​Hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Clinton Walker first released Stranded, his classic account of the rise of Australian independent music from the mid-seventies to the early-nineties. Back then, Walker was not so much writing history as reporting from the trenches. The music scene, such as it was, was very much an amorphous jungle, spread across several states and cities, and the jury was still out as to which artists or bands were destined for immortality. Now, with a quarter-century’s hindsight, it’s far easier to delineate the era’s peaks and troughs. Reading Stranded today, it’s easy to see that Walker mostly got things right. And if he stumbled now and again, it’s still the case he was streaks ahead of the pack when it came to grasping the magnitude of the moment.
            This new-look Stranded, sporting a malevolent Nick Cave on the cover, is billed as a revised and expanded edition. But rather than mess with the original book – which, after all, retains its own historical and artefactual validity – Walker has opted instead to incorporate new reflections by way of extended footnotes. This has enabled him to fill in gaps, update stories, correct errors, even confess the odd mea culpa (he concedes he never ‘got’ David Bridie’s not Drowning, Waving; still better late than never.)
            Walker’s modus operandi for Stranded was influenced by the oral history approach adopted by books such as Jean Stein’s biography of Edie Sedgwick (1982) and Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (1991). Having long been a part of the independent music scene as a journalist, Walker was well-placed to write about this music from the inside. Musicians, many of whom counted as friends, opened up freely, often with surprising candour, furnishing him with a rich chorus of voices from which to weave his narrative: Chris Bailey, Ed Kuepper, Rob Younger, Mick Harvey, Robert Forster, Lindy Morrison, Rowland Howard, Nick Cave, Dave Graney, Clare Moore, David McComb, Kim Salmon and many others.
            Be warned: Walker namechecks innumerable bands throughout, many of whom have since fallen from grace. For some, their achievements amounted to the odd single release; for others, like the Primitive Calculators, they just never seemed to get their due. But out of the bustling, hectic, overcrowded tale materialises the larger-then-life heroes of Walker’s story: The Saints, Radio Birdman, Laughing Clowns, Go-Betweens, Birthday Party, Triffids, Scientists, Moodists, Beasts of Bourbon. It’s an enviable roster that reads like an alternative history of Australian music.
            Walker structures the narrative year by year, taking as ground-zero the Saints’ debut single ‘I’m Stranded’, released on their own Fatal label in September 1976. When it comes to Australian independent music, ‘Stranded’ was the shot heard round the world. The following year saw both the Saints and Radio Birdman plying their trade in London, an all too familiar pattern repeated by the next wave of indie bands. Despite being treated as colonials, the Go-Betweens, Birthday Party and Moodists gradually built sizeable followings in Europe, even if they rarely saw a penny for their effort.
            When Stranded was first released, Walker found himself on the receiving end of criticism for writing himself into the narrative. Such criticism seems outdated even then, given the so-called ‘new journalists’ like Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer and Robert Christgau had been doing it for years. Walker’s proximity to his subjects is a fundamental strength of his book, feeding and nurturing his own musical vision. And while his book is mostly about the music, Stranded harbours an element of autobiography, in which he’s chasing down his own demons. By allowing himself a walk-on role, Walker openly declares his allegiences, planting his opinonated flag for all to see.
            It’s a truism that no independent music scene operates in a vacuum. Aside from the artists, there are any number of small record labels, distributors, record shops, venues, radio stations, promoters, music press, fanzines, most of them galvanised more by enthusiasm than financial sense. In recognising these complex forces at work, Walker intentionally casts his net widely, detailing the critical role, among others, of labels like Missing Link, Au Go Go, Shock, Hot, Red Eye and rooArt.
            Sticking to his strict definition of independent, Walker steers clear of major label activity that dominated Australian music during the period, much of it at the expense of the music he champions. Bands like Midnight Oil, Cold Chisel, INXS, all of whom benefited from major label support, have no place in his story. It is arguable that the vitality of the independent music scene, which flourished well away from the corporate glare, found itself galvanised by this very rejection. With nothing left to lose, artists manifested a fierce creativity when it came to making music.
            By the early nineties, the landscape was in transition. The onslaught of international grunge finally made the powerbrokers sit up and take notice. It was clear there was money to be made from the independent scene and big record labels soon came courting. Today Nick Cave is an international icon, Tex Perkins graces our loungeroom guest-hosting RocKwiz, and everybody belatedly loves the Go-Betweens. The music Walker writes about, once marginal, is now centre stage. At the same time, many of the artists featured in this book have since departed: David McComb, Grant McLennan, Rowland Howard, Ian Rilen, Anita Lane for starters. His book is as much a paean to their spirited lives as anything else.
            Most books on music tell a single story. Rarer are the ones that attempt to sum up an era. With Stranded, Clinton Walker sets his sights squarely on the latter, for the most part achieving his goal. Reading it is like watching a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle coming slowly into focus. A quarter-century on, it remains an essential touchstone charting Australia’s adventurous passage from punk to grunge.

“At least every few pages readers might come across a juicy snippet, whether fact or opinion, and maybe think, Hey, you can’t say that” – this is my favorite line from Kerrie Hickin’s item on Stranded in the May/June issue of Rhythms, which I think is quite a perceptive little piece, and which I’m taking as flattering and with all appreciation (read it here). But this whole thing about me being so contentious and opinionated? I think more than anything it’s a reflection not on me but on just how lame and fence-sitting so much so-called music ‘criticism’ has been for a long time. 

Nobody ever called Lester Bangs opinionated, and while I was loathe to say that for fear I’ll be pegged as even more conceited – comparing myself to the Great Master! – I can’t win anyway and so I said it (“You can’t say that!”) because it’s a fact that like Uncle Lester I have always had a vision for what makes music great and have never been afraid of calling it out when I don’t think it’s great… I mean, what are music critics for? To not warn you against the shit you shouldn’t waste your time (and money) on? To not alert you to the good shit? At least, that’s what I thought it was for. And I also think Stranded has turned on as many people (all round the world) as it hasn’t – and is still doing so with this new edition 25 years after the first, which I think is a pretty good result, just to still be here after that long…

​Next week I head briefly to Brisbane and there, on Wednesday March 17, I will be doing a Q&A event regards the new Stranded (Expanded) at the fabulous Phase 4 record store in the Valley. It’s pretty appropriate because if Stranded started anywhere, it was obviously in Brisbane, and up there they’re very proud of the legacy they enjoy that certainly punches above its weight for a city that for so long was a backwater; a city whose coming of age was indeed partly due to the way the Saints blazed a trail out of it..!
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            The artwork above returns to the precise scene of the crime. I created it to go in the aborted Bein’ Gnarly festival in Sydney in 2020, its ‘Girt by Shit’ exhibition component “featuring many of Australia’s punk rock artists.” Call it fan art, based on a lino cut I recall I did at Brisbane Art College in around 1976, a view of the Saints’ old crashpad on Petrie Terrace before they put up the ‘Club 76’ sign – long before the place became a landmark, complete with its own mural – showing the billboard for a travel agency I think it was that was on the roof.

