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ROBERT FORSTER

Latest news, the candle and the flame out now, 3rd of february, 2023.

                                “ The Candle and the Flame is full of life, wonder and hope. The songs are uncluttered, yet musical details sprout from everywhere like green shoots.” - THE GUARDIAN

                                       “The story behind Robert Forster’s eighth solo album is already assuming classic proportions, and the Go-Betweens co-founder has outdone himself with a masterly set of songs”  -  THE AUSTRALIAN                  

‘THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME’

Fans will be able to hear songs from the ‘The Candle And The Flame’ when Robert hits the road for a string of tour dates in 2023 – tickets available here.

UK, IRELAND, GERMANY & AUSTRIA TOUR - MARCH/APRIL 2023

AUSTRALIAN TOUR – MAY 2023 TICKETS ON SALE NOW

Photographer - Stephen Booth

‘TENDER YEARS’

OUT NOW – LISTEN HERE

                    ' Armed with just a guitar, the co-founder of the legendary Australian band serves up an intimate treat from his 40-year back catalogue' - The Guardian

Upcoming shows.

In conjunction with the release of his 8th solo album ‘The Candle And The Flame’ on Friday 3rd February 2023, Robert Forster has shows planned both in Australia and abroad in 2023.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

‘SHE’S A FIGHTER’

ROBERT FORSTER – ‘THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME’ 

LISTEN HERE

                         ' Robert Forster: Inferno review – loads of atmosphere and dry Brisbane wit' - The Guardian 

Rave reviews for inferno .

Robert Forster’s latest solo LP Inferno won rave reviews from MOJO, Record Collector, The Guardian, Uncut and The Irish Times. Its titular track, “Inferno (Brisbane In Summer)”, is Forster’s anthem to Brisbane, where he grew up and immortalised in 1988’s "Streets of Your Town", written by McLennan.  

  ' 9/10  Greatest living Australian returns with splendid seventh solo record' - Uncut

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Australian musician Robert Forster doesn’t mess around: the opening track to The Candle and the Flame , his eighth solo album, is “She’s a Fighter,” a brisk, slashing number led by his acoustic guitar and backed by his family, all musicians, on various instruments. The “she” of the album’s title is among them: His wife of many years, Karin. The lyric came to mind when she was first faced with a cancer diagnosis. For Forster, it’s all part of his own experience of art.

“I’m just following the changes in my life in a way,” he says. “It’s not like I’m trying to write as a 25-year-old, or I just turned off the material of my life when I was 40. I want to age with my material and my material ages with me. They can be other things where you just become aware of something, a feeling that has nothing to do with getting older.”

Forster can speak with plenty of experience on this point. His own songwriting history reaches back to the 1970s and his famed partnership with Grant McLennan in the Go-Betweens. His familiar voice, at once dryly reserved and subtly emotional, continues to explore the intersection of elegantly propulsive rock pulse and singer-songwriter reflection into a new decade; The Candle and the Flame is his first post-COVID effort. Like so many of us, he found his way through these past few years in his own particular fashion.

“I’m not a technical person and I’m quite a private person, which is how I got into music in the first place,” he explains. “I need quietness and I need a certain amount of just around-the-house stability. If my work is good, if I’m writing good songs or I’m writing a good memoir or I’m writing good music journalism, if I’m playing good shows, I’ll just do that. I probably should be doing a lot more, but that works for me.”

That feeling of quiet focus is a hallmark of The Candle and the Flame , which boasts songs with a more country and folk flavor; Forster’s no one’s idea of an “Americana” artist, but he’s long showed interest in these forms, and the gentle touch of fiddle on “The Roads” and the brilliantly-titled “I Don’t Do Drugs, I Do Time” gestures deftly at those influences.

“Take a song like “ Saginaw, Michigan ” by Lefty Frizzell,” Forster says. “There’s a film in that: he has a relationship with a woman, he goes up to Alaska and finds the gold and he sells it to the woman’s father. That’s what attracted me first to country music: the lyrics. I was more heavy into it in the late ’80s, during the start of the ’90s, but it’s an abiding thing. When I wrote [‘I Don’t Do Drugs’], I went like, ‘This is a Johnny Cash song.’ That was the feel that I instantly heard with it—but with psychedelic lyrics. Just this sort of weird turn on it.”

