song. I'm just trying to put three vignettes of a person, who's a lot like myself, growing up in Queensland, and just juxtaposing that against how I am now."

Listening to it now is tinged with sadness since McLennan's sudden and ridiculously early death at the age of 48 in 2006. But Cattle and Cane alone ensures a part of his life will always be preserved and remembered.'

 

Here's Grant and the other Go-Betweens songwriter Robert Forster talking about and playing the song