            The illustration of Chris Bailey was then mooted for the cover of the new edition of the book but dropped in favour of Nick Cave, for two reasons – 1) to open out the meaning to suggest the book wasn’t just purely about the Saints, and 2) because Nick has a global identification-factor beyond any other character in the book. Sadly, the Bein’ Gnarly event, organised by the inestimable Glenno Smith, became the first major Covid cancellation for me and many others. And yes, as some have asked me, the ‘Jamie Dunn’ penning that ultra-clueless assessment of the Saints’ epochal single is the old Brisbane DJ who would go on to enjoy an illustrious career with his hand stuck up that TV puppet ‘Aggro’…

           But as the book itself makes plain, in the time in between the Saints and the Go-Betweens in the late 70s and the whole renaissance of the late 80s/early 90s, Brisbane ceased to be a place you had to leave in order to get anywhere… and for me personally I’ve always loved going back, because in Brisbane I have family and many friends, and I just enjoy the place now that it’s so cosmopolitan along with being so commodious as it’s always been. Its music scene is second in this country only to Melbourne’s.
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            Stranded (Expanded) is getting out there and seeming to be going down okay. I’ve done a couple of radio interviews with Neil Rogers for his ‘Australian Mood’ show on 3RRR and with Phil McDougall for his ‘Sunglasses After Dark’ show on 3PBS and you can hear those, as long as the links last, here and here respectively. I also had an epic chat with Aaron Curran that he’s divided into two whole episodes for his fab podcast Unmarked Tracks that you can find here. Don’t forget either, there are Stranded playlists I’m making public in a staggered fashion to accompany each chapter of the book on both YouTube and Spotify, and you can go and see what’s up so far here and here.

            Go to publisher the Visible Spectrum's site for more details, and to BUY, if especially a hard copy, go to Amazon here if you're outside Australia, Booktopia if you're in Australia, and if it's an e-book you're after, go here for a links to all the online retailers.

​            Meantime, with a few other bits and pieces of promo on the horizon, I look forward to hitting Phase 4…

On the eve of the official publication date - February 26 - of the new expanded edition of my 1996 book Stranded, see below here the Visible Spectrum/Dave Laing Publicity press-release: 

STRANDED, CLINTON WALKER'S OVERVIEW OF THE EARLY DAYS OF AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENT MUSIC , GETS A REBOOT. 
 
AN UPDATED VERSION OF THE CLASSIC 1996 TEXT THAT TELLS THE STORY FROM THE EARLY STIRRINGS OF PUNK THROUGH TO TRIPLE J, THE BIG DAY OUT AND BEYOND, STRANDED (EXPANDED), IS PUBLISHED BY THE VISIBLE SPECTRUM, FEBRUARY 26 2021.
 
FEATURING THE SAINTS, RADIO BIRDMAN, BOYS NEXT DOOR/BIRTHDAY PARTY,  LEFTOVERS, GO-BETWEENS, WHIRLYWIRLD, X, VICTIMS, SPK, LIPSTICK KILLERS, SCIENTISTS, LAUGHING CLOWNS, SEVERED HEADS, SUNNYBOYS, MOODISTS, TRIFFIDS, CELIBATE RIFLES, HARD-ONS, DIED PRETTY, BEASTS OF BOURBON,  NEW CHRISTS, GOD, RATCAT, SPIDERBAIT, YOU AM I, MAGIC DIRT, THE DIRTY 3 and MANY MORE!
 
On February 26, music writer Clinton Walker, acclaimed as “our best chronicler of Australian grass-roots culture” by the Sun-Herald and the author of such classics as Inner City Sound, Highway to Hell and Buried Country, publishes the first of two books planned for 2021 – a new, expanded edition of Stranded, his definitive account of Australia’s 1980s’ post-punk/independent rock scene.

  
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Stranded ruffled a few feathers on its initial publication in 1996 by Pan Macmillan, but was nevertheless widely praised; in the intervening quarter century its boldness and prescience – not to mention its unavailability! – have garnered it an international cult following on a par with books like England’s Dreaming and Please Kill Me. Now it is finally available again via The Visible Spectrum, a new, internationally distributed imprint of Verse Chorus Press, publisher of several major works of Australian music history, including reissues of Walker’s earlier classics.


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This new edition, available in both print and e-book versions, is significantly expanded – the author calls it Stranded (Expanded)! – with a lengthy new foreword and afterword, many additional illustrations, and extensive footnotes that, the author laughs, “now actually tell the whole truth!”

Walker’s eleventh book, Deadly Woman Blues, was the subject of considerable controversy in 2018. A graphic history written and drawn by Walker (inspired by Robert Crumb’s famous Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country), it was conceived as a companion piece to his universally acclaimed Buried Country (2000), which brought national and international attention to under-recognized indigenous musicians, but was withdrawn and pulped following allegations of factual error and cultural insensitivity. Walker apologised for the errors and the hurt the book had caused, and only after a long period of reflection does he now return to the publishing scene.

Stranded, as Pig City author Andrew Stafford notes on the back cover of this new edition, is “one part stoned memoir, nine parts hard-boiled history.” Walker was no mere passive observer of the scene Stranded portrays, but a full participant. He defied Lester Bangs’ advice and became a friend and confidante of all the dark stars. He was there in Brisbane hanging with Kid Galahad and the Eternals even before they became the Saints and recorded “Stranded;” he saw the Go-Betweens play their first-ever gig as an acoustic duo; he was there in Melbourne every Tuesday night at the Tiger Lounge in the winter of 1978 when the Boys Next Door served their apprenticeship; he put out the fanzine Pulp and presented the 3RRR radio show Know Your Product with Bruce Milne; he wasn’t there in early 1982 when the Birthday Party played at the launch Ken West organised for his first book Inner City Sound, because he was in London, where he saw the Party, the Go-Betweens and the Laughing Clowns make their first international inroads; he was back in Sydney for the halcyon days of the Trade Union Club and the Strawberry Hills Hotel, living those ‘Darlinghurst Nights’ with the Triffids, the Moodists, Beasts of Bourbon, X, the Craven Fops and Died Pretty; he failed an audition to play bass with the Pretties, but did form his own bands the Killer Sheep and (with Primitive Calculator Stuart Grant) the Wild Oats; he was part of the team that launched the Big Day Out in 1991. Along the way he churned out what felt like millions of words on all this for RAM, Roadrunner, Rolling Stone, the Age, Stiletto, the Bulletin, Juice and other media.

Stranded plots this musical course over nearly two decades from punk through to grunge, with the author sharing digs, secrets and needles with his quarry, a generation of post-punk musicians who were so far ahead of the curve for the conservative Australian music mainstream that most of them had to go into exile in the UK before they could return home to (eventually) a hero’s welcome.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted – it remains as provocative and compulsive as it was a quarter-century ago. Fast-paced, plain-speaking, incisive, evocative, sometimes even poignant, it tells the story of an important, almost shamefully neglected chapter in Australian music history that has tended to be forgotten as its most successful protagonists have gradually, finally, been integrated into the larger official history.