The Candle and the Flame isn’t solely retrospective, as proven by sweetly engaging songs like the chugging, spirited “Always” and “Tender Years,” for which Forster shot a wonderfully engaging video in his kitchen. But the ways that the past shapes the present is a theme regardless; “There’s a Reason” is based on finding an old ticket stub and thinking about the memories attached, and “When I Was a Young Man” is a deft self-portrait of the artist, saluting departed inspirations like Tom Verlaine, David Bowie, and Lou Reed.

As Forster says, referencing the song’s opening lyric, “’When I was a young man, like 21, I wrote songs. I was unsung,’ When I wrote that, I went, ‘Got it, got it.’ It’s right at the beginning, before all the strands and all the history and all of that comes in. Maybe I was just wanting to avoid that and go right back to this [starting] point. But it was a very easy song to write—I’ll always want to play the song on stage, because I really love it. It’s one of those songs where you go, ‘Was I good enough to write that?’”

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Robert Forster Announces 2023 Tour, Releases New Single ‘Tender Years’

By Giuliano Ferla

Robert Forster , former singer of  The Go-Betweens  and acclaimed solo artist, has shared a new single and announced a May 2023 Australian tour in support of his forthcoming album. Forster wrote the new single, ‘Tender Years’, a groove-heavy folky love song, about his wife and collaborator Karen Baümler, with whom he has been in a relationship for 32 years.

The film clip, below, sees Forster in the kitchen preparing breakfast for two. Muesli, linseed, papaya and coffee. Cute and healthy. Forster’s new album,  The Candle And The Flame , is due for release on Friday, 3rd February. It is his eighth solo album and his 17th overall when The Go-Betweens’ back catalogue is included.

Robert Forster – ‘Tender Years’

The new album is a real family affair, including production from Forster, Baümler and their son Louis Forster, whose band  The Goon Sax  announced their  split  earlier this year. The album was mixed by Victor Van Vugt ( Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds ,  PJ Harvey ) and was recorded with former Go-Betweens bass player Adele Pickvance.

Forster will be jetting off in March 2023 for shows in the UK, Ireland, Austria and Germany, but will return to Australia for a national tour in support of the new record in May.

Robert Forster ‘The Candle And The Flame’ Australian Tour 2023

• Friday, 12th May – Trinity Sessions, Adelaide
• Saturday, 13th May – Freo Social, Fremantle
• Thursday, 18th May – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine
• Friday, 19th May – Brunswick Ballroom, Brunswick
• Saturday, 20th May –  Memo Music Hall, St Kilda
• Sunday, 21st May – Archies Creek Hotel, Archies Creek
• Friday, 26th May – Princess Theatre, Brisbane
• Saturday, 27th May – Factory Theatre, Sydney
• Sunday, 28th May – Lizottes, Newcastle

Tickets  here .

Further Reading

Robert Forster Announces New Album, Shares First Single ‘She’s A Fighter’

Brisbane’s The Goon Sax Have Announced Their Breakup

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ROBERT FORSTER

Although commonly considered the darker, artier half of the creative force of  the Go-Betweens  — the  Lennon  to  Grant McLennan ‘s  McCartney , as it were — singer, songwriter, and guitarist Robert Forster has a knack for crafty pop songs along with the brooding ballads he contributed to  the Go-Betweens ‘ albums, while his solo career — that began with 1990’s Danger in the Past — blended a healthy mix of both styles. By the time the ’80s band reunited in 2000, Forster had issued three more solo albums, including the self-produced Calling from a Country Phone (1993). The band’s reunion netted three critically acclaimed albums before  McLennan ‘s untimely death in 2006. Forster soldiered on as a music journalist and author, then resumed recording and releasing uniquely thoughtful and melodic solo albums that included 2008’s  McLennan -haunted The Evangelist, 2015’s rambling Songs to Play, and 2023’s emotionally raw The Candle and the Flame, an album of songs about aging and life experiences informed in part by wife and musical partner Karin Bäumler’s concurrent struggles with cancer.

“bittersweet songs with added resonance”

The Guardian

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Robert Forster Talks Deeply Personal & Vulnerable New Album ‘The Candle & The Flame’

"When we started the journey we didn’t know that we’d be able to finish the record."

Iconic Brisbane singer-songwriter Robert Forster has been involved in putting together many, many albums over his storied career - releasing nine long-players with his beloved band The Go-Betweens and now eight in his equally-excellent solo canon - and while it hasn’t always been smooth sailing, until now none of those records have arrived hewn from pure adversity like his latest effort, The Candle & The Flame .

