Tracey Thorn tells the story of her rock ‘n’ roll friend, Lindy Morrison
This book-length portrait of Australian musician Lindy Morrison is unique, as the author approaches it as friend, colleague, observer, participant, insider, outsider and admirer.
This is a book energised by an overdue reframing of a small but significant chapter in Australian music history. The accepted narrative – the one you might already know if you are a student of indie rock – goes like this: Two bookish young men meet at the University of Queensland, become friends and learn to play music together. In 1977 they form a band called The Go-Betweens. The two singers also write the songs, so together they form its driving creative force.
The band never does very well commercially but eventually becomes respected as one of the most important to emerge from Brisbane. The Go-Betweens split in 1989 – sick and tired after more than a decade of slog here and in London, with few financial returns – before reforming with a new line-up in 2000.
That persists until one of the songwriters, Grant McLennan, dies suddenly, aged 48, in 2006; the band dies with him, while Robert Forster continues to write and perform as a solo artist. In 2010, the Go Between Bridge is opened in Brisbane after a public vote on naming rights.
That is the usual story, told and told again. Occasionally, it’s expanded to include the fact the band began as a trio, with a woman drummer, and later added a woman violinist to become one of the era’s few groups where men and women were equally represented. The thing about narratives, though, is that once they’re repeated often enough, they fasten into place like concrete. They can become almost impossible to shift and require heroic acts to redress.
It’s not until the final chapters of My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend that the intention – to revise accepted history – becomes clear.
“The Go-Betweens weren’t the biggest band in the world,” writes British author Tracey Thorn. “You might never have heard of them. But they had their moment in the limelight … They were reviewed and interviewed, recorded and filmed. Their work is now collected in lush box sets, a movie tells their history, a bridge bears their name. It’s not nothing, by any means.”
This is Thorn’s fourth book; she is best known as a singer-songwriter with pop duo Everything But the Girl and as a solo artist. In March 1983, she was sitting in a dressing room when a tall, loud Australian woman named Lindy Morrison walked in, asking to use someone’s lipstick.
“I looked up to see blonde hair and a Lurex dress. A tall, angular woman, who seemed to reflect the light, or perhaps you had your own internal source. You didn’t look like you’d ever been scared to go on stage, or felt judged by your own bandmates, or been browbeaten by a road crew. You looked like confidence ran in your veins. You looked like self-belief in a mini dress, the equal of anyone.”
Morrison played drums in The Go-Betweens. A two-year gap followed that first meeting, but the two later became close friends, while Thorn – generally a much quieter presence – came to think of Morrison as “an idealised version of what I want to become”.
Thorn’s portrait of Morrison is unique, as she approaches it from several angles: friend, colleague, musician, observer, participant, insider, outsider, admirer. Much of the narrative is concerned with Morrison’s musical career; there is little discussion of her 22-year stint as a social worker and welfare co-ordinator at music charity Support Act. But that is by design: there was a 20-year gap in their friendship when they both became mothers, and “the line between us goes quiet”.
In 2019, Thorn travelled to Australia to reconnect with Morrison – now the star of pensioners’ insurance ads – and go through old documents to tell the story of her life as thoroughly as possible.
They attended Brisbane’s annual music industry conference, Bigsound, and Thorn was at first perplexed, then amused, to find Morrison had told plenty of people about the book her friend was writing about her, although it was still just an idea at that stage. There is a fun buddy-comedy feel to this section, with the author happily writing herself in as playing foil to the whirlwind of energy, activity and intensity Morrison has always presented.
“I had forgotten this basic fact: with Lindy, there is no preamble, no small talk, no social niceties,” she writes. “She cuts straight to what interests her, brushing aside anything else with a wave of her hand […] Being back in her company, after a gap of a quarter of a century, while in the grip of extreme jet lag, is a near-hallucinogenic experience.”
It’s only in the fifth and final section, after carefully setting the table, that Thorn really digs in for the main course. It is a meal to remember. “Why does it matter that Lindy has been partly written out of the story of the band? Because it happens all the time. Every time I see a music documentary where only men speak, even though the band’s fans were teenage girls; every time I see a festival bill with no women on the stages; every time I read an account from which half the names seem to be missing – something in me rises up, tense and snarling, and it looks very like fury.”
This book is a gift, and not only for readers who now have a much fuller picture of a small but significant chapter in Australian history. It’s an intimate gift from one friend to another, written with the purest of intentions: to rightfully reclaim and rewrite a narrative before it becomes a lost story. What a marvellous, heroic friend Thorn is.
My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend
By Tracey Thorn
Allen & Unwin, 248pp
More Coverage