It was a time before the term ‘alternative’ entered the lexicon, let alone became meaningless; before the music industry could see ‘niche markets’, so that if you weren’t on Countdown or going down the (middle of the) pub rock road, you were actively resisted; when if you were a female musician, the boys’ club laughed at you or worse, pulled the plug; when there were gigs on every corner in the inner city, and record shops were like salons around which the scenes revolved and out of which grew seminal indy labels like Missing Link, Phantom, Au-Go-Go, Waterfront, Hot, Red Eye and Half-a-Cow, which are as much a part of the story as the bands themselves; it was before grunge ‘legitimized’ fifteen years of obscurity in the wake of the punk/DIY revolution, when the risk-taking went way beyond just musical risks, and drugs, AIDS and the road claimed many; when a generation of Australian bands spurned in their homeland first got taken seriously overseas, and then played prominent roles in laying the foundations for the global grunge/alt-rock revolution to follow…
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Many years later, these artists are belatedly getting the Hall of Fame-style accolades they always warranted, and it seems quite natural that their spiritual heirs – from Courtney Barnett and her Milk Records label to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and their Flightless empire – find ready acceptance. Clinton Walker was there at the beginning forty years ago, and Stranded gathers his dispatches from the trenches that lay it all bare. It’s a book about culture wars becoming history wars, a glimpse into a lost world that remains a cautionary tale for the present day. It’s about music, people and place, and the talent and commitment it takes to reinvent an art form and to keep butting up against resistance until it’s finally overcome – and it’s also about the price, sadly, that that process so often exacts.
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Clinton Walker’s twelfth book, the all-new Suburban Songbook, is due out later in 2021, but meanwhile Stranded serves as a reminder of his pre-eminent status. How many other music writers have written so many books that, decades after their first publication, are still in print, or are coming back into print, and have inspired albums, documentary films, even touring stage shows? The literature of Australian popular music would be much poorer without Clinton Walker’s work, and now old and new fans alike can enjoy again the brilliantly flawed glories of Stranded. You won’t be able to put it down.

After a few years of laying low in the wake of the ‘Deadly Woman Blues Fiasco’, I am now ready to climb back in the ring again. Later this year will see the publication of my eleventh major work, Suburban Songbook: Writing Hits in post-war/pre-Countdown Australia. Meantime, in February, the Visible Spectrum will publish a new expanded edition of my 1996 book Stranded...

Suburban Songbook was in fact virtually all ready to go towards the end of 2018, but – happily I can say now in retrospect – it was scuttled because relations between the would-be publisher and I broke down. (‘Happily’ because this clown was the worst so-called publisher I’ve encountered in my entire forty years in the game [who is now effectively out of the game for that reason], and happily also because in the interim the book has become so much better, not different but just deeper, more comprehensive and way, way better.) So with the Songbook in transmogrification, when Steve Connell, my long-time American publisher at Verse Chorus Press, approached me last year with the idea of getting Stranded back in print, naturally I was dead keen. Stranded (Expanded) will be coming out through Steve’s new bespoke sub-imprint, the Visible Spectrum. The Visible Spectrum is designed as an outlet for a series of reissues, of ‘classics’, and so I’m just chuffed to be nestling alongside other fine writers and titles in the series like, so far, Susan Compo and David Nichols. Stranded (Expanded) is that, expanded, but in a very particular way: the original ‘integrity’ of the book is not compromised, meaning that the original text is not tampered with save for largely correcting errors of fact, but is appended with extensive footnotes. Which tell the real truth! Just wait!

At the start of 1978, around the time I turned 21, I moved from Brisbane to Melbourne, for a couple of reasons: one, to get out of Brisbane, which after the departure of my mates the Saints in early ’77 had started to seem like a lost city, or empty city (even as it was actually on the verge of exploding all over again); and two, to get more closely involved in putting out Pulp, the fanzine that Bruce Milne and me had launched as a sort of twin-city title during 1977.
            What actually transpired, of course, was in one respect quite the opposite: Pulp quickly folded. But since a reconstruction of the lost, last issue of Pulp #5 that never came out in ’78 has recently resurfaced, or at least what remains of it, I’ve been prompted to reflect on the whole episode.
            To see this reconstruction of the last Pulp, which is thanks to the efforts of Melynda von Wayward and Scotti Henthorn, and which was originally, ostensibly aimed at coming out around the middle of ’78, was something that blew my mind just a little bit. I was looking at what was most of the artworked pages for a fifth issue that I hadn’t seen for forty years and had virtually totally forgotten about – and I thought it all looked quite good!
            Of course, some remnants of Pulp #5 ended up in Inner City Sound, and in fact, it was one of the seeds that drove the conception of ICS in the first place, that here was this final issue of Pulp that had never come out and so why not – I can now reflect and think maybe this was my initial thinking – why not compile it with the previous four issues of the zine, which obviously had fairly limited distribution in their day, and put out a sort of best-of Pulp? But then obviously that idea expanded during 1981, and rightfully, to become what ICS is, which is a general sort of cut’n’paste history-as-it-happened record of the rise of punk/post-punk/indy music in Australia that drew on reprints from other fanzines as well as Pulp, plus reprints of articles from Roadrunner magazine, the new endeavour coming out of Adelaide in 1978 that Bruce and I got involved in that was part of what spelled Pulp’s end, plus reprints too of mainly stuff I wrote for RAM magazine, Australia’s leading rock rag of the day, which I started working for at the start of 1980 after I’d moved to Sydney.
            Up until only recently when I saw the mooted reconstruction of Pulp5 and got involved to help complete it, all I had was the above memory of the genesis of Inner City Sound, and a memory of carting around for years a stack of the artboards that I’d started putting together, pasting up, towards that ill-fated last issue.
            Some of those pages, like the Radio Birdman interview headlined “Radios Talk,” or Peter Nelson’s article on Crime and the City Solution, ended up in ICS as straight reproductions, since that was part of ICS’s agenda, to facsimilise stuff direct from its original publication in fanzines. Some of the other stuff in ICS from Pulp5, like a review by me of the Saints’ second album Eternally Yours, and a feature I did on Suicide Records, were newly typeset and re-artworked for the book, which was something else the book did, with Marjorie Macintosh doing a fabulous job designing it all into an integrated whole.
            But those artboards I knew I carried around for a while – and this was maybe an inch-deep stack of A4-sized stiff-card boards on which the layouts were assembled; because that was how you did it in those days, pasted the type and pictures down on artboards, Bainbridge Boards they were called – I remember them and I remember having them and then I didn’t have them. I didn’t know what happened to them, eventually.
            Well, now I know. They ended up, as did so much more history like them, in the piles of stuff in the backroom at Au-Go-Go Records, the shop that Bruce Milne opened in Melbourne in the mid-1980s. It was most likely there that then-employee Scotti Henthorn happened across them one day in the course of his regular tidying-up duties, and had the great prescience to photocopy them before they went back in the piles thenceforth never to be seen again.
            So, I’m just so grateful that Scotti had that archivist’s prescience back when – and that Melynda von Wayward still has the on-going passion for and dedication to documenting Australia’s punk history that’s driven her to getting this reconstruction of Pulp5 back out into the world. It’s like the way they rebuilt the Beach Boys’ Smile! and I’m just so chuffed that someone, anyone, has enough interest in this that’s part of my legacy to try and keep it alive – wow!
 
