‘Hair is important,” began Robert Forster, the co-frontman of the Go-Betweens, Australia’s criminally underrated band, in an article on haircare for the Manchester fanzine Debris in 1987. “Hair is placed fairly and squarely upon your head, to be admired and cared for. At a younger age, I almost drifted into hairdressing, and thankfully didn’t, but I have made a careful and practical study of hair ever since. You need know little more about hair than what I’m about to tell you.”

Of course, Forster, a gigantic, glorious, preening flamingo of a man, or his writing partner Grant McLennan, who looks like an affably bewildered plumber’s mate alongside such a glamorous figure, could have expounded for hours on other subjects; the subtlety of their songwriting, for example, or how their cultural isolation in suburban 1970s Brisbane allowed them to mix punk rock and folk rock without realising this was forbidden by the London style bibles. But the fact that Forster chose instead to talk at length about hair probably says more about the Go-Betweens’ tragic failure to connect with the mass market they obviously deserved than any attempt at reasoned analysis ever could.

Forster and McLennan are currently back in the country for their second joint tour. The Go-Betweens fell apart in 1989, but in 1996 the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles voted them “third best band of the 1980s”. Numbers one and two, the Smiths and the Pixies respectively, were obviously unavailable, so it fell to Forster and McLennan to play the celebratory Paris show, and they subsequently toured the world to exultantly appreciative audiences that they assumed had long forgotten them.

“Third Best Band of the 1980s”, a typically Go-Betweens accolade, might have made a fine title for their greatest hits collection, but instead it’s released this month under the name Bellavista Terrace. “We just wanted to do a kind of K-Tel Best of the Go-Betweens, for people who had never heard us but didn’t want to wade through six albums,” explains McLennan, “People can put it in their collection next to The Best of Gram Parsons.”

McLennan isn’t arrogant in citing such lofty company. In the 10 years it’s taken the dust to settle, the Go-Betweens’ back catalogue has grown in stature, even if it was hopelessly out of step with the plastic pop and stadium rock of the 1980s. A live 1987 radio session included with a limited-edition version of the album reveals the sometime fey folkies as formidable, feral rock’n’roll animals, Lindy Morrison’s drums clattering with the chaotic splendour that squeamish 1980s studio engineers usually took great pains to airbrush out.

Also released this month is The Go-Betweens 1978-1979: The Lost Album, a collection of surprisingly sharp demo tapes for an album predating their official debut, Send Me a Lullaby, by two years. Here, Forster, McLennan and the then drummer, Tim Mustapha, played an addictive hybrid of 1960s beat pop and intriguing, writerly wordplay. “We didn’t know what we were doing, and I wish we could have done that album properly,” admits McLennan, “but in America they see us as some kind of lo-fi pioneers. Which is nice.”

Only two years later, the duo had abandoned this style for the itchy, not always successful, art-pop of their first album. Remembering their youthful attempts at playing songs in waltz time, McLennan can’t suppress a laugh. “I know what was going on there. We went to Melbourne. We started hanging around with people like Nick Cave and so we had to be a bit louder and weirder.”

Having been corrupted by the big city, the Go-Betweens’ sound did not really coalesce until 1983’s Before Hollywood, a timeless album that sounds like Television backing mid-1960s Bob Dylan. It includes Cattle and Cane, McLennan’s beautiful, Proustian reflection upon leaving his outback cattle-station home for boarding school, a song so perfect it almost seems like a millstone to him today.

“When you’ve recorded a song like Cattle and Cane, you know not many of those are gonna come along in a lifetime,” he says, seeming not a little sad. “We did a midnight show in Melbourne in 1997 and the whole audience sang along word for word.”

Tellingly, the sleeve of The Go-Betweens 1978-1979 pictures the teenage trio in Forster’s bedroom, leaning against a wall festooned with iconographic images of “cool” – Bob Dylan, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charlotte Rampling. “Brisbane was culturally starved,” recalls Forster, “and life seemed far away. Grant knew about film and I had a knowledge of music and books, and together we built ourselves a fantasy world of Paris and New York, and dreamed of culture.”

A decade later, the final line-up of the Go-Betweens had brought the boys’ adolescent left-bank fantasies to life. Comprising Robert Vickers, an impossibly young-looking, modish bass player, Amanda Brown, the beautiful, classically trained violinist, Lindy Morrison, who would have fitted neatly into the Velvet Underground, and beatnik wordsmiths Forster and McLennan, with their seemingly inexhaustible supply of classic songs, the Go-Betweens themselves were finally an iconographic image.

“Yeah,” Forster concurs, “towards the end we had become something we could once have put up on our own wall.” McLennan agrees. “We were an interesting-looking pop group, but sometimes I think we broke up a little bit early. I’m glad we weren’t more successful in a way, otherwise today we’d be touring the provinces with Culture Club. But it seemed to have run its course, like we’d reached our…what’s that thing they put on milk?…expiry date.”

But Forster and McLennan hint that they might consider reopening their musical milk carton. Interviewed separately, they politely defer to each other’s talent, and won’t commit to any future plans, as if using the interview to sound out each other’s intentions, but McLennan admitted they had written a new song together. “We haven’t got a title for it yet, but it was written in Byron Bay, which is a very pleasant place to write a song. If we were going to do something again, I don’t think it would be a tour because we’ve done that now.”

Forster skirts the issue but adds: “Whatever comes out, I’m enjoying the tour and we’re playing well. I see no reason to hide in the closet under the bed saying, ‘No, no, I was never in the Go-Betweens, I’ve never heard of them.’ ”

Currently touring as a duo, Forster and McLennan’s 1997 live dates didn’t feature the rest of the classic Go-Betweens line-up, and they won’t be drawn on what re-forming the band would mean in real terms. They even have conflicting stories of the current whereabouts of their original drummer, Mustapha, which only serve to stoke their slightly absurd legend. “Tim Mustapha is now an actor on the Gold Coast,” says Forster, while McLennan offers the tantalisingly meaningless sentence: “I think he was a pharmacist’s assistant, but now he works in a musical capacity on the Great Barrier Reef.”

Meanwhile, Forster’s attention to his stage persona remains undimmed. “These days I’m feeling very comfortable in my yellow suit, which I wear with no tie, black shoes, make-up, and my hair just on the collar. With hairspray,” he says. “Make sure that you mention that.

Hair is important.” *