Spring Hill Fair

Spring Hill Fair is The Go Betweens' third album, released on 27 September 1984 in the UK on Sire Records. The LP was recorded during a "very wet May" at Studio Miraval in Le Val, France. Prior to the recording of the album, bass player Robert Vickers had joined the group, enabling Grant McLennan to move to lead guitar. The original release consisted of ten songs. In 2002, Circus released an expanded CD which included a second disc of ten bonus tracks and a music video for the song, "Bachelor Kisses".

The album was named after an annual fair in Spring Hill, Queensland, suburb of Brisbane Grammar School, Robert Forster's high school. Some of the band had also lived there in the early eighties. Grant McLennan said of the title, "It was generally not that we were home sick, I think we just wanted to have, after Before Hollywood, which was so obviously an American kind of thing, a regional home town thing." In another interview McLennan stated "we all lived there and the main reason was that in September, October of every year in Brisbane, there is, in Spring Hill, a fair, and as the album came out around then we thought it would be nice to have a parochial mention in a title because we hadn't done that for a long time." McLennan and Forster later said that they were uninspired and felt the songs on their previous album had been better, with Forster saying they were more interested in, "sitting around drinking wine and eating rabbit! It definitely lacked 'the edge' of where we were before." They were also unhappy with the production, despite using the same producer as on Before Hollywood. McLennan said, "John Brand, the producer, he did change between the second and third, which we did as well, but he went and made a very produced 1984 English pop record, which in a way well, that's not what we were." Forster more bluntly claimed, "John Brand was terrible. His whole attitude was, 'Now we're making a real record.'" Recording in France was much more expensive than their earlier recordings, About half the tracks had programmed rhythm tracks, leading to conflict between Brand and drummer Lindy Morrison. Morrison claimed the relationship had also soured after Brand attempted to seduce her and was rebuffed on their first day in the studio. Brand spent the first week trying to gate the drums and set click tracks, Furthermore, Morrison recalled the relationships within the band were poor. "They were fucked. There were little power struggles going on all over the place. We were a neurotic mess," she said. Forster indicating in hindsight that the band should have sacked Brand, however as Brand's manager had booked the studio on a deal, they felt compelled to proceed with him. Forster said of his writing, "The lyrics I wrote on this album, I wrote when I've been drinking. I wanted to speak a lot more directly and I wanted to speak about certain topics in a very straightforward way. And the best way I found of doing that was by sitting down and drinking. A conversational type lyric. Most of the lyrics I've done on that album were started at night. I'd start drinking, smoking cigarettes, and I'd write all the lyrics in one sitting. I think it shows." In an interview in 2016 Forster takes a different view, stating "Grant was always perceived as the pop kid in the band, but he didn’t pick the pop songs. At times I would try and sway him on material, because he had a lot more than me: I would have four or five songs for each album and he would have 15 or 20. But he chose avant garde weirdness over pop." The album features a number of guest musicians, more than any of the band's previous recordings, Jacques Loussier (the owner of the recording studio) performing synthesizer on "Part Company", Graeme Pleeth on keyboards and brass, Denis Gautier on trumpet and Marc Fontana on saxophone. The album cover, of the band was taken at the Richmond Theatre in London, by American photographer, Sheila Rock.