Grant McLennan (far right in photo with Robert Forster), co-founder of the legendary Australian band The Go-Betweens, died in his sleep at his home in Brisbane on Saturday, the sixth of May. He was 48 years old.
McLennan was a gifted songwriter whose 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. Between 1981 and 1989, The Go-Betweens released a series of strong albums that helped to expose Australian music on a global scale. After The Go-Betweens went on hiatus in 1989, McLennan concentrated on his solo career, releasing four solo albums and collaborating with others like Steve Kilbey of fellow Australian band The Church.
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 and The Boy Least Likely To, 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 best songwriting ever, and last year's Oceans Apart won a prestigious ARIA award for Best Contemporary Album. The ARIA's are the Australian equivalent of the Grammys.
McLennan is survived by his mother, sister, brother, girlfriend Emma, bandmates Adele Pickvance and Glenn Thompson, and lifetime musical colleague and friend Robert Forster.
