2007 – APRA Speech on Grant McLennan

I was driving the first time I heard Cattle and Cane. I had to pull over and stop the car it was so good. I could smell that song. The Go Betweens hit me at a time when I was trying to figure out how to
write my own songs, brew my own flavour. I studied and stole from them. Every time I play my song Careless I think of their song Apologies Accepted which gave me the chord sequence.

Grant and I lived in the same city for a while and loved to kick the footy together in Ruschutter’s Bay Park. We both liked poetry and books and the mystery of pop. We’d try out our new songs cagily on each other. We tried writing one together once but it didn’t work. Once he’d written a line he didn’t want to change it. And I can be quite stubborn myself! He did a little talking bit on one of my records and I played harmonica on his first solo album. Once in a while we’d stay up all night with guitars and beer and watch the sun come up over Bondi.

Geography separated us for a long time. Every now and then a postcard would come in the mail from some far corner of the world – Sweden or Seattle or Cairns. On the back of one of those cards once he’d written out part of The Ball Poem by John Berryman. That fragment gave me a song.

Every record Grant ever made was “the best thing I’ve ever done”. You could set your watch by him saying that. He knew more Bob Dylan songs than I did and that’s saying something.

Last weekend my teenage daughter had some friends around. We were all eating dinner and everyone was talking at once while Augie March’s new record played in the background and through the hubbub, hunched over my potatoes, I could hear that old eternal, yearning, humming thrum. Long will he live.