So what did actually happen back in Melbourne in 1978? Though it’s still not easy to piece together all the thinking that took place, it is possible to say that basically what happened to Pulp was – Roadrunner!
            I arrived in Melbourne towards the end of February, 1978, just after the Pulp double-issue 3+4 had come out, and straight away Bruce and I started working on a new issue. One of the big ideas Bruce had for it was to include a flexidisc, by the band News, who as the Babeez were probably Melbourne’s first punk-as-such band and one that Bruce, short of actually managing them, had given a lot of assistance to, including on putting out their debut single, “Dowanna Love,” at the end of 1977. Melbourne was electric with new music in the late 70s – which was one of the other reasons I’d moved there, it all just seemed so exciting – and one of the other things Bruce was doing at the time in early ’78 was managing the hottest new band in town, the Young Charlatans. Whose number included my then housemate, Jeffrey Wegener, who was an old friend from Brisbane who’d briefly played drums with the Saints before they left for the UK and he headed south, as I would do too. It was perhaps because Bruce was so busy looking after the Charlatans or perhaps because I had an aptitude for it – or both – that I took over from him on doing the artwork for Pulp. Bruce would readily admit that graphic art is not one of his strong suits.
            In March then, as the first issue of a new zine out of Adelaide, Roadrunner, came out, Bruce and I continued working away on the new issue of Pulp. I was laying out pages on the stuff we already in hand. But we needed money to print it, after Bruce had already shelled out the cash to press up the flexidisc that News had recorded, and that’s why we decided to put on a benefit gig. The Pulp Benefit took place at a short-lived venue in the city called Bernhardt’s (the former Thumpin’ Tum) at the end of April ’78, and whether or not it was successful – and that’s yet another thing I just can’t remember; I don’t remember the night itself, surviving photos notwithstanding – it certainly didn’t keep Pulp alive.
            But I think that by then Bruce and I had been drawn into the larger possibilities that Roadrunner presented, or that we felt it had as it got out a couple more monthly issues, and that’s what really put paid to Pulp. Roadrunner – Stuart Coupe and Donald Robertson – just seemed to have so much greater grand ambition than we did. They were talking about becoming a real rock magazine, like RAM, you know, on newsprint, in newsagents, nationally-distributed, and with advertisers, and I suppose it seemed to us like a shortcut to a place where we wanted to go, piggybacking on the impetus that these guys already had but from their perspective too, joining forces to make for a stronger team. I do remember going over to Adelaide a couple of times and thinking, wow, what a flat, dull little place, it’s even worse than Brisbane! Nevertheless, Bruce and I ditched Pulp, with its fifth issue still incomplete on the artboards, and threw in our lot with Roadrunner. Bruce even moved over there, briefly, to join the RR collective, which he was doubly encouraged to do because by then the Young Charlatans had broken up anyway, but by June he was already back in Melbourne, disillusioned especially by Stuart Coupe jumping ship to take up an offer of a staff-job at Roadrunner’s aspirational-rival RAM up in Sydney.
            But both Bruce and I remained mainstays on the Roadrunner mast-head nonetheless, and after Donald got national distribution for it in 1979, it became a vibrant player on a very vibrant Australian music media scene on the turn into the 80s. And it was only after Bruce got back from that short stint in Adelaide that, a) we started doing the show together on 3RRR that, known as Know Your Product, seemed to have had some impact too, and b) Bruce started working at Missing Link Records and working towards launching his own label Au-Go-Go Records.
            The News flexidiscs that were intended to go into Pulp5, and which contained the song “Sweet Dancer Au-Go-Go,” which was conceived as something of an ad jingle for Bruce’s prospective label but had to stand as just one of the number false-starts the label endured, ended up being included as part of a package that Missing Link’s Keith Glass put out in 1979 as a Babeez/News reissue called Dirty Secrets. Following on from the first News single as such, “Dirty Lies,” which the band put out themselves in ’78, Dirty Secrets contained a 7” comprising two tracks from the three-track first Babeez single, “Dowanna Love” and “Hate,” plus copies of the flexi. The release was itself another false-start for Au-Go-Go if by any other name; the label was finally launched later in ’79, with an EP by Two Way Garden. News broke up at the end of ’78.
The Young Charlatans’ demise was seminal in its own right, with Jeffrey Wegener going on to Sydney to join Ed Kuepper’s new post-Saints band the Laughing Clowns, Rowland Howard joining the Boys Next Door, thus marking their real rebirth as the Birthday Party, Ollie Olsen going on to form Whirlywirld with former News-drummer John Murphy, and Janine Hall going on to join Chris Bailey’s first incarnation of the post-Kuepper Saints.
            As for me, I kept stringing for Roadrunner, and Semper in Brisbane, until the end of 1979 when I moved to Sydney and almost overnight found myself a functioning, professional freelance journalist contributing stuff to RAM, Rolling Stone and the Adelaide Advertiser: My real baptism of fire as a writer.
            But I always hung on to those old artboards from the aborted Pulp5, and soon enough they would feed directly into the conception and execution of Inner City Sound, and that seems, or seemed then, as fitting an end for them as any.
            Yet now they’re back again! and in as full as they can be. I can’t remember if there were any more pages I’d artworked that have been totally lost, but I do remember it was an unfinished work-in-progress when we dropped it – and I’m pleasantly surprised I’m so impressed to see it again now after all this time. I like the critical tack it takes, and I love the way it looks. There’s nothing about it that’s that orthodox punky safety-pins/ransom-note aesthetic that I know for Bruce as well as me palled almost the minute it emerged. It’s just another indication of how far ahead of the global pack that so much that went on here in Australia was. And sad that that headway was so soon lost.
            But we tried.

When I was in Melbourne last week doing a bit of background business, I went in to the 3RRR studios on Sunday night with my old pal Bruce Milne and did a special episode of his regular show Where Yo Is by way of celebrating the show we used to do together on RRR in 1979, Know Your Product. Know Your Product was not so much a punk as post-punk show – because by ’79, certainly as far as we were concerned, the shock and fury of the Class of 77 was already a spent force, and now music, from a clean slate, was opening out again (like the universe itself, music expands and contracts in a cycle with big bangs in between, and punk was a big bang that like any other added whole new dimensions in space, new generic galaxies to the music universe) – and Know Your Product, we'd like to think, well, it was well-remembered for what it did, because people virtually demanded we do this reunion/tribute while we could... here.

​I had arrived in Melbourne from Brisbane at the very beginning of 1978 to continue work with Bruce on our trans-capital punk fanzine Pulp, the first issue of which had come out at the end of ’77. Pulp quickly folded, however, and Bruce left Melbourne to go over to Adelaide to work on our sort of panacea, Roadrunner magazine. I stayed in Melbourne and got a job doing paste-up in the art department of Coles in the city, while I served as RR’s ostensible ‘Melbourne Editor’. I can only say this with certainty now because for sake of this special show, I did something I’d long contemplated, which was go back to the State Library of Victoria and look up the archive of Radio City, RRR’s newsmagazine for subscribers, that started publication in April, 1978, around the same time the station took up residence in a new standalone studio in an old terrace house in Cardigan St, Carlton. Radio City would list the program grid. At long last I could get a bead on the true timeline, and put other things back together around it.

