Redgum’s John Schumann on why Roadrunner magazine mattered
It was the magazine that boldly dissected Australia’s vibrant music scene and as Redgum’s John Schumann explains, it looked long and hard into our national soul, without fear or favour.
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Once upon a time, in a land far away, songwriters mainlined their tunes and rhymes into our hearts and minds.
To many young Australians, musicians were god-like beings who ripped thunder and lightning from the sky and dashed them onto the sticky carpets of the nation’s hotels.
A night out with your friends either started or ended at a gig – sometimes both.
Record companies would sign and drop bands at the drop of a hat, and musicians and songwriters could make records in the knowledge that radio programmers would actually put new Australian music on rotation.
Record stores were a licence to print money: indeed, the music industry was an important economic driver in a world where a Commander phone system was the epitome of telephony and the internet was a nascent technology that most of us happily ignored.
They were heady days.
A band could move in to the Diplomat Motor Inn, in Acland St, St Kilda, and perform in Melbourne and regional centres every night for three weeks without playing the same venue twice.
A national tour could start in Adelaide and take three months to wind its way to Cairns.
You couldn’t get a job unpacking boxes in a record shop unless you knew who played bass on Vanilla Fudge’s fourth album.
If you were from Adelaide, you were actually taken seriously because the City of Churches was pretty well accepted as the veritable cradle of the Australian music industry.
Every Stobie pole and hoarding was at least a half an inch deep in tattered gig posters and if you weren’t in a band yourself, you were best mates with someone who was.
Poker machines were the province of pensioners on bus trips and record company executives were taken seriously.
As were music journalists.
Flicking through The Big Beat, it strikes me that this is a very important sociocultural document. Back then contemporary popular music was, arguably, the most accessed and accessible form of cultural activity.
During those years, Roadrunner chronicled and critiqued Australia’s prodigious musical output, rather like JF Archibald’s The Bulletin did for our national literature over a century ago.
It also strikes me that, unlike many “entertainment” journalists of today, people like Donald Robertson, Stuart Coupe and Larry Buttrose could actually find their way with grammatical rectitude and elegance from the uppercase to the period.
There was more than enough intellectual firepower in the editorial offices of Roadrunner not to embarrass itself in conversation with the likes of Don Walker.
In 1979, when Roadrunner scootedpast the Tollgate and on to the national landscape, it actually boasted a Poetry Editor, one Donna Maegraith. Imagine that!
Among its peers, Roadrunner was marked by a deeper understanding of the culture that it served. It looked long and hard into our national soul, without fear or favour.
Ever skating on financial thin ice Roadrunner was, at once, literate, entrepreneurial and courageous – its courage demon-strated by Buttrose’s less than glowing review of Midnight Oil’s gig at London’s Marquee Club in August 1981.
My own band, Redgum, was accorded a cover edition in 1980, at a time when we were almost wholly dismissed as a pinko Left-wing folk band trading in little more than “agitprop”. Roadrunner treated us with respect because, unlike most of the mainstream industry, it knew that we were selling more records and pulling bigger houses than many of the bands who pimped around on Countdown every Sunday night.
Importantly, and to our eternal gratitude, Roadrunner championed the important indigenous bands, No Fixed Address and Us Mob.
It heralded the arrival of Bruce Springsteen, took the record companies to task (notwithstanding free trips and free drinks) and allowed its readers to vent on a vibrant and no-holds-barred Letters page.
It’s not hyperbolic to say that Donald Robertson et al did us all a great service with Roadrunner back then.
He has done us a great service by putting together this anthology now. There is much, much more to this document than an exercise in nostalgia for the cognoscenti.
The Big Beat is an important chapter in Australia’s story.
As Mark Twain so memorably observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
HOW ROADRUNNER RECORDED OUR NOISY HISTORY
By Nathan Davies
To flick through the pages of The Big Beat – a bound collection of rock magazine Roadrunner – is to be transported to an Adelaide that no longer exists.
