The song that haunts Go-Betweens frontman Robert Forster

A title can make a song. Songwriters On the Run always met with a frisson of anticipation when Robert Forster announced it. Some nights he’d tease in more colour. “Let’s call them Tex and Tim,” he quipped at a Thornbury Theatre gig in 2015. Over just 12 lines and no chorus, the enigmatic outlaw romance worked strange magic.

“Every other song I’ve ever written, I’ve just left and felt like it was complete. I never revisited them in my mind,” says the guy who, despite nine solo albums and a growing body of prose, will always be the tall one from the Go-Betweens.

“But with Songwriters on the Run, I started to think, ‘Why are they in jail? Why did they break out? How did this happen? Who are they going to see?’ It was this odd thing where I wrote three verses very quickly in 2009, and they started to haunt me.”

Songwriters On the Run is also the name of Forster’s first novel. It’s a buddy romp that hits the road from Rockhampton to Melbourne with high stakes, plenty of laughs and songs going off like glimmers of salvation. Jail-breaking musicians Mick and Drew – “in their early 30s, tall and skinny, rock-star-wrecked handsome and in denim” – are not quite Forster and his late Go-Bies partner Grant McLennan, but well, you know fiction.

“In 2017, I’d been writing non-fiction for 11 years,” Forster explains. His award-winning music criticism in The Monthly had given way to books Ten Rules of Rock’n’Roll and Grant and I.

“I was really wanting to write stuff that I made up, that couldn’t be fact-checked. Not with a novel in mind necessarily, but just to start writing a story that came from my imagination. I had this desire to break free.”

Indeed. His debut novel can be read as “a comic odyssey, a crime thriller and a nuts-and-bolts account of making art”, to quote Paul Kelly’s endorsement. But at its heart is a metaphor for the musician’s life: the allure of absolute freedom straining against hourly, daily and lifelong limitations.

Inside the absurdity of outlaw songwriters is a truth that this seeker of top tunes, hit singles, critical adoration and massive American publishing deals clearly relishes. “What I came to realise when I was writing the book,” he says, “is that life on the run from the law is very similar to songwriters on tour.

“It’s something I’ve always been fascinated by, because when you’re a touring musician, your day can be planned in the itinerary – photo shoot at 10, soundcheck at three – and then it all changes.

“You’re driving at 11 instead of one. The soundcheck’s put back. You’re not doing the photo shoot, you’re going to a radio station. You’re onstage at 8.30 instead of 8. And then you’re backstage and someone says, ‘You’re not on for another half-hour’. That’s the day.”

As a musician, he says, you get acclimatised to that. “For anyone else, it’d be, ‘What the hell is happening?’ But you get to the stage where you’re numb. So I could see that Mick and Drew would be hardened to that. Surprises, changes of plan. You just take it in your stride.”

It’s partly why that hour or two on stage is such bliss. That timeless spell is, for most, the realisation of freedom, the only escape from the prison of industry and near-certain penury. Without spoiling a plot twist, there’s a moment in Forster’s novel where we feel that long exhale of liberty, or at least its promise looming close enough to taste.

“Mick closes his eyes, letting himself sink further into the soft leather folds of the settee,” Forster writes. “Like Drew, he immediately knows what this means. Normal life will stop. The vertical helicopter ascension out of reality is under way.”

“That’s one of my favourite passages,” he says. “When I wrote that paragraph, I thought, ‘Oh God, I’ve finally said it’. It’s what keeps virtually every musician going: that moment where life changes. I’ve seen it and chased it.

“I know friends that are stars, and there were a couple of times with the Go-Betweens where it almost felt like that. You just knew the album could go platinum, life would change, doors would open, the struggle’s over, you’re living another reality.”

The liberty bell rang most clearly, he remembers, when the Go-Betweens’ single Streets of Your Town was A-listed on BBC Radio 1 in England – “which is normally a guarantee of a hit record. Industry people were ringing, saying, ‘You’ve got it’.”

They didn’t have it. The song stalled. The soundcheck got put back, the photo shoot was canned … and so on. “But that was a moment where if it had happened ... that would have been the helicopter lift.”

So is the novel, in some sense, an attempt to change the ending? “It could have been. You’re getting psychological here. It wasn’t intentional, but maybe I wanted to revisit that moment.”

You don’t need a psych degree to see something else revisited in Songwriters On the Run. Twenty years ago this month, McLennan’s death hit Forster hard. They were creative soulmates from university days in 1970s Brisbane. The shock was sudden. Forster’s grief was naturally profound.

From the novel’s opening burst of dialogue between two characters caught mid-conversation at a roadhouse burger stop, the joy of their imagined reunion feels life-sustaining. It feels like the author getting in touch with an old friend.

“It was. The talking: that was definitely the way it was with Grant. We talked for years before we played together. We talked the band into existence. Talking about films, records, everything. And those conversations run all the way through the book. They have that rhythm and back and forth. It’s lovely to go back into that.”

The other, quieter conversation in the book is with songs. Drew is writing the titular one in his head for most of the tale: a thrill he returns to like a private sanctuary, a kind of map drawn from memory and inspiration that finds a way through the hardships of the world.

“If a songwriter is working on a good song, they’re happy. You might only write two or three a year, but the payoff is worth it. You get so much out of creating something on a guitar or piano that expresses why you’re on the planet. It’s a magical feeling. And you feel part of a chain. Great songwriters have done this, and you’re doing it too.

“It’s highly romantic,” he concedes, “but that’s part of it.”

The music paused for Forster when his wife, Karin Baumler, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2021. “After Karin’s diagnosis, I wrote She’s a Fighter and then didn’t write for a year,” he says. The video featured them and their kids, Louis and Loretta, playing it together in a tight circle. Fight won, the songs returned.

“We don’t travel much, or at all, so our life has become a lot more in-the-house; in our part of the world,” Forster says, “but I don’t think my writing has changed in its natural processes: the nuts-and-bolts sort of creativity, as Paul Kelly calls it.”

Nor can the road stay closed. A book tour will soon find him back on the run. “I’m going to walk on stage and start talking about the book, pulling it apart. I’ll play songs, read passages, take questions. I want a performance aspect to it. Small rooms,” he says.

“I want to hold people.”

Robert Forster appears at The Melbourne Writers Festival on May 9 (sold out) and launches Songwriters On the Run (Penguin) at Sydney Opera House on June 2 and Memo Music Hall in St Kilda on June 10.

The Age is a festival partner.