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GRANT McLENNAN RIP
We are devastated that our dear friend Grant McLennan is no longer with us. His company brought us so much joy and working with him was an honour and great pleasure. I don't think any of us can come to terms with this tragedy. Grant McLennan
On Saturday 6th May, legendary Australian singer songwriter Grant W McLennan died in his sleep at his home in Brisbane. McLennan was one of Australia’s greatest songwriters who created an outstanding musical legacy as a founder member of The Go-Betweens and as a solo artist. He was enjoying enormous acclaim for the band’s most recent album Oceans Apart, which has received five star reviews around the world and won a prestigious ARIA award. McLennan was born in Rockhampton, Queensland on 12th February 1958. While attending university in Brisbane he met fellow student Robert Forster and together they formed The Go-Betweens. After releasing a string of singles the band recorded their debut album, Send Me A Lullaby, in 1981. The Go-Betweens recorded a series of exceptional albums that achieved widespread critical acclaim and were fundamental in bringing Australian music to a global audience. He was an unparalleled lyricist and a prolific and meticulous composer. His auto-biographical masterpiece ‘Cattle and Cane’ was recently voted by the Australian Performing Rights Association as one of the ten greatest Australian songs of all time. In 1989 The Go-Betweens took a ten year sabbatical and McLennan recorded four powerful solo albums including the vivacious debut Watershed and the epic Horsebreaker Star as well as forming satellite groups like Jack Frost with Steve Kilbey of The Church and The Far Out Corporation with Ian Haug of Powderfinger. When Robert Forster and Grant McLennan reformed The Go-Betweens in 2000, the band was greeted with adulation by a new generation of musicians like Belle and Sebastian for whom, their songs had been an inspirational teenage soundtrack. The three albums the band subsequently released were universally acknowledged as containing some of McLennan’s greatest compositions. McLennan was a passionate supporter of the arts, extremely well-read and maintained a keen interest in all contemporary music, cinema and visual art. He was an exceptionally charming and polite man who endeared himself to everyone who met him and was one of the rare individuals worthy of the epithet ‘larger than life’. His singular contribution to music and his commitment to his craft simply cannot be overstated. He will be deeply missed by all who knew him. He is survived by his mother, his sister, girlfriend Emma, his son Nathan Wallace, his bandmates Adele Pickvance and Glenn Thompson and lifetime musical colleague and friend Robert Forster. Bernard MacMahon, Lo-Max - May 6, 2006 Two poems by Grant W. McLennan 'Cattle and Cane' I recall a schoolboy coming home
Through fields of cane
To a house of tin and timber
And in the sky
A rain of falling cinders
From time to time
The waste memory-wastes
I recall a boy in bigger pants
Like everyone
Just waiting for a chance
His father's watch
He left it in the showers
From time to time
The waste memory-wastes
I recall a bigger brighter world
A world of books
And silent times in thought
And then the railroad
The railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle
Through fields of cane
from time to time
The waste memory-wastes
The waste memory-wastes
Further, longer, higher, older 'Boundary Rider' There's a boundary rider
At the five mile fence
Bloodwood, bones and steers
And the sky's so deep
You can't find your sleep
Keeps you walking through these tears
So you reach for things
You're never satisfied
You're running down the years
And to know yourself
Is to be yourself
Keeps you walking through these tears
Some days you ride it hard
To stop them getting out
Then comes the day you ride
To stop them getting in
There's a boundary rider
on the five mile fence
bloodwood, bones + steers
And to know yourself
Is to be yourself
Keeps you walking through these tears...
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