Adrian Hoffmann’s tribute to Grant McLennan

Perth singer/songwriter Adrian Hoffmann and friends will pay tribute to one of Australia’s music greats next month, as they bring The Songs Of Grant McLennan (The Go-Betweens) to the stage at Lyrics’s Underground on Saturday, May 20. Special support on the night comes from Catherine Traicos, with tickets on sale now from Oztix. BOB GORDON spoke with Hoffmann about the late Go-Between founder’s life and music.

I want to ask about the wider appreciation you have – which includes Grant McLellan and the Go-Betweens – this sort of classic Australian artist/poet kind of music which also includes The Triffids,  The Church and your direct work with members of those bands. That’s the sort of music you were brought up with, wasn’t it?

Yeah, absolutely. My dad (Shaun Hoffmann, No Flowers No Wedding Dress) was in the local music scene in the 90s and he was well and truly up to speed with what all these bands were doing. So my childhood was just walking around the house hearing all these amazing, great Australian songs and I guess they seeped into my consciousness. And before I knew it, I was hooked on, like you mentioned The Triffids, The Church. The Go-Betweens, David Bridie, Archie Roach and Nick Cave, the list goes on.

So, I started getting into songwriting myself, probably about the age of seven or eight, a really young age. This was the inspiration I was drawing from and upon and I think with these bands and artists having great songs, they kind of showed me that it was possible to be an Australian songwriter that didn’t follow any trends and did their own thing in their own right. Because that was much more my vibe. I wasn’t really into popular radio and stuff like that at the time. So yeah, I’m grateful to have a dad with such great taste in music and being exposed to it at such a young age. I’m grateful that I studied these guys and learnt their songs and wanted to be like them.

You were several years into your own music career, that that evolved also into being a part of The Triffids tribute shows to the songs of David McComb, A Secret In The Shape Of A Song. So you performed with that around Australia and toured Europe with it and if you weren’t performing you were assisting?

Correct, yeah. When I was 16 years-old, The Triffids got back together – obviously not with Dave – and they played the Secret In The Shape Of A Song show in Sydney and being a massive fan by that stage my mum and dad flew me over to the shows and I was just gobsmacked by, you know the level of songwriting and quality of the music. This was back in the MySpace days, and I messaged one of the musicians James Patterson, who used to write a couple of songs with David McComb. Songs like Save What You Can and Stolen Property. I just sent him a message saying look, ‘I loved the show, I’m a massive fan.’ He was kind of the only one I could find on MySpace that had a personal page that I could see pretty clearly…

They’re all on Facebook these days…

Yeah, exactly. It would have been much easier these days. But he was intrigued that a 16-year-old from Perth loved The Triffids. So eventually he asked to hear some of my stuff, which eventually led to me getting a phone call from Graham Lee saying, ‘hey, do you want to come up and sing some of the teenage Triffids repertoire?’ You know, those tape recording songs. And then friendships came from that and that’s where I met Steve Kilbey, members of the Bad Seeds and Ricky Maymi from the Jonestown Massacre, who’s produced three of my albums. It was just this springboard into my music career that I have now, and it was with the coolest people in the world.

So now you’re doing a tribute to the songs of Grant McLennan both with The Go-Betweens and from his solo career. What is it for you about Grant McLennan? The music is certainly very enduring and endearing…

The thing that draws me in with Grant McLennan is probably how effortless he makes it sound and seem. He’s such a genius in my eyes, probably the equivalent to what Tom Petty is to the mainstream world. He could make the most incredible song out of four chords and just hang on those four chords, and you feel like you’ve been on a journey out of space and back. I don’t know, he just had this magical ability to make me drift off into space, and I love that and that’s what I listen to music for.

I saw his last show in Perth before he passed away as a young kid and just admired this guy who, like I said, made it look like you didn’t even need to try that hard. And he blew me away. He blew the audience away. And that was kind of the opposite of what I saw as a young kid as being like a rock star, it felt closer to me and to what I saw as a songwriter. And essentially, he became that eternal permission slip for me to go after my dreams as a songwriter. You know, giving me that confidence that you don’t have to be like everyone else jumping around, taking your shirt off, jumping into the mosh pit, which is all fun and needed at times. He told me that you can just write great songs and that’s enough. And I love that.

The Go-Betweens were all sorts of flavours and contradictions as a group. His creative foil was Robert Forster, who was often very flamboyant.

Very much so…

…but Grant McLennan looked like a guy who’d help you fix your fence.

(Laughs) That’s true. There were things about Robert that drew me into what he was doing in another way that I loved and admired, but Grant seemed very consistently ‘Grant’ to me, in my eyes anyway. Robert kind of explored himself and came onstage with different outfits and had a few different flavours and someone like Nick Cave obviously went through that journey as well. And I love those artists, but like you say Grant also just gave me that feeling of it’s okay to just write great songs and roll up in the clothes you’re wearing that day and then play your tunes and sing from your heart. I just love that about him.

