HOWZAT

“I had never picked up an instrument in my life, never wanted to be in a band,” says McLennan, who liked cinema, art and literature as much as music. “I never stood in front of the mirror and thought I was Jimmy Page. In early 1978 I was 19 and living on the cattle station where I grew up.”

Their first single, Forster’s Lee Remick (“She was in The Omen with Gregory Peck/ She got killed — what the heck?”) created enough of a buzz for the band to be invited to Britain to record another single for the Scottish label Postcard. So in 1979 they left Australia (McLennan finished his degree; Forster abandoned his and says now: “I’d still be there trying to finish it if I hadn’t left”) and embarked on a brief UK tour with label-mates Orange Juice.

“Three gigs,” says Forster. “Two in Glasgow, one in Edinburgh. But we had a great six weeks living in Glasgow and made a connection with the city that’s never been severed.”

Back in Australia, they recorded their first album, Send Me a Lullaby, and returned to Britain in 1982 when the Rough Trade label agreed to distribute it if they would perform in support of it.

This time they stayed for five years, and recorded a second album, the optimistically titled Before Hollywood, before being signed to the famous American label Sire, home of Talking Heads and the Ramones. But still the commercial breakthrough eluded them.

In 1989 they toured the world with R.E.M., and at the end of the tour the Go-Betweens decided to go their separate ways. “We were burnt out,” says McLennan. “The classic rock story.”

He retreated to Sydney, while Forster went to start a family with his German wife, Karin, in Bavaria. “Basically we’d had enough of being in a band,” Forster says. “We’d been together for 11 years and done six albums. When we bounced back to Sydney after two world tours — our own and with R.E.M. — we had no money and the enthusiasm was not there.

“It was not the most friendly atmosphere. Grant and I looked at each other and he said: ‘Look, I want to stop.’ And I said: ‘I want to stop too.’ So we stopped.”

He adds: “It was a great decision because it saved our sanity and saved our friendship. And it gave us the opportunity to do whole albums ourselves. But we never lost touch — we always stayed friends.”

When they were reunited in 1999 it was just like old times. “When we started playing together again we had two new songs and they dropped effortlessly into the set,” says McLennan. “It was exactly the same.”

Musically, however, there had been a shift away from the angular rhythms of their Eighties material towards a smoother, guitar-led style, and a new maturity in both the lyrics and their vocals that won them some new fans for their comeback album, The Friends of Rachel Worth.

Today, despite the different demands of Forster’s family (his children are six and three) their friendship, and the creative symbiosis it fuels, are as strong as ever. Yet they remain, if not haunted by their failure to reach a wider audience, at least optimistic that it may yet happen.

“I’ve never doubted our talent,” says McLennan. “We’re a band that’s consistently interesting and often really good and occasionally brilliant. It does bug me sometimes when I see some of our peers enjoying a lot more commercial success than we do because we have done some really great work. But even in my most deluded moments I’ve never thought that what we do is a mainstream thing.

“And when it comes down to it, one sees so many people in all forms of expression, not just music, who have been eaten up by success, so maybe we are better off. Look at Coldplay: they’ve been making their new record for over a year and EMI’s share price has dropped because it’s taken so long. I’d hate to be in that position.”

• Oceans Apart is released by Lomax on Monday. The Go-Betweens begin a European tour at Brighton Concorde (01273 673311) on May 9