It’s a resolutely gorgeous collection of songs - intimate and intensely personal - yet its genesis sadly lies in personal heartbreak. Back in 2021 Forster’s wife and long-term musical companion   Karin Bäumler was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and life as he knew it was put on hold and his priorities recalibrated.

Naturally, his entire focus became being present for his partner and as supportive as possible in the dire circumstances. His music initially became an entirely secondary concern as they embarked down the road of treatment and recovery, until - slowly but surely - it crept back into the frame. Only this time rather than to further Forster’s career the ambition was to summon art’s healing power, to harness the innate restorative powers of the form. 

In a time of such tumult and uncertainty music became a bedrock and means to ward off the inherent post-diagnosis fears, with other family and friends organically rallying together as the project progressed in dribs and drabs when health and circumstances allowed. The final product The Candle & The Flame is an extraordinary album and undoubtedly one of Forster’s finest, but this time around it almost seems as if the journey was as important as the destination. 

“Yes, that’s a very good way of putting it,” the singer nods. “Of course when we started the journey we didn’t know that we’d be able to finish the record. In fact at the very start of the journey when Karin first got her diagnosis there was no intention of even making a record, that just happened gradually. Everything sort of just bloomed out in a way, without any sort of master plan. 

“We got to finish the record, we’ve got to make videos, we’ve watched it all the way through to this moment. Even just tracking how it’s been going and talking about the artwork for the album, and talking about the mixes, it’s all been part of the one thing. It’s given us great… entertainment, almost - something to do besides dealing with the seriousness of Karin’s situation - so it’s provided something to us all the way along the line."

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With the couple originally playing music together in their home as a form of escape, it didn’t take long for the impromptu sessions to take on a life of their own. First, they were joined on guitar by their son Louis (frontman for sadly-defunct Brisbane rockers The Goon Sax), then later by Forster’s former Go-Betweens bandmate Adele Pickvance on the four-string.  

“Karin and I are obviously living in the house together so we started playing together almost as therapy, not intending to make an album,” he recalls. “Then Louis had put off a tour with The Goon Sax in Europe - he found out about the diagnosis just before he was about to fly off - so he was here and he started dropping in and joining in the playing, although he was here visiting his mother all the time anyway. 

“But he brought a guitar over and started playing on the songs, and then Adele visited bringing over food - a group of our very kind Brisbane friends started up a cooking group because we were just overwhelmed - so I asked her to bring over her bass and a little amp one day, so she did and she joined Louis, Karin and I. 

“It was early in Karin’s diagnosis and we were just strumming songs here - her and I, then her and I and Louis and then Adele - but immediately your mind forgets the current situation and you just go to another reality. So that was just the beauty of music, and it was enormously helpful to us in those months.

“And we did this one seven-hour recording session before Karin was going in to have a big medical procedure, just to document what we’d been doing. Then we heard I Don’t Do Drugs I Do Time and we heard It’s Only Poison , and we thought that they sounded complete. Somehow we’d fluked this thing, and this was the key to the realisation that after the operation - after Karin gets better - we can think about doing more recordings in that manner.”

The moving clip to the album’s lead single She’s A Fighter - directed by Brisbane film-maker Denny Ryan - gives a good sense of the familial and musical camaraderie forged during the sessions, with the proud parents joined not only by Louis but also their daughter Loretta, the entire family seated and facing each other as they perform the poignant number together. 

“It was an amazing moment,” Forster marvels of the clip. “We knew it, we could sense it. Because on a number of levels our family has never been something that we’ve wanted to feature in the limelight with us in any way. And also Louis has got his own thing going with music, and he wanted that space and we were very happy to give it to him that space.

“That’s it on one level, the other level is that here we are as a family playing music. Here we are almost a year after the diagnosis being filmed playing this song - we just knew the power of that, and the power of us doing it as a family. And we already knew the power of the song."

She’s A Fighter contains only six words - “ She’s a fighter, fighting for good ” - yet still manages to convey an incredible amount of emotion amidst the brevity.

"Six words! It’s occurred to me recently that even the Ramones can’t do that!” Forster smiles. “They needed 12 words - I’ve halved the Ramones! That was the only lyric that I wrote after the diagnosis - that was the only new thing. All of the other text for the songs was written beforehand”.

