The Paul Keating cover that sent Rolling Stone ‘viral’ in 1993

Kathy Bail ushered in a new era for Australian Rolling Stone in the early 90s. Her first cover, featuring Paul Keating, took the iconic magazine back to its roots.

The great Kathy Bail at the height of her rock goddess powers as editor of Rolling Stone.

For the Australian Rolling Stone, the year 1992 brought turmoil. Five years after their successful bid for the licence, and with five years of consistent growth behind them, tensions between publisher Phillip Keir and editor Toby Creswell came to boiling point.

“I don’t remember what the actual tinder was,” Creswell says, “but I got fired.”

Creswell is, by his own admission, a shy man, not one to delve deeply into details of a past he’s long since made peace with. The firing played out in a dramatic fashion. He was removed from the premises, and Creswell was no longer involved with Rolling Stone in any way.

His firing was to usher in a new era for the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. One cannot help but admire the job Creswell did while helming the iconic title – indeed, it was he who turned it into a true Australian magazine, his laser focus on and passion for Australian music leading it to become more than an offshoot of the American original. But it was his leaving that was to pave the way for Rolling Stone to, essentially, re-create its glory days; that is, return to its roots as a magazine that wasn’t just a vehicle for Australian music but a record of the times themselves, as it had set out to be under Jann Wenner in the US in the late 1960s.

The new editor, installed from the March 1993 issue, was Kathy Bail, a journalist formerly of News Corp and publications like The Independent Monthly. Bail was a serious journalist and had been honing her craft from a young age, with a background editing Australian film industry magazine Cinema Papers and before that Farrago, the University of Melbourne student newspaper. It was these bona fides that Keir was looking for when it came to taking his publication forward.

Full Coverage: A History of Rock Journalism in Australia by Samuel J. Fell

“I suppose the thing that really appealed to me about Rolling Stone was that from its inception in the late ’60s, it had covered music and the sort of social and political environment in which all of that happened,” Bail says. “And so it was an opportunity to cover music and politics and the full range of things in contemporary culture.”

Bail says that for her the quality of the journalism always came first, no matter the genre. Hunter S. Thompson had his own distinctive style and approach. The magazine had “a reputation for publishing investigative stories that were relevant to a younger readership, and I thought I had strong credentials in that area”, she says. “And I didn’t believe that the editor of a magazine like that had to be a music fan or a musician. I thought that having strong editorial skills was the main thing.”

Bail’s first move was to hire a new music editor in freelance journalist Dino Scatena (who went on to write for The Daily Telegraph and produce a number of books on high-profile Australian musicians). Her second was to form a coterie of contributors.

“I was really well connected to some of the top journalists in the country,” she explains. “And I knew that many of them were interested in contributing to Rolling Stone. Some of them worked on newspapers and other magazines, but would’ve been in a position to do this as an extra gig. So I suppose I felt confident that I could bring in a new group of writers.”

Her tenure at Stone started with a bang. Her first cover, the March 1993 issue, wasn’t a rock star, local or otherwise. It wasn’t a film star or an entertainment personality at all. The cover story for that issue, his face adorning the cover with a half-smile, eyes partially hidden by a pair of black sunglasses, was none other than serving prime minister Paul Keating. This was an announcement – the magazine was now heading in a more political direction once again.

“That was March ’93, just ahead of the election, which he won. That issue sold well,” says Bail, smiling. “And it also got an enormous amount of attention in other media … because it was a different kind of interview for Paul Keating; there was interest in what he was saying to younger Australians. A different demographic.

“So it was a signal, I think, in that first issue, that we were going to cover politics seriously. We were going to report on politics in a way that engaged the readership of Rolling Stone and younger readers. And also in a way that older readers of the sort of baby boomer generation would recognise. Because they’d seen that Rolling Stone had been doing this ever since the late ’60s. So I think we probably got a bit of a crossover readership.

The famous cover of Rolling Stone magazine, featuring Australian prime minister Paul Keating.

“And that cover was reproduced everywhere. I talked about it on ABC television, on the 7.30 Report (with) Kerry O’Brien … I think I did something with (him), I think it was in The Sydney Morning Herald and Fairfax papers … it went viral, in today’s language … It was a signal that we were going to cover kind of everything, between music and politics and social issues. And that was very different to Juice, which was sort of aimed at … well, it wasn’t aimed at that sort of older reader who might’ve been reading Rolling Stone for some time. It was aimed at the younger demographic. And I don’t think they invested the same resources as Rolling Stone in those political and social stories.”

Bail’s first year as editor yielded two more covers with Australians in Midnight Oil (May 1993) and INXS (August 1993), along with international stars, chosen to reflect what was happening locally – for instance, Madonna graced the October issue, given she was touring that month – although it’s not one of Bail’s favourite covers.

“I think it’s a weak cover,” she says, commenting on the shot, a close-up still from one of the singer’s music videos. “We were doing something on her as a video artist – I was trying to convey that we were writing much more about music video and the role of music video to promote music. And we’re kind of right in the heart of MTV. So I thought that was a way of sort of signalling that kind of music video culture. But looking at it now, it wasn’t a strong cover image.”

The final cover of the year featured Janet Jackson – the now iconic photo of the singer topless with her husband’s hands covering her breasts. “That’s sort of classic Rolling Stone,” Bail says of another cover image she wasn’t particularly proud of. “There were often women on the cover but … Rolling Stone was beginning to compete with the lads’ magazines, you know, other kinds of men’s magazines. So, not my favourite cover.”

Still, as 1993 ticked over into 1994, Bail felt she had found her feet as editor of the publication. “I was hitting my stride,” she says. “I had a much, much better feel for the readership. There were more obvious subcultures … more of a sense of the alternative (back then) … And I suppose my role as an editor was to be aware of what was happening across all of these subcultures and, even though I wasn’t part of them, to have good sources or people within those groups to say to me, ‘This is what’s going on, we should be reporting on it’.”

Extracted from Full Coverage: A History Of Rock Journalism In Australia (Monash University Publishing) by Samuel J. Fell, out now.