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Streets of Your Town

"Streets of Your Town"
Streets of your Town.jpg
cover of Australian release
Single by The Go-Betweens
from the album 16 Lovers Lane
A-side Streets of Your Town
B-side Wait Until June
Released July, 1988
Format 7" vinyl
Genre
Length 3:34
Label Beggars Banquet
Writer(s) Grant McLennan
Producer(s) Mark Wallis
The Go-Betweens singles chronology
"Bye Bye Pride"
(1987)
"Streets of Your Town"
(1988)
"Was There Anything I Could Do?"
(1988)

"Streets Of Your Town" is a song by Australian indie group The Go-Betweens, a single from their 1988 album, 16 Lovers Lane. Featuring polished production, a prominent backing vocal by Amanda Brown and a guitar solo by bassist John Willsteed, "Streets of Your Town" is one of the band's most recognised songs and is arguably the closest the group had to a mainstream hit. It was released in July 1988 in the UK on Beggars Banquet, where it reached #80 on the singles charts and in Australia in August 1988 on Mushroom, where it reached #70. In New Zealand, the song was issued in November 1988, and was a top 40 hit, peaking at #30 -- the band's highest-ever placing on any national chart.

The single was re-released in the UK in 1989, in an attempt by Beggars Banquet to encourage the band's commercial momentum. However, it only peaked at No. 82.

Written by Grant McLennan, the sunny, upbeat music is contrasted with darker lyrics: "Don't the sun look good today but the rain is on its way, watch the butcher shine his knives, and this town is full of battered wives". McLennan said of writing the song, "I was listening to 'Under the Milky Way' and I was just working it out - cause I'm a big fan of The Church. And that afternoon I came up with a chord progression and a chorus." Mclennan had not played the song to Forster before entering the studio. "It remains an odd fact - the one Go-Betweens song Grant and I never played before recording," Forster wrote.

Forster later said, "This was obviously the most commercial thing we'd ever done, and it came out around October '88, which caught the summer here. It was re-released in summer and it sat fantastically on Australian summer radio and then it sat well on English summer radio. We were walking around Soho and we'd hear it on the radio, every jean shop and café. It was on Radio 1 and so we were hearing it as we were walking around."

Lines from the song were included by U2 when they played "Elevation" and "With or Without You" on the opening of the Pacific leg of their Vertigo World Tour in Brisbane, in dedication to McLennan. The song was also played after the band's second encore. The song was covered by Ivy, appearing on their 2003 album, Guestroom. The opening guitar chords from the song are sampled on "Just the Way You Are" by Italian dance production group Milky. The song debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot Dance Airplay chart in October, 2003.


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