One of the most surreal aspects of The Candle & The Flame is that the bulk of the album’s songs pre-dated the health scare, given that all of them seem as if written specifically in light of that predicament.

“That’s the amazing thing - it stuns me and it stuns Karin, and I just don’t know how that happened,” Forster marvels. “I was thinking this the other day, I’m just sort of really happy that I had all the songs finished. I could have had half-songs and half-lyrics and I wouldn't have been able to write a word. I wouldn’t have been able to add to any of them because it would just be too heavy and too overwhelming, and I didn’t have the time to do it anyway.

“But they were all written, including the music for She’s A Fighter , and then just seeing Karin respond to the news of her diagnosis and what she had to do - the fight she was going to take to it - inspired those six words. So in a way, I was lucky that they were all complete."

Forster admits that these pre-existing songs - which he’d been hoarding with a new album in mind - didn’t need to bend much to suit this new scenario. 

“Not really, I write on the acoustic guitar so it’s not like I’ve got a laptop and I’m doing blips and blobs and it’s all quite piecemeal - I’m a traditional singer-songwriter on a guitar,” he tells. “I was thinking that I’d make an album in 2023, but I didn’t know where. 

“Maybe if I had the budget I was thinking about going back to Berlin and working with Victor Van Vugt again - that’s if I had the money - but I wasn’t thinking about doing them in this form. But as I said, being a singer-songwriter you can mould them quite easily - you don’t need ten people there doing bits and pieces, they just come straight from the guitar and people can join it.”

The fact that the songs were recorded live works superbly in terms of catching the spontaneity of each take, but the singer explains that this was by necessity rather than design. 

“It was necessary,” he offers. “When a normal album’s made - and I’m just doing an average calculation here - you rehearse in the studio for three or four weeks and then you’re in the recording studio - if you can afford it, otherwise in the home studio - for three or four weeks, or three or four months. None of that was going to work: with Karin in chemotherapy, none of that was going to work. 

“It just had to be a day here and a day there. We had to rehearse at home, and then we went in and set up in Alchemix studio in West End in a circle just like the She’s A Fighter clip, so when you see the video we recorded a lot of the album like that - there are overdubs and there’s a drum-kit on a couple of songs, but that’s the way we did it - so the circumstances created the sound in a way.” 

Forster has written a lot of autobiographical songs over the journey, but this batch seems markedly personal and vulnerable in a way he’s rarely explored before.

“It was, it was” he ponders. “I’ve written a lot of songs from that angle before - songs like German Farmhouse   and Here Comes The City and Born To A Family , all of those songs - but this was probably a little bit more pointed, a bit more direct. 

“This time around I wrote Tender Years  really early, and that was clearly autobiographical, and that kind of set the tone for what followed. Probably writing Tender Years led me to When I Was A Young Man , which is also autobiographical. Then that led into I Don’t Do Drugs… , and it just kept on going in that vein."

When I Was A Young Man is one of the album’s unabashed highlights - recounting Forster’s initial forays as a songwriter - tucked away as the final track to finish the record on a high.

“It’s such a great song, that’s why we put it last,” he admits. “It’s kind of a little bit outside the story and also inside the story, so it works going last. It’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written, it’s a real favourite of mine and one I’m very proud of."

A rudimentary knowledge of The Go-Betweens story places When I Was A Young Man  in the inner-west Brisbane suburb of Toowong in roughly 1978, a time when Forster and his uni friend Grant McLennan - who he formed the band with around this time, and made music with until McLennan’s sad passing in 2006 - were both discovering their latent creative potential.

“Yes, all of that stuff about living in ' the house down the lane' , and ' it was so beautiful, there the times were insane' that was all Golding St in Toowong and the [record store] Toowong Music Centre - that’s where I was when I was 21,” he recounts. “It was about moving out of home, moving to Toowong, still going to university part-time, Grant and I starting the band and hanging around Toowong Music Centre - golden times. Golden, golden, golden times."

The world must have seemed like an open book of possibilities to explore for Forster as his talents unfurled.

“Well, I knew it was going to be tough and I probably thought that I had to move out of Brisbane, and that was daunting,” he continues. “But the really big change was starting to work with Grant. One person trying to do all of that would have been impossible, and it would have been overwhelming for me - I don’t think I could have done it.

“But once there was the two of us, we backed each other up and then it felt like anything’s possible. That was the moment - Grant was really a steadying influence but also a total dreamer, yet he was also really driven - so once the two of us got going, and that’s all in that song too, things felt possible."

