“Dark city club where we used to meet – you were in the band, knocked me off of my feet…”

You could say that the Sugargliders were the definitive Sarah Records band: all six of their releases for the label were 7”s, all six were 3-track EPs, and just when the label was complacently wondering what sort of 3-minute miracle Josh and Joel would come up with next – something that took the haunting, enigmatic flamenco shuffle of Letter From A Lifeboat (“A match struck at midnight makes our faces glow, the shimmer on the water looked like dancing, so we did…”) for one more spin around the sea-wetted deck, perhaps, or grabbed Seventeen’s youthful yearning and wide-eyed vision of limitless possibility and ran with it into the moonlit fields? – the brothers calmly announced that the Sugargliders were no more, as they needed to move on...

The problem with letting aesthetics and an uncorrupted pop sensibility triumph over common sense and commerce is, of course, that not everyone will get what you’re doing… or even get the chance to think about whether they get it or not. And pitching a series of pitch-perfect 7” singles into a world increasingly bereft of 7”-single racks was, it sometimes felt, a gloriously foolhardy gesture. Hence We’re All Trying To Get There, a 12”-sized collection featuring two songs from each of those 7”s… but no more than two, so anyone who’d bought the originals (or was now inspired to) could still feel special and un-let-down; after all, as it said on the sleeve, “this long-playing record contains no new material” (did we mention that the Sugargliders might be the definitive Sarah Records band?). The album also included, as all poetic collections of should, an index of first lines (see previous bracket).

Poetry? Well, why not? Because, with not a single word, or chord, or empty, aching space out of place, what else is this but poetry with guitars… guitars and drums… maybe a bass… and, fair enough, the odd desolate howl of harmonica (Strong) or, drifting through the smoky syncopated nightclub jazz of Trumpet Play, what may possibly be something not entirely unlike a trumpet. Or, if not poems, poetic manifestations… with tunes to take your breath away (and then take you dancing…), harmonising vocals of heart-melting soulfulness, and lyrics that speak of fickle hearts, smoke rings emerging from lipsticked lips, a dog-eared photo of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam and – once Top 40 Sculpture’s majestic trumpet blast of a wordless chorus has subsided – the small pleasures to be had from watching a four-man passing move from North Melbourne FC end in air-punching glory: "Here at home, we walk alone in safety – it’s a big city, but the risks are small. Saturdays can still provide some comfort – Laidley, Allison, Carey, Longmire… goal!”

They also, on Ahprahran – a song about a Melbourne suburb, recorded in a London suburb with Ian Catt on their one-and-only UK tour – proved that they could spell I-N-T-U-I-T-I-V-E. But you probably had a feeling they could…