FOR more than a quarter of a century the Go-Betweens have teetered on the brink of a breakthrough. Cult favourites since they formed the band in Brisbane in 1978, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan have spent their adult lives making music of subtle beauty without ever threatening to become rich and famous.

Their small but fervent band of admirers includes Michael Stipe of R.E.M., Bono and the Edge of U2, the film-maker Jonathan Demme, fellow Australians Nick Cave and Jason Donovan, and Princess Caroline of Monaco. Their influence has even spread to Hollywood. Kiefer Sutherland’s hunt for terrorists in the current series of 24 takes him to a sinister corporation called McLennan-Forster — a neat in-joke by another fan, the writer-producer Evan Katz.

Each of their eight albums has been adored by critics. Yet, even if you include the eight solo albums they made during a decade-long hiatus in the Nineties, their combined record sales would struggle to hit seven figures.

No one would question the timespan if they were a wine; a bordeaux laid down in 1978 would only now be ready to be appreciated fully. But pop music is not meant to work that way. Youth is all. Two Australian men now in their mid-forties making gentle semi-acoustic music with witty lyrics full of literary and cinematic allusions were never going to start a bidding war.

Now, though, they feel this might finally be the time for them to break through to the public at large. Now, with the release of their ninth album, Oceans Apart, there is a sense that the Go-Betweens have painted their masterpiece.

McLennan, who combines straight-talking Aussie blokeishness with the soul of a poet, says he feels that for the first time he can stand shoulder to shoulder with those at the peak of his profession. “This really is the first time where I feel I’d love to walk into a room with Elton John and Madonna and Prince, and maybe U2 and Neil Diamond, and hold up this album and say: ‘Cop an earful of this!’ ” Oceans Apart follows the Beatles-like formula with which the Go-Betweens have made records from the start. Each album has ten songs, five by Forster and five by McLennan, with each singing his own tunes and playing guitar, joined by various accompanists. They write the songs separately and have distinct styles of their own, united by a gift for evoking a sense of time and place in the music and in particular the lyrics, which often feature the names of real places and people.

A fastidious figure with a penchant for smart suits, afternoon tea and the finer points of etiquette, Forster’s narrative songwriting style offers wry observations sparkling with wit against rhythms that reflect his angular physique.

Here Comes a City, from the new album, describes a train ride in which the carriage is shared with an earnest young man reading a hefty tome, prompting Forster to ponder: “Why do people who read Dostoevsky always look like Dostoevsky?” “It’s true!” he insists. “A couple of years back I was on a train when a student in his early twenties with a wild look came into our carriage and pulled out Dostoevsky.”

Another of Forster’s compositions, the elegiac Darlinghurst Nights, recalls youthful times in a Sydney suburb, inspired by the discovery of an old diary. “Darlinghurst is a place where we spent some time in the early Eighties,” he explains. “It was a bohemian area with coffee shops and cheap Italian restaurants. We met a lot of people there and made a lot of friends.”

Most of them are name-checked in the song, which captures that sense of forgotten friendships in another time, right down to the smallest detail: “Then there was Sue, who we never saw again.”

Compared to Forster’s crafted vignettes McLennan is a more instinctive writer, whose songs come from the heart. He inclines towards the ballad, mining a seam of romance and nostalgia. “At night I haunt the boulevards to the songs of Sasha,” he croons on The Statue, scanning the boulevard for late-night drinking dens full of disreputable women.

In the flesh, flanked by an ever-present supply of beer and cigarettes, he looks like a cricketer, or at least someone who enjoys the outdoors — as long as it’s followed by a debauched night out.

The two met in 1976, while studying arts at Queensland University in Brisbane. Inspired by the first wave of New York punk bands — Talking Heads, Television, Blondie, Richard Hell, the Ramones — and Brisbane’s own punk tyros, the Saints, Forster decided they should form a band, despite his best mate’s lack of musical proficiency.