So it’s only now that I really understand that Know Your Product happened in ’79, not ’78, under which illusion I’d long labored. What actually happened was that when Bruce got back from three or four months in Adelaide, after the RR sands had shifted under his feet, we got back together again and went in to RRR to offer ourselves up as volunteer announcers. Bruce had previously, before going to Adelaide, done a bit firstly on 3SW and then 3RMT. It was the formidable Nadia Anderson I remember put us on. Starting in June, Bruce did Thursday nights 10-12pm, a nice slot, then - our routine became - we shot some pinball up on Lygon St,  then we went back to the studio at 2am for me to head my graveyard shift.
             It was a surprise for me to be reminded that I had done a solo shift at RRR in ’78 before Bruce and I came together as an actual two-header to do Know Your Product. But the timeline makes sense and explains other personal stuff besides. What I can’t figure out is how I got enough records to cover four hours every week, but Bruce and I shared stuff and he remembers borrowing stuff from record shops like One-Stop and Missing Link. When us two were doing those Thursday nights, the Saturday morning slot, I was delighted to be reminded, was done by our friend Linda Baron, with a show with ‘Little’ Mark Ryan called Teen Beat. When we all started in 1978, it was a bit of a new incursion on RRR. To us, the station was mostly older, refugees from Melbourne’s theatre underground like the Pram Factory and all that. Folks like us added a new necessary dimension to RRR.

By the start of 1979, Bruce and I were preparing to shift to Saturday mornings. When we opened at 9am on March 3, the show certainly wasn’t listed in Radio City as Know Your Product. It just had the generic ‘Weekend Radio’ tag. It took on the Radio City listing as Know Your Product in May, but I’m certain we’d long referred to it as that and always used the Saints’ track as our theme. 

We did the show all up for four or five months in 1979, the winter basically. It was certainly a time of an extraordinary explosion of new new music coming out mostly on 45, and in a way that makes making a radio show easy. Although that’s easy to say now. But it was, and Bruce and I were reminded of the fact when after forty years we did another two hours together on RRR last week. Hopefully it won’t be the last two hours! We only managed to squeeze in twenty tracks amid all the mad chatter, and there’s still another twenty shows’ worth of tracks you could do just like that, such was the fervidity of the reinvention of rock that took place in that immediate post-punk era. One great record after another every week, mostly singles, some hits but many, mostly, not. But no different to any time when pop generally hits some kind of tipping point and changes.
             Really, because I’ve long just wanted to hear how all the eras of music unfolded, I don’t think the excitement of my blank-generation experience is any greater than any other great flowering, and pop has so many such moments, but obviously for me a period that is my starting point has special import. And sometimes you can be embarrassed by listening back to things you liked, and think how awful they are, or other things you hated and think actually, they’re good. That’s just the ever-evolving brain of a true songcatcher.
             But measure what we can only reconstruct in our memories as to what our playlists were with the RRR charts of the time, and I’d still back our strike-rate. Put it this way. The sign up in the studio in the late 70s that Bruce refers to in the show/lead image above, that asked announcers not to play Elvis Costello all the time, well, we didn’t play Elvis Costello at all! Never been enamoured of him myself, and I know Bruce wasn’t either – too many words crammed into too small a space for me, making for nothing but suffocation – and we didn’t play most of what the station’s charts rated highly either. Didn’t play the Sports, the Cars, I dunno, didn’t play the Clash, didn’t play most everything everybody else seemed to. But did play Ian Dury, other things. We played what we wanted. We thought it was the good shit, the best shit, and we thought that everything else was real shit. We were right and we were wrong. Which is the whole idea and glory of public radio. You can hear all the more detail – and here just a handful of the songs we loved and loved playing – by going here.
            Know Your Product ended, for whatever reason I can’t remember, in July 1979. Teen Beat made a return to the Saturday morning slot and Bruce and I were shuffled around the schedule, Bruce in a sort of promotion back to Thursday nights 10-midnight, and me getting a real booby prize, one of the worst slots in radio, the graveyard shift on Friday night/Saturday morning. Go on air at 2am after being out at a gig or a party or the pub and somehow grind through to 6am. What I remember is being relieved at dawn by Ron Meerbeck and Julie Purvis, who were friends too, who were then followed by Linda Baron with Teen Beat and she was another friend too who, if I remember rightly, shared a house at that time with Julie. So there were more of us sneaking in there. Bruce was followed on Thursday nights at midnight by John Murphy, and Alan Bamford and others had started doing shifts too, and that was the ‘little bands’ scene that was eulogized in Dogs in Space. Most of the rest of the year played out like that until even I got a bit of a promotion, up to Thursday midnights, which meant Bruce and I were back where started, sort of, back-to-back and crossing over on each other’s shows. Playing pinball on Lygon St. I started doing Thursday-midnights in November, but did it only for a month because in December ’79, I moved to Sydney.
            So I went to Sydney and started writing for the major music press and Bruce for one thing,  continued on at RRR. His legendary, pioneering cassette-zine Fast Forward was conceived in and put together in the studio at RRR, which does beg the question as to why it wasn’t stand-alone show in its own right? Then in the latter 80s he and Phil Brophy fronted the legendary, long-running trash-pop culture show Eeek! And now he’s still there at RRR, doing Where Yo Is on Sunday nights – one of the longest serving announcers on the station alongside Johnny Topper and the aforesaid Geoff King – all of which is part of what makes, I reckon, 3RRR one of the world’s great not-just public-radio stations but radio stations period. For me, it did still remain all the Rs - I went from RRR and RR (Roadrunner) to RAM and Rolling Stone. I never went back to radio and now I think that's a bit of a shame. But I sit here at my desk in Sydney writing and streaming the many shows  RRR broadcasts that I love. And now I can stream a podcast that even features me! if you need to be reminded again, right here!

​I am very pleased to be able to say that the Suzi Q documentary is finally now out, after a long four or five years in production, and it is pretty damn good. But how could it be not!? It’s Suzi! She is – well, she’s just Suzi Q and her magic is so spellbinding it even worked in reverse so that Dale Hawkins was able to predict her more than decade before she even hit the scene. Of course, I’ve been a fan since “Can the Can,” when I saw her on the ABC rock show GTK and she explained that she had a star tattooed on her wrist because she was one, a star. ​ 

When old friend Tait Brady, producer at Acme Films in Melbourne, got in touch just recently to invite me along to the Sydney ​preview of Suzi Q, I’d forgotten altogether that I’d something very minor to do with its genesis. The credit I shared with Jen Jewel Brown was for ‘Editorial Consultancy’, which meant I had a look at the script, the material, and offered up my thoughts. Can’t honestly see I did much at all really, but I can see that Liam and Tait have divined a really satisfying delicate balance between a sometimes confrontationally honest family saga and the consequently comparatively almost routine tale of one amazing woman’s determination to make it. 

