ANDREW P STREET reckons he can ‘out-Best-Of’ The Go-Betweens, answering their new collection with one of his own design.

The new compilation Quiet Heart is given the impossible task of summing up one of Australia’s most extraordinary (and prolific) bands in 18 songs. That’s a big ask for a catalogue that contains nine albums, several standalone singles and a bunch of top-notch B-sides, especially since most of the space, by necessity, must be taken up with The Hits.

The selections for the album were made by former members Robert Forster (voice/guitar), Lindy Morrison (drums), Amanda Brown (violin, keys, voice, pretty much anything else) and Robert Vickers (bass), and while there’s really no way to criticise the songs included, the need to include the obvious tunes means it doesn’t leave much room to explore the glorious breadth of the band’s catalogue. After all, what sort of Best Of could exist without ‘Streets of Your Town’, ‘Cattle & Cane’, ‘Bachelor Kisses’, ‘Bye Bye Pride’, ‘Love Goes On!’ and ‘Right Here’? A crap one is what.

Incidentally, all of those songs have something in common: they’re all sung (and mainly written) by the late, great singer/guitarist/bassist Grant McLennan, who tended to be the more poppy and melodic of the band’s two writers. While he and Forster matched each other song-for-song on each album, going by their radio-friendliest tunes will result in an imbalance in the perception of what the band were about.

Hence, this list – and given the above, it’s no great surprise that an “alternative” look at The Go-Betweens would skew a little more toward the Forster side of the canon. And of course there are some painful omissions, and I’ve attempted to keep it plausibly Best-Of-y, with an emphasis on underrated singles and choice album cuts rather than “Hey, let me look super-awesome with my knowledge of obscure B-sides! Whoo! Here’s ‘Don’t Let Him Come Back’, you philistines!” Because if there’s one thing online music journalism is truly characterised by, it’s a sober and reasonable approach to the weight of opinion within popular culture.

So, with those caveats laid out, here’s my personal Best Of. EMI, if you like the way I’m thinking, might I suggest the title Rock and Roll Friend: An Alternative Guide to The Go-Betweens, and please note that my rates for sleeve notes are very, very reasonable. Warner, the same rate applies for the Models compilation that you unconsciously yearn for me to helm.

1. ‘Lee Remick’

(single, 1978)
The debut single, Robert Forster’s ode to the titular screen goddess, is a piece of awesome three-chord indie-thrash. Forster himself has pointed out that it just begs to be given a pop-punk cover, although maybe he’s just angling for some sweet, sweet royalties.

2. ‘Magic in Here’

(The Friends of Rachel Worth, 2000)
It’s impossible to hear this as anything other than McLennan’s love song to his songwriting partner, coming as the first song on the band’s reunion album. Well, more accurately, the album upon which Forster and McLennan reactivated their partnership and band name – none of the other former members were invited, replaced by bassist Adele Pickvance and, on this disc, Sleater-Kinney’s Janet Weiss on drums.

3. ‘The House That Jack Kerouac Built’

(Tallulah, 1987)
Leaving aside Forster’s best-ever title, the secret weapon is Amanda Brown’s insistent violin that undercuts the vocal with a soundtrack-worthy tension. “In the darkened cinema, I’ll give you pleasure in the stall.” Coming from Forster, that’s both hot and downright creepy.

4. ‘Hammer the Hammer’

(single, 1982)
Grant McLennan’s strident bass line and breathless vocal powers a glorious song that sounds like it could have been the best early Bunnymen single ever. The band did a version on the first Live at the Wireless LP by the then-Double J which is the definitive one, if you ask me.

5. ‘I Need Two Heads’

(single, 1980)
Another early non-album single, sung by Forster and showing that the young three-piece Go Betweens could have just as easily turned into The Cure. Imagine this segueing into ‘Jumping Someone Else’s Train’. It would totally work.

6. ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?’

(16 Lovers Lane, 1988)
An underrated single from McLennan’s pen, this was an uncharacteristically strident entry on 16 Lovers Lane. And while I do love the melody line, what makes the song is that searing counterpoint violin line from Brown.