How would you characterise Grant’s tunes in The Go-Betweens? I know that’s probably pretty hard because there’s so many songs and they came from a different place, yet they often build poetically on his own memories…

He was incredibly melodic, and those melodies have always been a massive drawcard for me as a listener. They’re hypnotic. I always say that Grant McLennan songs to me are hypnotic because he could hang on one chord and I don’t know where I went, you know? He knew how to place things in the right spots musically, like vocally. As a vocalist his range was not the greatest, he didn’t go like some other singers that explore the whole piano keys, but he was so clever with how he phrased his vocals. It’s just so effective and just hits you in all the right places, musically. But as I mentioned earlier, if there was an artist I thought my writing was most similar to, it’d probably be Grant because everything lyrically, the imagery he created, but also with a dash of his personal story and mystery. And then with his guitar chords, the way that they kind of just melt together. It’s just this beautiful landscape of sound that I get lost in.

When you consider the poppy nature of Streets Of Your Town, and then the ethereal nature of Cattle And Cane they’re kind of worlds apart but they orbit each other, don’t they?

Yeah, I guess I listened to all these artists we’re talking about backwards, just because I guess I was born in the 90s. So I wasn’t around when they were at the height of their careers, I guess. And that happened for me with The Go-Betweens, The Triffids and The Church. My first time hearing them were all their 90s albums, you know? So their ‘hit’ season was dying down but not in a bad way, just in terms of what was popular on the radio in the 80s. I feel like the albums all those bands were writing at the end of the 80s or early 90s were more a representation of what they wanted to do as opposed to a record label.

Like I said, I went backwards. So I heard all of Grant’s later stuff first, and so the big, early hits were just a bit of a bonus for me to stumble across. Maybe that makes me see more of who he was before everyone else did because I think if you watch an artist at the start of their career, they’re kind of finding their feet, in a weird way. It’s a generalisation but yeah, I think I’m fortunate in some ways. I’ve got to hear these artists when they were established, and they knew exactly what they wanted to write. And then it just becomes a bit of fun to go back and hear stuff they bashed out when they were trying to get record deals and make it in the scene.

So what are your feelings about the ‘Phase 2’ Go-Betweens without Lindy Morrison and Amanda Brown?

I think with the later stuff for The Go-Betweens the appeal for me was the duelling acoustic guitar sound that Robert and Grant played and the way they almost sounded like one guitarist… the way that they got their notes to blend together. So for me coming in the later years while learning acoustic guitar I got a great lesson in melody through listening to them playing acoustic guitar together and hearing the songs come out fleshed out like that.

And then listening to the earlier stuff with Amanda and Lindy it was kind of like it was less of that and more like they were artists in their own right collaborating with Grant and Robert. So it’s just different flavours and it was just so cool because obviously they’re amazing and I have so much admiration for them and everyone in the band.

I don’t know if I’ve never thought about that before, but hopefully that gives you a sense of what I feel. Coming in later in the game, it was very much about the acoustic guitars chiming together, which I was immediately drawn to.

What songs have you chosen to perform? Not to give the whole game away, but it’s pretty across the board, isn’t it?

Yeah, it was incredibly hard to choose the songs, because there were so many to choose from. This show’s a beautiful balance of Go-Betweens, Grant hits, some of his obscure stuff and then some of his well-known solo stuff as well. It was incredibly hard to fit it into a show. I’ve tried my best to capture every aspect of him as a songwriter. And so, there’s a mix of everything.

The hardest thing was the deeper I dug into his catalogue, the harder it became to really choose the songs for the set. So but there’s a lot of them and there’s a wide range.  So I’m sure the audience and the Grant McLennan super fans will just love it… because I’m one of them and those were the songs that I decided would be the best fit.

Who else is in the band playing with you?

We’ve got Aidan Gordon (6s & 7s, The Reductors) and James Redman (The Limbs) both playing guitar. Alistair Peel (Mace Francis, Dave Brewer, Lucky Oceans) on bass, Madeleine Antoine (Selfless Orchestra, Fieldsy, BABAYAGA) on violin, Todd Walker (NFNWD) on keys and my brother Lochie (Moana, Unicorn) on drums. There’s also a special guest Sasha Ion (Spank, Butternut, One Horse Town) on backing vocals, which I’m really excited about because she was kind of an upcoming artist back when my dad was booking bands and had a label and things like that. She’s known me since I was a very young child, so to now be able to perform with her is pretty special.

You don’t want it to be a one-off, do you? You’d like to tour this show…

I’d love to tour this. I mean so much work has gone into it, and it’s been so carefully thought out and more importantly the songs are phenomenal, and they need to be played live. We’re receiving a lot of interest around the country, from Go-Betweens and Grant McLennan fans, so hopefully that all comes to life, and we can take this around the country at some stage.