Praise for a pencil pusher (original) (raw)

October 26, 2006 — 10.00am

When the musician Robert Forster was approached to become the music critic for a new magazine, The Monthly, last year, his writer's résumé consisted of one entry: a column on hair care he penned for a Manchester fanzine called Debris in the late 1980s.

The founding member of Brisbane's finest band, the Go-Betweens, is clearly a fast learner. Last night he was awarded the Pascall Prize for criticism, earning $15,000, a place alongside some of the most significant names in contemporary arts and lavish praise from the competition's judges.

"Robert Forster is one of those rare critics so possessed of both charm and intellectual clarity that his work can be read with pleasure (and instruction) by people who are not especially interested in his subject," they wrote. "For those who are, he is a godsend because he writes about popular music with an authority and grace which would be rare in any area of criticism and is all the more striking in a field where criticism is often merely modish."

A "thrilled" Forster, who writes using a pencil and an unlined pad before transferring his prose to a computer - "pencil doesn't have permanence. When I write in ink it all looks a bit too important already" - sees the prize as affirmation and as some small compensation for what has been a traumatic year.

In May, his long-time partner in the Go-Betweens, Grant McLennan, whom he met when both were studying arts at Queensland University in the mid-1970s, died just as the band's reputation and sales were at renewed highs.

"It's obviously good for the soul and the heart," he says of the award, which takes its name from the journalist Geraldine Pascall, who died young in 1983 and whose estate funded the prize.

"In terms of Grant, there is obviously an odd synchronicity to it. My first published piece came out a year before Grant died. I don't want to read too many cosmic implications into all this but I do notice that one thing finishes and one thing begins."

Having been a musician for 30 years, it could be said that Forster the critic is a prime example of the poacher turned gamekeeper. He laughs at the notion.

"I've never seen this great division between rock journalists or rock critics and musicians. It always seemed bogus to me. In the Go-Betweens we knew journalists, quite a few, and there was a great common love, which was music." Forster says his experiences as a musician do influence his approach to journalism.

"I tend to think that I am probably thinking a little bit more of the artist and that could come from my knowing that when someone writes about myself or the Go-Betweens I take it personally," he says. "Which doesn't mean that everything is piercing my heart, but it's quite a personal relationship."

As a writer, Forster exhibits many of the qualities fans admire in his songwriting: a love of language; a droll wit; familiar ideas approached from unexpected angles; insight drawn from wide reading and, above all, flair.

His weakness, he says, is a voice he feels is occasionally "a bit too personal - a little bit too idiosyncratic". Hardly a fatal flaw, if a flaw at all.

What were his reference points as a writer? "There was no example really in front of me," he says. "It was 30 years of being in a band and 30 years of reading rock journalism and a good smattering of literature. Nothing more. I said to [the editor] I'll write this, if you don't like it or you don't think I can do it or I don't even finish it, well, no one's really going to know. I sent off the piece, he wrote back and said it works, it's great, we love it, it's on."

And how did it feel to have that first piece of serious journalism in his hands? "It was like holding [the first Go-Betweens single] Lee Remick for the first time," he says. "It meant that much to me."

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