The Lost album is an essential acquisition. And it’s not just for the songs — RF’s liner notes are worth the CD price alone!

Overall, what you get with this album is a sense of the early influences and, critically, how they, in many ways, continued to shape the future: particularly, the distinctive rhythm guitar playing of Lou Reed, circa The Velvets 1969 album, that RF nicely rehaped for his own purposes. But you can also hear here the influence of Creedence, The Modern Lovers, Dylan, Francois Hardy, the garage sounds of Lenny Kaye’s ‘Nuggets’ (a very influential album in Brisbane in the late 70s), early rock ‘n’ roll and surf music.

One of the most curious songs on the album, I think, is ‘Long Lonely Day’. It betrays RF’s interest in the sound and guitar-playing of early rock ‘n’ roll, and includes a massive, highly ironic, 45 second guitar solo (Chuck Berry is written all over it). But the song itself is most intreging: it could almost be a soundtrack for a spagetti western or a spy thriller, and in 1999 RF allowed the Sydney-based artist Gail Hastings to use it for a situational artwork that was later presented at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne.

‘Rare Victory’ is another beauty. Check out the forceful camera metaphor in the opening stanza, which reappeared to great effect in ‘Eight Pictures’ — another remarkable song from this period, in fact, the only one to find its way onto SMAL (UK pressing only), and which is almost emblematic of the wacky and somewhat unnerving rhythms that so marked the early Go-Betweens.

By the way, Donat, it is not right to describe Graham Aisthorpe’s BACKSTAGE as ‘street press’. For a start it cost 40c, which in 1980 was at least the price of a 10 ounce glass of beer! BACKSTAGE is also sometimes categorised as a fanzine, but this too is incorrect. However, its relation to both fanzines and what we know today as ‘street press’ is tangible. Much of the writing was ‘fanzine-like’, to be sure, although Graham ambition was, on the whole, more critical than fanzine production. After BACKSTAGE folded in late 1980, Graham carried over his regular ‘Backstab’ column of information about the then lively Brisbane scene into the newly created ‘Time Off’ magazine, which started out as a fortnightly general arts and culture magazine, but which as the years went by became music dominated and is today part of the street press. Graham’s ambition was also, it should be said, at odds with the kind of ‘editorial for advertising’ formats of the ‘straight’ rock press of the time and which has pretty much carried over into the largely promotional writing of today’s street press. Having said that, Graham was the greatest early promoter of the Go-Betweens — no question of that and I’m sure Lindy would back me up on this — and while he was a huge fan, he was always trying to get at what was of critical value there, something that, I think, the RF interview in the first issue of BACKSTAGE testifies to. The other thing about BACKSTAGE is that it was widely distributed through news agencies, something which also distinguished it from fanzines and, by definition, the street press of today.