Live Review: Robert Forster, McKisko

There are ‘Sold Out’ signs plastered over posters of Robert Forster’s visage all around the entrance to the dignified and stately Old Museum building, a reference to the commercial viability of tonight’s album launch rather than any snarky commentary about compromised integrity.

Accordingly there’s a large crowd seated in the vast Concert Hall by the time local singer-songwriter Helen Franzmann enters the fray with her comrades from McKisko, the amorphous project with Franzmann’s gentle spirit and beautiful voice as its constant nucleus having now swelled out to a four-piece replete with guitar, violin and gentle percussion. 

She opens with the aching Arms Water – perhaps the emotional core of her recent album Southerly – and is soon manipulating avant-harmonies with herself from her keyboard, later running a percussive instrument along the strings of an electric guitar as the entrancing soundscape swells and evolves. More Southerly songs follow in the form of The Reservoir with its delicate skeleton and the desolate Animal Heart before the gentle country lilt of Wellspring lifts the mood. Old fave Good Grief gets an airing before the set ends with delicate, spectral single Leaning Out, completing a fine display of restraint and versatility.

It must be a nightmare selecting setlists these days for iconic Brisbane auteur Robert Forster, with two large and increasingly beloved bodies of work jostling for attention. The older canon is that of the much-loved The Go-Betweens – whose shadow looms large over the nooks and crannies of this city’s music scene to this day – with the relative newcomer being his burgeoning solo repertoire, itself now seven albums deep with the recent addition of the excellent Inferno, which is being launched into the world tonight. 

The debonair entertainer leads his five-piece band into the fray to a hero’s reception – explaining with a flourish how happy he is to be in Brisbane in winter and able to wear a jumper on stage – bursting into The Morning and following it with fellow Inferno track Crazy Jane On The Day Of Judgement, the new songs lively and vibrant in the flesh. 

The band is strong and confident yet happy to demur attention in favour of Forster – whose inherent charisma draws it anyway despite no overt efforts at showmanship (besides the jumper) – with his wife Karin Bäumler coming and going at regular intervals, offering violin and beautiful backing vocals when required but happy to wander into offstage darkness when not.

The solo fare offered tonight draws largely from Inferno (Life Has Turned A Page, Remain, One Bird In The Sky and the vivacious Inferno [Brisbane In Summer]) as well as its 2015 predecessor Songs To Play (I Love Myself [And I Always Have], A Poet Walks, Learn To Burn), and the fact that they sit so well among their older brethren and receive just as much adulation speaks volumes about Forster’s ongoing creative acumen. The one older solo outlier in this regard – Demon Days from 2008’s The Evangelist – brings genuine pathos to proceedings, being one of the last songs passed to Forster by his close friend Grant McLennan shortly before he was so sadly lost to us.

The memory of this incredible creative and personal partnership is rekindled regularly tonight with a generous helping of evergreen songs by The Go-Betweens, the set proper favouring older fare, namely In The Core Of A Flame, Man O’Sand To Girl O’Sea, Dive For Your Memory, Twin Layers Of Lightning and Spring Rain, offset by latter era standards in Born To A Family and skittish set closer Here Comes A City. 

There’s so much residual love for these songs that its almost tangible, and Forster proves that the flamboyance of yore still simmers away by offering a faux heartfelt “Thank you for digging us” before leading the troops away from battle.

Old fave Love Is A Sign opens the first encore – a huge Forster harmonica flourish bringing it home – before the gentle caress of Finding You elicits a standing ovation and they throw in Learn To Burn for added measure.

The second encore proves just as fulfilling, The Clarke Sisters seeming a deep cut from The Go-Betweens’ canon before being immediately trumped by 1986 B-side Don’t Let Him Come Back – purportedly penned about The Apartments’ mainman Peter Milton Walsh, himself a member the G-Bs for a flicker – and it’s all brought to a fittingly rousing finale with the wonkily anthemic Surfing Magazines, a killer end to a wonderfully parochial night of amazing music and Brisbane bonhomie.