I planned the month of covers well in advance, thinking that the year-in-review session was always so successful, and perhaps it was because I actually thought about it beforehand. So if you were wondering, this post is coincidental. If not, let me explain.

This is Ivy’s cover of the Go-Betweens’ “Streets Of Your Town,” and like so many covers, I have neither heard the original nor anything else of the Go-Betweens’. So this post was largely going to be about Ivy, the band I do know and appreciate. I was going to tell you that Guestroom was the album that convinced me Ivy was more than just a lightweight pop band; though I love “This Is The Day” and “Lucy Doesn’t Love You,” they seemed more likely to be flukes rather than a genuine indicator of what Ivy was all about. In a sense, I was right; the horn-backed jangly guitar pop song is just one of Ivy’s many weapons. I just didn’t realize that Ivy was so consistent with the quality and the catchiness, two elements I thought would be in short supply.

But the Go-Betweens are largely an unknown quantity to me. I know a couple of things; they’re a highly influential Australian band, like an Australian Velvet Underground. Bono’s apparently got a Go-Betweens song in his top 3 songs of all time; Belle and Sebastian and Edwyn Collins, among others, loved the band to bits. The band managed to convince Sleater-Kinney to help back them on their much-celebrated reunion album in 2000 after 12 years of inaction. “I was thrilled that a band as good as that would cover our songs,” Robert Forster said once of Ivy’s cover; I can only guess that Ivy—and the many other bands who call them an influence—would say the honour was all theirs.

There’s a sad postscript to this story, though, and it’s the reason for the odd note above. About two weeks ago, Grant McLennan, one half of the core of the Go-Betweens, died in his sleep at the young age of 48. Forster has confirmed that the band will not go on without his partner in crime. The Go-Betweens were so beloved that no less than the parliament of Australia recognized McLennan’s passing. As Brian Boyd put it in his tribute in the Irish Times, “Cattle and Cane was recently voted one of the ‘10 greatest Australian songs of all time’, which is patent nonsense. It is the greatest Australian song of all time.”