​That she did so at a time before it had ever really been done merely redoubles the magnitude of her achievement, and is the reason why so many subsequent feminist icons of rock (Debbie Harry! Tina Weymouth! Joan Jett!) weigh in here with such clearly heartfelt admiration. That she did it too in such a sort of punk-prescient way probably explains why she struggled to crack her home market, and why she warrants even more admiration. I’m in love! But then I loved her from the moment I laid eyes on her anyway. And so how could I be anything but delighted to see this fine, fine film. Suzi endeared herself even more at this Sydney premiere by doing a quick Suzi-Q&A after its screening, and showed that her apparent humility, humor and straightforwardness is absolutely for real. ​

My only regret is that when audience-members were asked to offer a three-word encapsulation of this five-foot wonder, I didn’t get a chance to offer mine – simply: Hot, hot, hot! See the film. ​

The People’s Republic of Camperdown is a bit like Fight Club. First rule is: don’t put it on social media. The People’s Republic doesn’t use social media because it doesn’t have to. Because it operates at capacity and sometimes beyond as it is, putting on (let’s just call it) marginal music (for the moment) on an irregular regular basis, and if you want to know about it, if you need to know about it, it will find you, according to that great old leveller word of mouth, and if you go along you and the music will be the better for it.
         I wanted to jot a few words on the Republic and its founding father Nick S here now because they just celebrated their tenth anniversary and that is really quite an astonishing feat that warrants at least these few thoughts for the record, even if they do nothing more make Nick feel a little bit of a warm glow. Not to my knowledge has the Republic ever enjoyed any media coverage. In ten years at the cutting edge! The only reason I haven't done it is because I gave up trying to get published in the mediocre mainstream more than two decades back.
         The powers-that-be have systematically destroyed the Sydney live music circuit that, say, thirty years ago was the equal of any anywhere else in the world; the equal even of Melbourne today! Since then, it’s been a case of the death of a thousand cuts and many already know that story and certainly it’s outlined in the book I wrote for Currency Press in 2012, History is Made at Night, which of course was how I met the great good Nick in the first place, as he was the book’s editor.
         Since then, when I ended that book on a note of cautious optimism, hoping that the powers-that-be would see the worth of live music, economically if not culturally, the situation’s only gotten worse. The lockout laws were introduced and that meant there was no more violence on the streets because there were no more people on the streets, at least after 8pm, by which time you were supposed to be safe at home tucked-in in bed in anticipation of going to Sunday school bright and early next morning. That’s what these right-wing, church-going prudes and wowsers have turned this once bustling, cosmopolitan city into.
         Don’t be kidded that the rise of music festivals, at least up until recently, was any compensation either. I’ve got a whole theory that the festivalisation of music and culture is just another way for the Man to control it, to make culture state-sanctioned (because you can’t put on a festival without major leverage), and certainly, or surely anyone can see, if you cut off the roots the middle and upper echelons will wither. I’m watching it happen in my once-beloved AFL football (the decimation of the grass-roots game means the top level no longer has a feeder apart from privileged private schools) and it’s happened in music too. How come none of these PMS academics or worse still the people who once might have been entrepreneurs but are now bureaucrats who go to more conferences than gigs have sussed this? But maybe it’s not in their interest either, so long as they can keep writing papers on the problem and conducting studies into it, rather than actually doing anything about it.
         Don’t be fooled by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore either, with her spiky hair and dog collars suggesting a latent punkiness. All the rhetoric about small bars and even the reality of them means little to most music. I even go to them occasionally but me and only a dozen other people at any given time, because there’s no room for any more heads than that in these tiny places. Which means that only a particular type of music is encouraged, quiet acoustic solo singer/songwriters or small combo stuff, and means that there’s next to no money in it for the musicians either. But for music in between the small bars and what might once have been called the prestige, medium-sized club gigs like, say, the Metro in the city – and the Metro is about the only such gig in town anyway – for music that requires production that’s a mite bigger than a small bar can accommodate, and that attracts an audience that’s a mite bigger than a small bar can accommodate, where can it go? It and I and crowds go to the Marrickville Bowlo or the newly-reopened Lansdowne, but again, along with the OAF, that’s about it.
         A seeming and reluctant roll-back on this draconian situation is of course only fuelled by money, the powers-that-be realising that there’s a buck in people going out at night (!), and that Sydney was starting to look like a complete joke, especially compared to Melbourne.
         Yet even then the NSW state government's greed is still torn by its puritanism, and the festivals that have more recently flourished because they were all there is have been hammered by this drug-testing bullshit, which is probably no worse than the Bjelke-Petersonesque sniffer dogs that spoil a nice harmless beer-garden drink in Sydney at the best of times but still a total furphy and a travesty.
         The Sydney Morning Herald is a culprit in this too. The Herald’s been going downhill for a long time but the timbre of this city is something it used to care about, used to run campaigns to protect, and it’s a travesty that none of its music writers or even Pascall Prize-winning urban affairs commentator Elizabeth Farrelly have offered much more than lip-service on the subject. Pathetic. And I can’t see the Herald improving under its new ownership.
         But then, who reads newspapers any more anyway?
         Just as, who wants to go see lame rock bands any more either?
         Which might bring us back around – you may breathe a sigh of relief – to the real subject here: A celebration of the People’s Republic of Camperdown. Having put it in context, it is a small but big kick against the major prick that is this city’s current cultural landscape.
         As ever, what does the real culture do when it’s squeezed out of more open conduct?
         It goes underground.
​         That’s what the young people have done, with ‘illegal’ warehouse gigs and moveable raves at secret locations and all that, and that’s what the People’s Republic does too. It’s a warehouse gig for old people that young people sometimes come to as well, whether as performers or audience-members.
         I make-weighted the term ‘marginal music’ at the top because it’s hard to know what else to call most of what goes on at the People’s Republic. I’m loathe to call it experimental music for a whole number of reasons. A bit more long-winded exposition: When I first went down to a gig at the Republic, when I first met Nick back in 2012 and he invited me along, I was somewhat taken aback. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the heady days of post-punk in Sydney (and all round the country) in the 80s, when music would find different ways to put itself out there, mostly because it wouldn’t be tolerated in the bigger, more mainstream venues (like, say, the Hopetoun! or the Annandale! although the Petersham Inn was actually always wont to doing almost anything…); and where, for which reason, it was driven not by careerism but largely aesthetics, in other words, the art of it.
         … and here it was, a quarter of a century later, still going on! To strike onto music again that was driven by little but the love of music was totally refreshing, totally. Nick had set up the Republic to happen in his own home, admittedly a pretty big, certainly very high-ceilinged living room in a converted warehouse apartment, at which he’d somehow managed to get the tolerance of his fellow tenants and put on these gigs that attracted often overflowing crowds and that demanded no door-charge and yet inevitably ended the night with the jar full of cash. Of which Nick takes none; it all goes to the artists. It was and remains a textbook case of the organic underground resistance doing what it’s supposed to do.
         Which brings me back to this question of semantics and the term ‘marginal music’. One of the early gigs I saw at the Republic – and I’ve seen a lot in the seven out of its ten years I’ve been going there, and I’ve even helped line up a few and even done one myself, rarely presenting a film there (my Buried Country documentary) – but one of the gigs, a classic People’s Republic show, was Scattered Order. Now Scattered Order was a(n M-Squared) band I used to see back in those post-punk days I just mentioned, and I was delighted to see them making a comeback because mainly as I understood it, there was a demand wanting to be satisfied.
         And I remember thinking, how come it’s called experimental music? When it sounded pretty much the same it did where it left off twenty years ago, arrhythmic, atonal, and anarchically or at least intuitively structured. If it was experimental back then, have they still not found an answer to the problems or questions posed? Or if they are still looking, how come it still sounds much the same? And then it struck me: it’s all semantics, and in my own head. Maybe it’s not experimental music at all but rather, umm, in the particular instance of Scattered Order, call it free-form industrial music? ‘Free jazz’ is known as that and it’s a fair tag and the music operates on its own inherent and very open-ended principles. And so if that was my problem to get over, and not Nick S’s or Scattered Order’s or anybody else’s, I got over it and I’ve continued to go to the Republic evermore and enjoy or not so much enjoy the music depending purely on whether I like it or enjoy it or not.
         The range of stuff Nick’s put on with the unstinting and ever-patient support of his partner Corinne and the other folks who help out like on things technical is broad, international and really quite stunning. At the tenth anniversary celebration gig I went to the other week there was big illustrated timeline pinned up on the wall, but I was too involved in the music and meeting and conversing with nice folks around the sets that I didn’t get a chance to look at it.
         It’s rare to find anything and anyone these days who isn’t all about big-noting themselves on social media but again, it’s just so refreshing and humbling to find an endeavour like this that runs independently on its own terms, under its own steam, and which couldn’t be doing more to expose a whole strata of music that otherwise doesn’t get a look in but which is catering to a demand that clearly exists. Not going on social media or producing a compendium box-set live album or a film or anything like that is not a case of elitism or trying to be esoteric, it’s just a case of doing what’s do-able.
         At the recent tenth birthday show there was two bands on, the Holy Soul and Party Dozen. I want to conclude on a wrap for Party Dozen because they’re pretty damn brand new and pretty damn amazing and many are probably already well familiar with the redoubtable Holy Soul. Who weighed with a great little set. (Which is another great thing about the Republic – most of the acts who appear there have learnt or understand that brevity is the soul of wit. Was it the same night that U2 were on at some stadium in Sydney? and finished off an apparently already epic set with an eight-song encore? Eight songs!? [I never thought they had one decent song.] And while I can understand the punters at such a gig might want their money’s worth, since they’ve probably paid hundreds of dollars to be there, to me, you couldn’t pay me!) But – after we chucked a lobster into the jar at the Republic, and it was overflowing with them – Party Dozen!? OMG! I’d been clued to them by Nick and I tuned in online and listened to their signature song ‘Party Dozen’ and I was blown away. Party Dozen is a duo, a sax/drums duo augmented by a throbbing little black box the boy drummer runs, and they’re young people, young musicians, and I hadn’t heard anything quite like them since… ever. Oh, I could hear little traces of post-punk things like, say, Blurt, or DAF (though if I made a reference to a fleeting Sydney jazz-punk band from the early 80s called Kill the King it would probably mean nothing to next to nobody, let alone Party Dozen themselves, so I’ll tantalizingly leave it at that; KtK never released a recording, so you can’t look them up). I might glibly call Party Dozen the Ramones of free jazz, or Coltrane’s Interstellar Space meets the Sabs' Master of Reality. Just don't call them experimental. They know what they're doing, and they're just exploring it to its outer reaches. Basically, Party Dozen blew their own little electro-organic tornado through that Sunday night for me and I don’t doubt they will continue to do so more broadly because they’ve got the drive, they’ve got the ideas and the wherewithal and they got the sort of response at the People’s Republic that’s what you need to keep on keeping on…
         As long as there’s a few little joints like the Republic flying the flag, they can make it possible for different sorts of music to be accessed, to refuse to be beaten down by the prigs, the prudes and the squares…
         I queued up the merch table after Party Dozen’s set and happily scored a copy of their debut LP; you can check them and it out here.
         And I will continue to patronise the People’s Republic as long as Nick S is putting on something to interest me and others, and it’s unlikely he won’t be doing that, and I will follow with keen interest Party Dozen’s progress from now on. How about a double-header national tour with Melbourne's Surprise Chef? Just a thought.

