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Robert Forster, frontman of the Go-Betweens, knows how to write music and how to write about it. Beyond his contribution to one of Brisbane’s greatest cultural exports, he also penned Grant & I, a moving memoir of his decades-long songwriting partnership with Grant McLennan, and plenty of excellent music criticism for the Monthly. It’s disappointing then, and a bit surprising, that his foray into fiction at the age of 68, a caper about musicians, music and music-making, hits such a dud note.

Songwriters on the Run, set in 1991 in central Queensland, follows Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock, two long-maned “rock-star-wrecked handsome” men in their 30s. After some international tours and two albums – “a kind of seventies folk-rock sound” – they’ve found some critical acclaim. Their hopes of the stratosphere risk being dashed, however, when police catch them with a bag of weed and charge them with credit card fraud and driving a stolen car. Mick and Drew are bungled off to a correctional facility but soon spring out, aided by some oddly helpful inmates, and get running.

Across some oddly named sections (Chapter 1, Days Before, Chapter 3, Days After), Mick and Drew’ try to get to Melbourne to contact their suddenly unreachable manager, Bingo, whom they suspect might be to blame for their troubles. Meanwhile, an agent from Warners Brothers Publishing in the US is trying to uncover the identities of two singer-songwriters who have turned up on a blank cassette tape. As these threads entangle, a lot of everything you would expect to happen happens: some impromptu gigs, some drugs, some lust-at-first-sight, some chords strummed idly by a fire, and some reflections on how attractive and brilliant both these songwriters are.

It’s all very tongue-in-cheek and PG-13. Alas, it’s not quite the “comic odyssey” or “crime thriller” described in Paul Kelly’s cover blurb. Even his claim of it being “a nuts-and-bolts account of making art” is a stretch; there isn’t much evocative here about music-making. There is some lyric-writing – Forster incorporating some real lines from his own released material – but there’s little emotional resonance. A musing from Mick on songwriting sounds AI-generated: “Be universal, not personal. Do sneaky things like bring in characters, male or female, living in the present or past, to say and emote things you want to get across.”

Perhaps this is putting too harsh a lens on Songwriters on the Run; this is all just a rollicking, rock’n’roll road trip, after all. But somehow even a passage about snorting some racking speed in a roadie’s car is sedating. There’s little melody or rhythm in the prose, ironically, and it’s overwhelmed with dialogue, much of it plodding and full of exposition. Between the various platitudes – “If only love and life could be written like a song” – there are also several sentences that Forster’s editor should hang their heads for letting through to print. A favourite: “Her prominent feature is a long straight nose, dividing her face into two attractive sides.” And: “Bingo twirls an arm over the armrest as if scooping water from a leaky boat.” I spent a few minutes trying to do this.

Forster, thankfully, is more engaging when capturing various Australian scenes and locales of the decades past, evoking well the “whippet-thing, track-suited desperados, hunting for heroin” in St Kilda in the 1980s. There are some nice passages of small-town Queensland, too, which Mick and Drew watch wake up like “one of those movie camera tricks, where a flower is shown to open, bloom and die in thirty seconds”. You grasp on to these bits for dear life, starving for some imagery and a sense of place, but they are too few and far between to keep you nourished.

For audiophiles hoping for a romp through the halls of music greats, there is much waxing lyrical waiting for you. These nods can feel shoehorned in at times – after Mick and Drew are taken to the Capricorn Correctional Facility, Drew asks if this means it’s abbreviated as CCF, not CCR, aka Creedence Clearwater Revival, “One of the five best American bands of the sixties.” Nice. Throughout, though, the weight of Forster’s experience, knowledge and love of music and their makers is apparent – and it is enriching, even if the story woven around it is not.