“My agent used to tell me: ‘You give people the shits,’” sings Robert Forster, channelling a disaffected thirtysomething rock star on the elegantly wasted ‘Such a Shame’. “Why can’t you be like everyone else? Play the hits.” Too ungainly to follow any kind of conventional career path, too thoughtful to effectively dumb it down, the former Go-Between’s compensation for any financial insecurity has been a career full of charming twists, with Strawberries – recorded in Sweden with a freshly-assembled backing band – perhaps the most uncomplicated and joyous of them all.
If 2023’s The Candle and the Flame was overshadowed by his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis, Forster’s ninth solo LP comes from a more playful place. A duet with Bäumler,…