🎵 Send Me a Lullaby (The Go-Betweens)

Send Me a Lullaby is The Go-Betweens first album recorded in November 1981 with the help of Tony Cohen. It is interesting going to an artists early work and listening afresh. All in all it is an album that feels like it is trying to find itself. One minute there are jangley hooks that I could imagine coming up in a Talking Heads album, then there is a track like Eight Pictures which I could imagine Dave McComb brooding to.

The band’s first official album, Send Me a Lullaby, produced by The Go-Betweens and Tony Cohen, on Missing Link in Australia, was released as an eight-track mini-album in November 1981.[1] Missing Link’s UK distributors, Rough Trade, released the album in the UK, three months later, with four tracks added.[2][5] Morrison provided the album title, in preference to Two Wimps and a Witch, from a Zelda Fitzgerald novel Save Me the Waltz.[8] The group had developed a subtler sound consisting of dry semi-spoken vocals, complex lyrics and melodic but fractious guitar pop influenced by contemporary bands such as Television, Wire and Talking Heads. Australian rock music historian, Ian McFarlane, described the album as “tentative and clumsy [with] its brittle, rough-hewn sound”.[2]

Andrew Stafford explains that it is very much reflection of the times.

Released in 1981, it now sounds very much of its time: jerky, influenced by all sorts of even jerkier-sounding British post-punk bands like Gang of Four, the Raincoats and the Slits.

It was interesting to read Robert Forster’s reflection in Clinton Walker’s Stranded:

Robert Forster: I think it’s really important, especially in Australia, that we’re seen as feminine in opposition to the across-the-board masculinity of Australian bands. But you see, I see the Birthday Party as feminine too.

I find it hard to imagine a world where The Go-Betweens are hand-in-hand with The Birthday Party.