Live Review: Robert Forster, The Garbage & The Flowers

After an inevitable Omicron-inspired two-month postponement, Robert Forster’s performance at the Brisbane Powerhouse – one of only two performances on his schedule for the year – was re-dubbed ‘Life Beings Again… Again’. And so it did, too, for the elusive and ramshackle New Zealand band The Garbage & The Flowers, who seem to exist in a perpetual state of dissolution and reincarnation. Performing without a drummer this evening, the five-piece were delightfully untethered, wobbling and wavering in and out of time with each other as they wove songs together.

The combined sound of founding member Yuri Frusin’s twelve-stringed guitar with the other three guitars on stage (bass, acoustic, electric) – plus a fourth when singer Helen Johnstone picked up her small pink guitar – made for a sound that resembled less the crystalline structure of spiderwebs, and more the hazy, diaphanous form of dusty cobwebs gently dancing in the wind. This fragile, ephemeral quality of the music could not match Johnstone’s singing more perfectly, her plaintive and patient style resembling Moe Tucker as she sang songs from the band’s sporadic, decade-spanning catalogue.

There was more than one reverberation of The Velvet Underground to be heard this evening, Robert Forster having invited comparisons of himself to Lou Reed and his earnest acolyte, Jonathan Richman. While Reed was hailed as the poet laureate of New York, Forster’s music has done for many Brisbane residents what David Malouf’s novel Johnno did for Forster in high school – reveal Brisbane as subject matter.

The stately sixty-four-year-old took the audience back to his formative years with his solo setlist, telling the story of his life through a series of portraits in song. Born To A Family, I Love Myself (And I Always Have), and Spring Rain offered a familiar – though nonetheless rejuvenating – recounting of Forster’s early years, before 121 (from his 1993 album Calling From A Country Phone), introduced a gothic element to the singer’s self-mythologising, describing the tombstones, cobblestones, and old bones that lie beneath this city.

One Bird In The Sky, Did She Overtake You, Spirit Of A Vampyre, and Inferno (Brisbane In Summer) seemed to loosely chronicle Forster’s adult years. Darlinghurst Nights struck a particularly sentimental and reflective note, leading into Dive For Your Memory – a song that was written decades before Forster’s Go-Betweens bandmate Grant McLennan’s death, but subsequently can’t help but to evoke his legacy and memory.

Dressed in a white shirt, and with his hair combed straight, Forster dived further down memory lane with early Go-Betweens numbers Spirit, Head Full Of Steam, and Lee Remick. Somehow, even though it was only Forster playing an acoustic guitar, phantom traces of that striped sunlight sound hung suspended in the air – outlines of oboe, snatches of strings, ghost notes.

Life Has Turned A Page felt pertinent, and not only because it represented his recent work. Perhaps a sign of his age, or mere theatricality, Forster had a box of chocolates on stage, claiming they were for when he needed a sugar hit – eventually reaching for a strawberry cream. He bashfully avoided the rigmarole of staging an official encore (“I’m too scared of sitting in a room for hours”), choosing instead to stay and perform a trio of evergreen Go-Betweens songs to end the night: He Lives My Life, People Say, and Surfing Magazines. He left the stage afterwards, leaving only a pink chocolate wrapper behind.