7. ‘Draining the Pool for You’

(Spring Hill Fair, 1984)
Another Forster classic, where his cracked vocal rests over a staggering rhythm for a song that turns the entire trope of the sexy, sexy pool boy on its head. It’s effectively the flipside of The Beatles’ ‘Drive My Car’.

8. ‘The Statue’

(Oceans Apart, 2005)
A hazy piece of drifting jangle-pop from McLennan, buried in the middle of the last album but deserving of attention on its own merits. It also shows how much electronics had become part of the palette for late -period GBs, with Glenn Thompson’s drums matched by loops and keys.

9. ‘German Farmhouse’

(The Friends of Rachel Worth, 2000)
Forster explains his recent absence with one of his riffiest songs ever over a wonderfully conversational autobiographical lyric. The incredulous “There was a rumour Pavarotti would sing there!” alone makes it worth inclusion.

10. ‘Rock and Roll Friend’

(B-side, 1988)
“You’re home late, and you smell/Of the music that you make.” Anyone who’s ever gone out with a muso, lived in a house one with or been in a band knows exactly what Forster’s getting at. How the fuck was this a B-side (for ‘Was There Anything I Could Do?’, incidentally)? Forster reactivated it for his 1996 solo album Warm Nights, and he was right to. A more underrated song he has never written.

11. ‘Caroline and I’

(Bright Yellow Bright Orange, 2003)
There’s not a lot on this album that screams “single!” and this poppy Forster strummer was probably as close as it got, not least because it sounded like late-period Custard. Anyone fancy turning that into a thesis topic for cultural studies is welcome to it – “The influence of former Custard skinsman Glenn Thompson on the final Go-Betweens albums suggests the existence of a distinct Brisbane-music sonic identity: discuss.”

12. ‘Apology Accepted’

(Liberty Belle & the Black Diamond Express, 1986)
McLennan has rarely sounded this unguarded than in this emotional plea for forgiveness, with one of his most singalong-able choruses ever. Hunters & Collectors would have killed for this.

13. ‘Your Turn, My Turn’

(Send Me a Lullaby, 1981)
A drunken piano turns Forster’s accusatory waltz into something downright sinister, and it’s here that comparisons between Forster and Nick Cave make the most sense. Significantly, it was the first single with drummer Lindy Morrison.

14. ‘The Clarke Sisters’

(Tallulah, 1987)
“They have problems with their father’s law/They sleep in the back of a feminist bookstore.” So begins one of Forster’s most enigmatic pieces: a sparse vignette that shows how gloriously economical the band could be. And, again, it’s a song that would have had Cave tearing up most of his notebooks in a jealous rage.

15. ‘Poison in the Walls’

(Bright Yellow Bright Orange, 2003)
Every so often a writer knocks out a song that sounds like the equivalent of your year-four teacher brightly saying “Well, write an essay about not being able to write an essay!” This, I contend, is McLennan’s version. “There’s poison in the walls/The revolution never called/And now we’re all the same,” he sighs over a GBs-by-the-numbers chord progression, asking, “Where’s that brilliant juice? That flame that fires your heart?” And it’s still great.

16. ‘Man O’ Sand to Girl O’ Sea’

(Before Hollywood, 1983)
Many a songwriter has risked a relationship with a thoughtless song or an ill-advised musical confession, but has there ever been a ballsier declaration than “I feel so sure about our love, I’ll write a song about us breaking up”? And he was right to be confident: it was to be another five years and the making of 16 Lovers Lane until Forster and drummer Lindy Morrison’s decade-plus relationship was to unravel.

17. ‘I Just Get Caught Out’

(Tallulah, 1987)
It’s not often that a GBs song rests on a bass line, but this Forster song is really down to Robert Vickers – and Brown and McLennan’s bah-bah-bah backing vocals means it slides into widescreen pop in the chorus. Look, I guess what I’m really saying is that I totally rate Tallulah, OK?

18. ‘Boundary Rider’

(Oceans Apart, 2005)
McLennan’s sweetly simple ode to solitude is the perfect way to end the record, with a “boundary rider on a five-mile fence” evoking the same sense of space and place as he did over two decades earlier with ‘Cattle & Cane’. The man never lost it.

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Related: Robert Forster discusses ‘Quiet Heart’ track by track.