‘It’s not a love song’: Lindy Morrison on songwriting, old friendships, and reclaiming her agency
After decades behind the kit, former Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison has turned reluctant songwriter on the debut LP by her new group – with a cameo from a former bandmate.
“When I look back at my time in The Go-Betweens, I feel like I was in a kind of naive fog a lot of the time,” Lindy Morrison tells InReview. “And I believe that’s because you get really institutionalised when you’re in a band.”
Morrison was The Go-Betweens’ drummer from 1980 until their split in 1989, a decade that saw her tour the world and cut six records, from the seminal Before Hollywood in 1983 to the original lineup’s 1988 swan song, 16 Lovers Lane.
“I’ve been musing on it, because the reason for that is your agency’s taken away from you altogether. You’re never making decisions, everybody else around you is making those decisions, and you’re just in a van travelling around the world, dropping off in back rooms, stages, studios, rehearsal rooms.”
It’s an ominous observation from someone about to hit the road with her current group, SnarskiCircusLindyBand. But these days, Morrison says, she has “total agency”.
It began around five years ago, after a guest stint playing drums with millennial singer songwriter Alex the Astronaut prompted Morrison to consider quitting her jobs and getting back on the road. She soon linked up with Rob Snarski, the singer songwriter and longtime frontman of The Blackeyed Susans.
“It was such bliss playing with [Alex], and then it was just so fortunate that that Rob just came to me and said he wanted to do this band. I was right in the right place for my life. Because, you know, I was getting on, I had enough money to be able to stop working all the time because my daughter left home and I’d raised her, so it worked out well.”
The duo has now grown to include Graham Lee (The Triffids), producer Shane O’Mara (The Audreys), and Dan Kelly (Paul Kelly, Dan Kelly and the Alpha Males), and after multiple tours and two mini albums in 2023 and 2024, the SnarskiCircusLindyBand will release their debut full-length LP, what’s said and what’s left unsaid on September 26.
You might like
“I honestly think I’m so lucky, and I’m so fortunate,” she says of the project. “It’s a very tender band, you know, we get on extremely well. There’s a lot of laughter, there’s very little tension.”
Morrison says she relishes “playing all the time”.
“I go into a studio twice a week and just work out, and I just am so happy to be able to express myself on drums again.”
what’s said and what’s left unsaid also sees Morrison express herself beyond the kit, with the album featuring some of her first-ever songwriting credits. It began when Morrison complained that Snarski tended to write ballads over up-tempo songs.
“He said, ‘Well, all right, if you want me to play fast songs, you write them with me’.
"I go into a studio twice a week and just work out, and I just am so happy to be able to express myself on drums again."
“I had no interest in writing because I was not going to be published,” she explains of this late-career pivot. “You know, what was the point? I’d rather work on my drums, right? That’s what my love is. Anyway, Rob was so insistent, and then I just started. And it was easy, really, because he writes such beautiful melodies – sometimes I just sent him lyrics and then he’d write a melody, and I’d be gobsmacked.”
Ironically, many of Morrison’s contributions on the album are gentle slow burners, like the contemplative – and drum-free – ‘Keepsake’, which Morrison had originally planned to call ‘Ode to Robert’ in reference to her former Go-Betweens bandmate and ex-partner Robert Forster.
“But of course then everyone said, ‘Well, that sounds like a love song’,” she says. “But it’s not a love song.”
The lyrics, sung by Snarski over a guitar arpeggio and ebbing backing vocals, tilt at something more complicated than love or nostalgia.
Subscribe for updates
‘I am stitching on a treadle Singer / Keepsakes from our past / You can say that I’m retreating / But I think of it as an advance’
Another Morrison cut, ‘Take A Step’, is sung by her former Go-Betweens and Cleopatra Wong bandmate Amanda Brown. Morrison says she and Brown remain “incredibly good friends” who talk every week.
“We are very, very fast friends, because we’ve been through so much together,” she says. “When she joined The Go-Betweens she was just a baby girl, and then between her falling in love with Grant [McLennan], and her unbelievable musical contribution to The Go-Betweens and her guidance, musically, with me, and then the breakup that was just absolutely, you know, tragic, and then we did Cleopatra Wong, and we both had babies… it’s a very deep, enduring friendship – so it’s really great to be working with her.”
The pair will also perform together in their old band’s hometown of Brisbane in a live tribute to 16 Lovers Lane on October 26, joined by former bassist John Willsteed, Morrison’s current bandmate Dan Kelly, and guest vocalists including Meg Washington, Patience Hodgson (The Grates), Seja Vogel, Ben Ely (Regurgitator), Jem Cassar‑Daley, David McCormack (Custard), Eamon Sandwith (The Chats) and Darren Hanlon.
Ahead of the show, Morrison’s twice-weekly practice sessions have included drumming along to old Go-Betweens songs on YouTube. It’s a process that still turns up surprises decades later – like a ‘Radio Edit’ of Lovers Lane opener ‘Love Goes On’ with a noticeably different drum part. It had been years since Morrison last heard the performance, and she had no idea it had been re-released until she stumbled across it online.
“I mean talk about loss of agency, you know,” she reflects, before adding that she’ll bring back this long-forgotten arrangement for the concert.
Like the SnarskiCircusLindyBand, who will tour Australia from October to November, it’s a moment Morrison can appreciate with a different perspective to her earlier life as a touring drummer.
“I’m fully aware of what’s going on – and I’m not in any way drug-f****, or filled with bitterness as things deteriorate around me,” she laughs. “Oh, that really touched a nerve!”
16 Lovers Lane will be performed at QPAC on September 26. SnarskiCircusLindyBand’s will release their debut album on September 26 before touring nationally.
SnarskiCircusLindyBand tour dates
Adelaide
Sunday October 19
The Wheatsheaf Hotel
Melbourne
Saturday October 25
Memo Music Hall
Brisbane
Sunday November 9
The Cave Inn
Sydney
Friday December 19 – Saturday December 20
The Vanguard