There must have been a slight ‘fish out of water’ aspect at the time as well, given that both Forster and McLennan were enamoured by foreign film and literature which gave them an almost bohemian vibe compared to the average late-‘70s Queenslander.

“Yeah there was, but we were also very supported,” he tells. “We could get shows. [Community radio station] Triple Z were playing us, people were interested in what we were doing, and we were friends with other bands like The Riptides and Xero and The Apartments - it was a pretty friendly scene. 

“We were obviously different, but everyone was different to an extent to anybody else. But obviously, Grant and I weren’t walking around - like quite a few people were - in leather trousers and chains and things like that, we weren’t into that which probably set us apart to an extent, but it all worked out.

The Go-Betweens’ classic Spring Rain - penned by Foster for their fourth album Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express - also explored Forster’s formative years in Brisbane through a similarly wistful lens.

“They are in the same era, although Spring Rain was a little bit earlier than When I Was A Young Man which is about when I was 21, in Spring Rain I was about 17 or 18,” he remembers. “But those years - particularly for me, but for everyone - when you’re about to leave school to when you’re about 21, are so formative and so much in my mind, that I just have to go there or think about it and images and ideas come to me. It’s such an informative time in your life, but it’s also so rich for songwriting or any kind of memoir - so many books have been written about people in that age-group, and so many great films."

Another highlight of the new collection is The Roads , in which Forster recounts travelling in the car alongside Bäumler on trips around her homeland, seemingly as much about the couple sharing that particular solitude as it is the actual infrastructure.

“It is, it is,” he agrees. “But they’re real roads. That song I wrote the melody in Bavaria in Karin’s family house, and I made a spontaneous decision to write the lyrics about Bavaria and my time there and just driving around in the car with Karin - she always drives in Germany, and I do more of the driving in Australia. So it’s just a passenger seat view of looking out at Bavarian countryside, and these little roads that take you places but also disappear and go off and lead to people’s houses or old churches and end in forests, or disappear into forests and you wonder where they go. 

Another powerful track There’s A Reason To Live reflects on how you can find meaning in the strangest of places.

“You do, and sometimes it’s the everyday things,” he says. “That to me is very much a COVID song, remembering to an extent how easy things used to be. It’s all in that line “ it’s not profound, it’s what I found ” - about how it’s just these things that are at my fingerprints or in my hands that aren’t profound but in a way are. And when you’re looking for reasons to live, it’s all around you - those reasons to go on are touchable.”

The “non-profound” item in that particular track was an old gig ticket found in a jacket pocket, and while the songwriter admits that the song is based on real-life events a bit of creative licence was involved.

“I’ll let you in on a secret - the ticket was actually a dry-cleaning ticket,” he chuckles. “I was in Sweden and I was doing a tour with these wonderful Swedish musicians, and we were rehearsing in Stockholm where they all lived and I went to a dry-cleaners to get some of my clothes cleaned because I’d been on the road a bit.

“This lady at the washing centre gave me this little pink ticket - it was how they did it, like something from the 1960s - and I must have put this little ticket in my suit jacket. Then a couple of years later in 2020 when I was writing the song I reached into my jacket and pulled out that Stockholm dry-cleaning ticket, and I must have written the lyrics soon after and just changed the ticket to a gig ticket. 

“It’s the same concept, I pulled out the ticket and looked at it - and it’s all in Swedish but I remembered the dry-cleaning place and the lady - I must have changed it to something a little bit more relatable. But isn’t it fantastic that those things are just there - lingering in a pocket - and when you find them you just race back in time."

As is the cyclical way of the world for musicians, Forster is about to embark on a run of live shows to promote his new opus.

“I’m doing a short tour of the UK and Europe - it’s only three weeks because I don’t want to be away too long - and then I’m doing a big Australian tour in May as well,” he explains. “I’m really excited to play these new songs - I want to play as many as I can - and I’m working on a setlist now. 

“If I do six or seven songs from the new album then the other songs I choose have to sit with them, and looking at the setlist I was surprised - though I shouldn’t really be surprised - about how these new songs shape that, shape what other songs will be around them. 

“Honestly, these days I could play for three-and-a-half hours and I’d be happy and I’d be playing what I thought were my best songs. I’m not slapping myself on the back, but it really is now more about what I leave out. But I play different songs throughout the tours, and different tours have a different emphasis.”

