Obituary: Grant McLennan

Grant McLennan (left) with Dave Dobbyn, producer of the album Watershed.

* Grant McLennan, singer-songwriter. Died aged 48.

The death of Grant McLennan brought to an end one of Australia's most revered musical partnerships behind one of its most loved bands, the Go-Betweens.

Born in Rockhampton and growing up in Cairns and rural Queensland, McLennan died from what is believed to be a heart attack this week in Brisbane. He and fellow singer-songwriter Robert Forster first formed the Go-Betweens while students at the city's university in the late 1970s.

Their mutual love of literature, the Beat era, cinema, rock history and in particular Bob Dylan set them apart as songwriters of depth and substance during the synthetic 80s. The band eventually broke up in 1989.

The pair reunited in 2000 and until McLennan's death the two were preparing a new album, their fourth since reforming.

Their last was 2005's Oceans Apart on which, as always, the two shared joint credit for the songs they wrote and sang separately.

"In the long term it's meant that record companies haven't been able to get in and separate Robert from myself," McLennan told the Herald in 2002 when the band last played in Auckland.

"It's sort of unique, the idea of two distinct voices in the one group - it somehow seems to fit now more than it did."

The Go-Betweens were musical outsiders from the outset, at odds with pub-friendly Oz rock and skipped to Britain to further a career which barely rose above cult status. On this side of the Tasman, the band were recognised as fellow travellers to the Flying Nun groups emerging from Dunedin at the same time.

After the 1989 split, McLennan started a series of solo albums capturing his languid and literate songwriting against bolder arrangements than the spartan folk-rock of the Go-Betweens' recordings. His warmly received first two albums, Watershed and Fireboy, were produced by the then Australia-based Dave Dobbyn. The pair toured on both sides of the Tasman.

"I can't imagine music in this part of the world without him in it," Dobbyn said.

Dobbyn remembers McLennan as a man who was constantly devouring books, a fan who sobbed in the dressing room the night the pair opened for Bob Dylan in Melbourne and Dylan was "terrible", and a fine conversationalist with an Oscar Wilde-like wit and a consummate songwriter.

"His songs like Cattle and Cane and Bachelor Kisses are among the best stuff that has come out of Australia on any level really. It's got a great filmic sense of place, great eye for detail, wryness, and really great words on a page."

McLennan is survived by his mother, sister, brother and girlfriend Emma.