​How embarrassment! Now I know that’s probably not the best way to open this little notice on the publication of an anthology of not the best-of but the entirity-of Roadrunner magazine, because I am stoked to see it and it’s a very welcome addition to the bibliography, but that’s certainly how my (very adolescent) contributions to the magazine and thus this book The Big Beat make me feel. Because when I started writing I couldn’t write, I’ve never been afraid of admitting that, and that’s what you can read of mine here, some pretty poor prose…
     But I know, I know, it’s not all about me, at all, and thank Christ for that! Roadrunner was the Chrysler of the Big 3 R rock magazines in Australia at the turn into the 1980s, trailing the GM and Ford of RAM and Rolling Stone, and like the Hemi-powered Plymouths and Dodges, it was wild and untamed, and it’s a blessing that there’s now a permanent record of it, all 500 pages of it and bound in a beautiful hard cover as you can see here:

It was cruel but fair but barely fair the way the late Anthony O’Grady used to describe Roadrunner as the outlet for the stories RAM rejected. There was more to it than that, so much more…
     I first met Stuart Coupe and Donald Robertson, the real godfather of Roadrunner and the man who’s shepherded this magnificent volume to publication, back in 1978. The world was so much bigger then, and smaller too. Donald and Stuart put out one issue of their punk fanzine Street Fever in Adelaide, and had folded it with the idea of launching a magazine: the distinction seemed stark back then, but from here I can hardly see the difference. Bruce Milne and I in Melbourne were in the process of folding our fanzine Pulp, and so we decided to throw our lot in with this mob we’d heard about over in Adelaide. I’ve written before on this subject here and here so I want to try and avoid repeating myself. Bruce and I went over to Adelaide, the magazine got going, Bruce then even moved over to Adelaide for a while, and I served as ‘Melbourne Editor’. The magazine survived the defection of Stuart Coupe over to RAM, but Bruce didn’t and he soon returned to Melbourne. But it was always Donald’s baby really and I can’t find higher praise for the commitment he put into Roadrunner over its every single issue up until its last, in 1983. But for Donald to have somehow found that same amount of commitment and energy to get The Big Beat out now, at a now very much more advanced age, well, it’s humbling and inspirational to me.
     Initially, Donald made a mistake similar to one I’d made recently too, which was to sign The Big Beat on with Perth publisher Starman Books. Best I not say too much about Starman for fear of defaming them; suffice it to say, Donald and I are not the only two writers to have recently had to use the termination clauses in our contracts to walk on Starman. So Donald took it all on to self-publish and we can only be thankful, again, that he did...