It’s wonderful that even after all these years Forster still loves playing his compositions in the flesh and revelling in that connection with his devoted fans.

“Oh definitely, to me it’s almost what it’s all about,” he stresses. “Being able to stand onstage and do that - play song after song to a crowd that’s attentive - weaves something over an hour-and-a-half to an hour-and-forty-five-minutes that’s really powerful, I love it”. 

Aside from this album-related chicanery Forster has a lot on his plate for 2023: following a couple of well-received literary forays (including his exceptional 2016 memoirs Grant & I ) he’s working on his debut novel, as well as working on the third (and final) instalment of the epic G Stands For Go-Betweens boxset series, although of course his priority is helping Bäumler on her long road to recovery. 

And, while she’s still far from out of the woods, Forster shares some exceedingly positive news in that regard.

“She’s doing well,” he beams. “She’s getting stronger and she’s travelling well. It’s good.” 

ROBERT FORSTER

THE CANDLE AND THE FLAME AUSTRALIAN TOUR

Friday May 12 - Trinity Sessions, Adelaide Saturday May 13 - Venue: Freo Social, Fremantle Thursday May 18 - Venue: Theatre Royal, Castlemaine Friday May 19 - Venue: Brunswick Ballroom, Brunswick Saturday May 20 - Venue: Memo Music Hall, St Kilda Sunday May 21 - Venue: Archies Creek Hotel, Archies Creek Friday May 26 - Venue: Princess Theatre, Brisbane Saturday May 27 - Venue: Factory Theatre, Sydney Sunday May 28 - Venue: Lizottes, Newcastle

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Robert Forster

Robert Forster is an Australian singer-songwriter, best known for his work with songwriting partner Grant McLennan, with whom he co-founded The more...

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Robert Forster (the Go-Betweens)

Robert Forster is a Brisbane based singer-songwriter and author.

In 1978, with Queensland University friend Grant McLennan, he co-founded the acclaimed pop/rock band The Go-Betweens. The group, based in London for five and a half years, recorded six albums, toured extensively, before breaking up in late 1989.

In the 1990’s, while living in Brisbane and Regensburg, Germany, Forster recorded and toured three solo albums of original material: Danger In The Past (’90); Calling From A Country Phone (’93) and Warm Nights (’96). He also released an album of his favourite songs by other artists called I Had a New York Girlfriend (’94).

In 2000, reunited with Grant McLennan, The Go-Betweens recorded their seventh album, and would record two more albums, one of which, ‘Oceans Apart’, was awarded the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Best Adult Contemporary Album of 2005.

On May 6, 2006, Grant McLennan’s passed away at the age of 48. From 2005 to 2013, Forster was the music critic for Australian politics and culture magazine The Monthly. He won the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism in 2006, and a collection of his music writings was published in 2009, titled, ‘The Ten Rules of Rock and Roll’. In 2015, Forster received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from Queensland University. The following year, his memoir, ‘Grant & I ’ was published, winning the Book Of The Year award in Mojo and Uncut in 2017. His memoir was also translated and published in Italian and German.

Between 2007 and 2019, Forster recorded three albums of original material: The Evangelist (’08); Songs To Play (’15); Inferno (’19). On February 3, 2023, his new album, ‘The Candle And The Flame’ will be released.

Robert Forster will be undertaking tours of the UK, Europe, and Australia in the first half of 2023. He is currently writing a novel, and preparing the release of Volume 3 of The Go-Betweens Boxset series, ‘G Stands For Go-Betweens.’

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Robert Forster announces national tour and shares new single ‘Tender Years’

Forster's new album 'The Candle And The Flame' will arrive in February next year

Robert Forster has announced he’ll embark on an Australian tour in May 2023, in support of his forthcoming solo album ‘The Candle And The Flame’.

The former Go-Betweens singer and guitarist will kick off the run on May 12 in Adelaide, before performing shows in Fremantle, Castlemaine, Melbourne, Archies Creek, Brisbane, Sydney and Newcastle. See dates and venues below – tickets are on sale now.

The news coincides with the release of ‘Tender Years’, the second single to be lifted from ‘The Candle And The Flame’ ahead of the album’s release on February 2. The song features The John Steel Singers’ Scott Bromiley and Luke McDonald providing drums, bass and other instrumentation, while Forster’s son Louis (of The Goon Sax ) plays guitar and sings.