An Adelaide of smoke-filled, sticky-floored band rooms still a decade or two from being transformed into soulless pokie dens.
An Adelaide of photocopied band flyers sticky taped to Stobie poles and record shops – actual record shops – staffed by intimidating rock snobs ready to judge your every purchase.
Nick Cave is in the book, resplendent in a tuxedo out front of The Boys Next Door at the Highway Inn in Plympton. Yes, the Highway. There’s Debbie Harry, standing in front of a Datsun on Hindley St, holding what looks like a bag of onions with rock writer Stuart Coupe hanging out in the background in thongs and a knitted vest.
Bob Marley on stage at the Apollo, Joe Strummer at the Thebby, Peter Garrett at The Tivoli, Joe Camilleri at … the Sefton Park Target store.
For Donald Robertson, the man who founded and edited Roadrunner from 1978 until it finished in 1983, his dream was inspired by the punk fanzines that were popping up in the UK in 1976 and 1977.
“I was living there at the time, and I used to devour the weekly rock press,” Robertson says.
“NME, Melody Maker, Sounds … and they talked about these fanzines that people like Mark P were creating, like Sniffin’ Glue and Other Rock ‘N’ Roll Habits. The message – certainly Mark P’s message – was ‘do it yourself’. That whole attitude, you know? Here’s a chord, here’s another one, here’s a third – now go form a band! It was an exaltation to inspire people who were moved by this music.”
Robertson was, very much, one of those “moved by this music”.
He remembers being so blown away by the Sex Pistols’ debut single Anarchy in the UK that he hung his speakers out of his third-floor window so that the good burghers of Bath could hear this wonderful noise.
“I thought, ‘This is the sound of a youth revolution!’ It was so powerful, and it was so in tune with the times.”
When Robertson returned to Australia, he brought this zeal – and a stash of 25 new punk singles – with him. One person who shared this passion was writer and university newspaper editor Stuart Coupe, and the pair set about planning a fanzine of their own.
The zine was a minor hit, being distributed out of Adelaide record shop Modern Love Songs, and the pair were soon eyeing a larger prize. Roadrunner, named after the Jonathan Richman classic, was born.
“It grew very organically from the early issues, and got bigger and bigger as the year went on,” Robertson says.
“It was ‘South Australia only’ at first, but by the end of the first year I was faced with a choice and I quit my job and went for national distribution. We very quickly had an impact in New South Wales and Victoria.”
While punk music, and the punk ethos, was at the core of Roadrunner its team was never restricted to one genre.
“Our pitch was to write about the Adelaide music scene – the local acts and the acts that were coming through,” Robertson says.
“We’d write about The Beach Boys, Dylan, Weather Report, Chick Corea, even Billy Connolly. By the end of that first year though I realised that there wasn’t enough going on in Adelaide to sustain things and I’d have to write about what was going on in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane, too.”
It was, Robertson says, a hand-to-mouth existence, with each issue of Roadrunner financing the next. On some occasions it was only the money he raised through flogging sample LPs to second-hand record shops that kept the whole operation afloat. It was never, however, not fun. When pushed to pick a favourite show from his time at Roadrunner, Robertson baulks
“How about a top three?” he asks.
“That would be The Clash at the Thebarton Theatre, an absolutely stunning show. No Fixed Address, they made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. They were so young, so different, so Aboriginal. And then probably Midnight Oil on Adelaide Uni’s Barr Smith Lawns. I was side stage, up close, and Midnight Oil in full flight were white hot.”
TheBig Beat: Rock Music in Australia 1978-83, through the pages of Roadrunner magazine will be launched on October 16 at The Howling Owl, Vaughan Place, from 5.30pm. Signed copies will be available for $99. The book will be sold at: Dymocks , Imprints Booksellers , Dillons Books, Matilda Bookshop, Streetlight , Clarity Records, Big Star Records, Mr V Music.