As the new kid on the block in the late 70s/early 80s, Roadrunner had both advantages and disadvantages. Its scope was wider than the more established RAM and Stone with their respective commercial constraints, but even within that, its inexperience – my inexperience! – showed.
    But Australia was in the middle of a music explosion, and there was a vast audience that couldn’t get enough of the inky newsprint on the subject, and this was a wave that Roadrunner rode the same as RAM and Rolling Stone did. Only just all a bit more loosey-goosily.
​     For me, my first pieces for the early issues of the rag were mainly live reviews, and while I can understand why I might have been willing to go and see Graham Parker, or Stiletto, I cannot for the life of me remember how Donald convinced me to go along and see Status Quo. But I did and I filed reports and they probably weren’t that badly written. Well, looking back over them again here now, yes they were, they were pretty terrible. But I will say one thing in my defence, and I don’t think many would argue with me on this: I didn’t hold back! 

If I didn’t like something I said so, and even in the Roadrunner firmament that attitude wasn’t universal. Whether my approach was due to arrogance, ignorance, special insight or just insensitivity I’m not sure, probably a bit of all four. But there was an aspect of it that I think adds further to my advertisement for myself here – I might not have been able to write (yet), but I could hear, I had ears, and maybe that was the pay-off. I am reminded now I wrote a lengthy review of the Stones’ Some Girls album for RR, and it’s a mess, structurally, but if you can wade through the clutter you can discern that critically, it was close to on the money.
     In making the transition to a soon to be nationally-distributed actual magazine, Roadrunner had to broaden its base out from the previously punky precepts of Street Fever. Even I understood that. And so as Roadrunner made staples of emerging new pub bands that I wasn't interested in whether Midnight Oil, the Angels or INXS, I didn't mind, even as it ironed some of the kinks out in the mag to indeed put it on an aspirational par with RAM, because with most of the writers all fawning over this stuff, it left the good shit mostly to me.
     Put it this way: When Chris Bailey put together a new post-Ed Kuepper incarnation of the Saints and came back home from the UK to play a tour, the response was rapturous in a way the original Saints never got. I of course was outraged, and said so, in a decimation of the band published in another magazine that forty years later I regret as probably ill-judged and certainly ill-mannered, but the main point here is that at least Roadrunner, Donald, allowed me to instead shine a light on the new band that Ed Kuepper had that was relatively languishing in inattention, the Laughing Clowns.
     And that, for me, was the great glory of Roadrunner: When most every other rock critic in the country, including at Roadrunner, was fawning all over Cold Chisel, the Angels and Midnight Oil - and the neo-Saints! - I was sticking my neck out and giving some of the first-ever media coverage to long-shots like the Laughing Clowns, the GoBetweens and Nick Cave's Boys Next Door. And note that this wasn't without its perils; many thought the GoBetweens, say, were just a joke, and I did what I did in the face of ridicule and contempt. You can read some of this stuff in The Big Beat, or here and here.
     But again to Donald's great credit, he gave me rope, regardless of what he thought of what I thought. He gave me rope to write decimations of other bands too and some of those caused enmities that still persist forty years later too. Me, I reckon we all make mistakes and get wronged equally, and you just have to soak it up and keep moving.
     I wrote a third of an RR cover story (shared with XTC and the Angels, in July ’79) on new Australian ‘elektronik musik’ and it was such a good centre-page spread that two years later in Sydney, Rolling Stone got me to do it again, or rather update the exact same idea. It was a ‘good story’ not in the sense it was well-written as that it was a thing, or a coming thing, and though by the time I did the Stone version my writing had indeed vastly improved, it was if the bailiwick still seemed to belong to me alone almost. Everybody else was still fawning over Chisel, the Saints and INXS - how hard was that to do? When even if forty years later I can appreciate the pop success of, say, Mi-Sex, I've got no doubt - and I think history bears me out on this - how seminal, say, Ollie Olsen or the Primitive Calculators were. And Roadrunner ran my coverage of Whirlywirld, and the Calculators, and Peter Lillie and other less obvious Melbourne music.
     So even if Roadrunner pretty quickly ended up competing with RAM in terms of pretty much all the same cover stories - which is what it had to do just to sell copies - the pages inside, as The Big Beat shows, were much more diverse, much more daring. And I think that’s what made RR more than just the bronze-medallist. It had less to lose! I remember Ross Stapleton wrote a number of major, deep-impact investigative features for the mag in the late 70s. Stapleton was a guy on the make (turned out all he really wanted was a job with a record company) who'd given me and Bruce an amazing story for Pulp on the hilarious London meeting of Molly Meldrum and the Sex Pistols. For Roadrunner, he wrote, among other things, an in-depth examination of the machinations of Australia's live/touring/pub circuit (based on round-table interviews with the top booking agents), and he wrote an in-depth examination of Michael Gudinski's business interests, and these were stories that the Big 2 (RAM and Stone) would indeed doubtless have rejected, would never have run, for fear of repercussions. Stapleton himself soon enough disappeared (indeed got a job with Virgin in the UK as we were given to understand), but it's enough that we are left with those important, revealing references and now even more accessibly for the record in The Big Beat.
     Donald Roberston was prepared to take the game on, and in the same way that these days I never read the erstwhile Farifax press without also reading the News equivalent, so I can counterbalance the biases on both sides, I needed to consult both RR and RAM back in the day before I could really start to form an opinion on anything; Stone I took with a grain of salt at least up until it sort of reinvented itself when it went monthly in 1980.
     But Roadrunner never paid for contributions, and as Donald has reprinted in his notes here, I had to write a letter (remember those?) at one point begging for money to buy film for my camera (I had a very short-lived tenure as a photographer on my own stories). So when I moved from Melbourne to Sydney in 1980 and found almost overnight that I could write for both RAM and Rolling Stone and get paid for it, that’s what I did.
     But Donald steered RR on and it offered a crucial adjunct to RAM and Stone, and it outgutsed and outlived start-up upstarts like Backstage (from Brisbane) and Vox (from Melbourne) and it happily afforded an outlet for great if shooting star writers like Peter Nelson, Adrian Ryan, Craig N. Pearce and others. The mag's move from Adelaide to Sydney in 1982 was as necessary as it was risky (I was overseas at the time), and eventually the risk won out and the magazine folded after one issue in a new A4 glossy format in 1983.
     It’s all here in these pages, unvarnished, unrevised, except for the additional running commentary from Donald. I don’t need to read yet again the story of Australian music’s renaissance in the 80s, it’s been told a million times. The Big Beat does that, to be sure, but being what it is, it tells another story as well, and that’s the story of the way we processed that music in its real-time. As embarrassing as it sometimes is for me, it’s very much my story too, and so I have to be happy enough to embrace it. The Big Beat reminds me that in so many ways I haven’t changed, and neither, surprisingly, has the media landscape, really, because all it still takes is a few kids or anybody with a keyboard and a bit of an idea and you can get your voice out there, perchance to maybe even change things. I think Roadrunner was a crucial component in a crucial phase of Australia’s cultural history. If I was still teaching I’d tell young journalism students to read it and try and do better.
​      You can see some of the glowing responses the book has garnered here at 'Roadrunner Twice', and buy it online here.