‘Tender Years’ was written about Forster’s wife, Karin Bäumler, who co-directed its accompanying video with Forster. Watch that below:

Forster announced ‘The Candle And The Flame’ last month alongside lead single ‘She’s A Fighter’. The album – the follow-up to 2019’s ‘Inferno’ – was produced by Forster alongside Bäumler and their son. The trio began recording the album in late September, following Bäumler receiving a cancer diagnosis in July, and undergoing surgery in October.

“The recording sessions for the album were done sporadically over six months. Sometimes just one or two days a month. As that was all Karin’s strength and condition allowed her to do,” Forster explained when announcing the album last month. “So we had to record ‘live’, catching magical moments and going for ‘feel’. And that became the sound of the album.”

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“Karin was driving the the album and listening to what we’d done on each session gave us weeks of enjoyment and a place we could retreat to, away from hospital visits and scans and blood tests,” Forster elaborated in a Facebook post. “In early March, with her chemotherapy course just finished, we did our last day in the studio.

“With a challenging year behind her, Karin is feeling strong and positive now and she can’t wait for our music to go out of our house and into the world. It may seem strange making an album in these circumstances and looking back, we really don’t know how we did it, but we do know that it helped us just so much as a family. It was done in drops and gave us this other reality we could live in. Something that music is great in giving.”

Robert Forster’s 2023 Australian tour dates are:

MAY Friday 12 – Adelaide, Trinity Sessions Saturday 13 – Fremantle, Freo Social Thursday 18 – Castlemaine, Theatre Royal Friday 19 – Melbourne, Brunswick Ballroom Saturday 20 – Melbourne, Memo Music Hall Sunday 21 – Archies Creek, Archies Creek Hotel Friday 26 – Brisbane, Princess Theatre Saturday 27 – Sydney, Factory Theatre Sunday 28 – Newcastle, Lizottes

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Robert Forster Announces 2023 Tour, Releases New Single ‘Tender Years’

Robert Forster , former singer of  The Go-Betweens  and acclaimed solo artist, has shared a new single and announced a May 2023 Australian tour in support of his forthcoming album. Forster wrote the new single, ‘Tender Years’, a groove-heavy folky love song, about his wife and collaborator Karen Baümler, with whom he has been in a relationship for 32 years.

The film clip, below, sees Forster in the kitchen preparing breakfast for two. Muesli, linseed, papaya and coffee. Cute and healthy. Forster’s new album,  The Candle And The Flame , is due for release on Friday, 3rd February. It is his eighth solo album and his 17th overall when The Go-Betweens’ back catalogue is included.

Robert Forster – ‘Tender Years’

The new album is a real family affair, including production from Forster, Baümler and their son Louis Forster, whose band  The Goon Sax  announced their  split  earlier this year. The album was mixed by Victor Van Vugt ( Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds ,  PJ Harvey ) and was recorded with former Go-Betweens bass player Adele Pickvance.

Forster will be jetting off in March 2023 for shows in the UK, Ireland, Austria and Germany, but will return to Australia for a national tour in support of the new record in May.

Robert Forster ‘The Candle And The Flame’ Australian Tour 2023

Friday, 12th May – Trinity Sessions, Adelaide

Saturday, 13th May – Freo Social, Fremantle

Thursday, 18th May – Theatre Royal, Castlemaine

Friday, 19th May – Brunswick Ballroom, Brunswick

Saturday, 20th May –  Memo Music Hall, St Kilda

Sunday, 21st May – Archies Creek Hotel, Archies Creek

Friday, 26th May – Princess Theatre, Brisbane

Saturday, 27th May – Factory Theatre, Sydney

Sunday, 28th May – Lizottes, Newcastle

Tickets  here .

Further Reading

Robert Forster Announces New Album, Shares First Single ‘She’s A Fighter’

Brisbane’s The Goon Sax Have Announced Their Breakup

These Aussie Classics Just Officially Became ‘Sounds Of Australia’

The post Robert Forster Announces 2023 Tour, Releases New Single ‘Tender Years’ appeared first on Music Feeds .

