Robert Forster
Strawberries
★★★★★
TAPETE
“My agent used to tell me: ‘You give people the shits,’” sings Robert Forster, channelling a disaffected thirtysomething rock star on the elegantly wasted Such A Shame. “Why can’t you be like everyone else? Play the hits.” Too ungainly to follow any kind of conventional career path, too thoughtful to effectively dumb it down, the former Go-Between’s compensation for any financial insecurity has been a career full of charming twists, with Strawberries – recorded in Sweden with a freshly-assembled backing band – perhaps the most uncomplicated and joyous of them all.
If 2023’s The Candle And The Flame was overshadowed by his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis, Forster’s ninth solo LP comes from a more playful place. A duet with Bäumler, the title track is a charming jazz-age celebration of forbidden fruit (with an equally sweet accompanying video) filled with a gratitude for the low buzz of enduring love. “Miracle days of happiness,” sings the 67-year-old. “Joyful moments of bliss.” Secure in himself, the bookish Brisbanite gave himself freedom to roam for Strawberries, which he describes as “less confessional” and “a lot more story-oriented” than previous work, though parallels with the shimmering passions of The Go-Betweens’ ageless 16 Lovers Lane are evident from the opening Tell It Back To Me. A sun-spangled recap of a lightning-strike love affair, it bristles with confounding detail. “I taught English, you were French,” sings Forster, gloriously deadpan. “We kissed, on a bench.”
Breakfast On The Train is more excitable still, as former schoolmates get carried away after running into each other following a rugby match on a damp night in Edinburgh. “The hotel was her idea,” Forster notes. “It was expensive, but it was near.” Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue stripped of the messy emotional baggage, it features some noisy sex, an anguished call to reception and perhaps the greatest “fuck” in pop since the Sex Pistols’ Bodies.
Not all the passions on Strawberries are so spectacularly reciprocated – Foolish I Know is an elegantly measured portrait of a gay crush on a straight man (“He’s handsome and he’s unattached; I like him but there’s just one catch”), but for the most part it’s a record about possibilities, hope. Even when there are tears – and there are plenty on rockabilly shuffle Good To Cry – they are a righteous purging, and Forster ventures further still on cryptic quiet/loud closer Diamonds, Mark E. Smith yelps, distorted guitars and jagged squalls of saxophone, garish new additions to a hitherto sensible musical wardrobe.
The subtext, of course, is awful. Forster – like anyone who has watched parents die and loved ones suffer – knows that the worst is never over. However, Strawberries concludes that raging against the dying of the light is a mug’s game; the only sensible response to mortality and pain is to live (and love) harder. Some of the stylistic choices here may give regular listeners “the shits”, but Forster is quite possibly beyond worrying about what people think about him now. His debut novel is in the works; he is writing some of the best songs of his life. That delicious fruit won’t be fresh forever, enjoy the sweetness now.
Strawberries is out May 23 on Tapete.
ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade
Track listing:
Tell It Back To Me
Good To Cry
Breakfast On The Train
Strawberries
All Of The Time
Such A Shame
Foolish I Know
Diamonds
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