Sunday 19 July 2020

16 Lovers Lane: The Go-Betweens - 1988



Australian Pressing, 1988.
Earl Collection 00007

Like pretty much everyone else, unfortunately for the band, I liked The Go-Betweens in the 1980s, but never bought their records. I have a reasonably good excuse however, I was a poor teenager with not much jangling around in my pockets to buy that many records. I didn’t really connect with them in a serious way again until 2015 when I bought G Stands for Go-Betweens: Vol.1, a box set of their first three albums plus EPs and rarities. How I fell for them, swooning into their literary pop-rock pretense. 16 Lovers Lane is one of their greatest achievements and one of the great melodic pop-rock albums, period. It contains two of my favourite Go-Betweens songs, Grant McLennan’s confessional Quiet Heart (which is also my partner’s favourite song of theirs) and Robert Forster’s plaintive Dive for Your Memory. I was always a sucker for melancholy.

I’m pretty sure that I bought this second hand album in Melbourne from Dixon’s Recycled Records in Fitzroy, from the look of the price sticker, maybe in the early 2000s. Every record stores’ price sticker is like a finger-print. You’ll notice that the majority of my records have the price sticker on the inside of the record sleeve, as a permanent reminder of how much I paid for it and where I bought it from, which is all part of the history of that record.

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