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• Friday May 24, 2024 Robert Forster Omeara, London
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Monday 20 March 2023

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‘The best six words I have ever written’: Robert Forster on finding inspiration in his wife’s illness

Creating art after Karin’s cancer diagnosis seemed obscene to the former Go-Betweens frontman. But then the sound of a recent piece of music he’d written was in his ear, and a lyric came to him

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M usic has always been important to Karin and me; in fact, it’s how we met. I was in the Go-Betweens, touring Germany on each album we made. She played violin and sang in a folk-rock band from Bavaria called Baby You Know. They would come and see us play and we’d talk music and hang out after shows. And then, following the last Go-Betweens tour of Germany in the 80s, the band returning to Australia, I stayed on and moved in with Karin.

She lived with friends in a farmhouse in a village an hour east of Munich. It was a funky house, and while her band rehearsed in the kitchen, I’d be writing songs upstairs. The record player always on, music was our lives. So when Karin and I married in May 1990, we busked with violin and guitar on our honeymoon in Vienna, earning enough money, before the police moved us on, to buy Sachertorte and coffee in an old-world cafe.

Over the next 30 years, living in Germany and Australia, we continued to make music together. Often at home for fun, or one-off shows as a duo; twice, we made demos for albums that never got made. With our two children older, Karin played and toured on my last two albums before the Covid pandemic hit, and she would have played and sung on an album I was planning to make in 2022. When she received an ovarian cancer diagnosis in July 2021, she was 55 years old.

We didn’t know it, but music was about to play an even more important role in our lives.

The weeks after the diagnosis were hard. As a family we were absorbing the news and implications of Karin’s situation, while she underwent hospital and doctor visits to determine methods of treatment. On 31 July, she began seven rounds of three weekly cycles of chemotherapy. Everything was being thrown at the cancer to allow Karin the possibility of an operation. Most days, she was in bed, knocked out by the medication. In late August, a fire on in our lounge room stove, a cup of tea on the table, I asked her if she wanted to sing a few songs with me.

Karin is the first person to hear my new songs. She is the barometer of their worth; the midwife bringing them to life. If I feel like playing something to her, I know it must be good. So she knew the songs I’d written over the previous three years, and by the fire we played a few of them, her voice a whisper. After each number we’d talk about its musical arrangement, she’d try a different vocal idea, and for the first time since early July we were venturing into another world. She walked back to bed that night stronger and straighter.

Our son Louis had cancelled a tour to the UK with his band the Goon Sax to be close to home. He had been visiting us most days and began playing guitar on the songs. We were a lounge-room, sitting-by-the-fire, three-piece. Then, former Go-Betweens bassist Adele Pickvance pulled up a chair and we were four. She was part of a cooking circle that some wonderful Brisbane friends of ours had put together, bringing meals to us in these first challenging months.

In mid-September, Karin was told she could have an operation. In celebration, and to document the music we’d been making, our little band recorded 10 songs in a studio over seven hours. Listening back to the recordings gave Karin and me enormous pleasure, as we bubbled over what we liked and what could be improved or tweaked. Two songs in particular that we played over and over again – I Don’t Do Drugs I Do Time and It’s Only Poison – sounded complete in their first take, no-overdubs state. Could we make a record like this? Karin thought so.

Over the next four months, in the most unusual of recording schedules – “good” days plucked from chemotherapy rounds, a Covid wave coming – other musicians, including former John Steel Singers members Scott Bromley and Luke McDonald, helped us greatly in the studio. Unable to play violin, Karin’s violin teacher Christine Dunaway played melody lines Karin had written a few years before for a song called The Roads.

On 3 March 2022, we finished The Candle and the Flame.

In the first days of Karin’s diagnosis, I put any idea of further songwriting or any form of creative endeavour aside. There wouldn’t be time and creating art in the face of the changes to our lives seemed obscene to me. There was however, like the buzz of a circling mosquito, the sound of a recent piece of music I’d written in my ear. It was a fast, clipped song that had little space for a lyric, but a lyric was needed. Watching Karin gather her vast spiritual and internal strength, vowing not to wallow but to fight for her recovery, the line “s he’s a fighter” came to me . Days later, when sitting beside her in hospital as she took her first round of chemotherapy drugs, a second line occurred to me.

She’s a Fighter was the first single released from the album. In the video, Karin is playing xylophone, and our two children, Louis and Loretta, are on guitar and bass. As on the recording, we wanted the video to be the four of us. Karin, two months out of chemo, recovering, getting stronger as she is to this day, is pounding the xylophone. Surrounded by such charisma, I am happy to stand and sing the lyric. “ She’s a fighter, fighting for good.”

The best six words I have ever written.

The Candle and the Flame is out now. Robert Forster is touring Australia in May

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