Creating art after Karin’s cancer diagnosis seemed obscene to the former Go-Betweens frontman. But then the sound of a recent piece of music he’d written was in his ear, and a lyric came to him
usic has always been important to Karin and me; in fact, it’s how we met. I was in the Go-Betweens, touring Germany on each album we made. She played violin and sang in a folk-rock band from Bavaria called Baby You Know. They would come and see us play and we’d talk music and hang out after shows. And then, following the last Go-Betweens tour of Germany in the 80s, the band returning to Australia, I stayed on and moved in with Karin.
Friends, family, former bandmates and fellow musicians rallied around Robert Forster and his wife Karin.Karin is the first person to hear my new songs. She is the barometer of their worth; the midwife bringing them to life. If I feel like playing something to her, I know it must be good. So she knew the songs I’d written over the previous three years, and by the fire we played a few of them, her voice a whisper.
In mid-September, Karin was told she could have an operation. In celebration, and to document the music we’d been making, our little band recorded 10 songs in a studio over seven hours. Listening back to the recordings gave Karin and me enormous pleasure, as we bubbled over what we liked and what could be improved or tweaked. Two songs in particular that we played over and over again – I Don’t Do Drugs I Do Time and It’s Only Poison – sounded complete in their first take, no-overdubs state.
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