Meldrum

• But there really was a time when exposure to culture was mediated by curators who had far too much power over what we all saw, heard or experienced.
• We had a film press, a television press, a literary press – and a music press.
• Nonetheless, I would read rock publications voraciously and I never passed up the opportunity to contribute.
• There were also things that Fell failed (or perhaps chose not) to include.

Molly, Lily and Go-Set

• Set up by university students, whose only prior experience was Monash University’s paper, Go-Set quickly filled a need for information and connection among pop fans.
• Enthusiastic writers like Lily Brett, Ian (Molly) Meldrum, Johnny Young and Douglas Panther conveyed the inside story of the lives of musicians and celebrities, while maintaining a particular accessibility for their “teens and twenties” readers.
• Go-Set’s publisher, Philip Frazer, went on, in a haphazard way, to bring a Rolling Stone franchise to Australia.

Street papers: ‘uniquely Australian’

• Their extensive advertising revenue from venues, record companies and related industries allowed these publications to be provided at no cost.
• The street paper killed RAM and Juke, not by being anywhere near as good, but far, far cheaper.
• Fell loves the “street papers”, and one gets the sense he would happily have written about them alone.
• Read more:
  How a 'pot-smoking, acid-gobbling smart-arse' became the producer behind some of Australia's greatest music

Undeniable soap operas

• What’s the word for respecting an author’s restraint, while wishing there was just a bit more goss within their pages?
• Of course, there were many links between the producers of music magazines and the people they wrote about.
• By links, I don’t just mean romantic or domestic entanglements, though I do mean that, of course.
• There are also great, undeniable soap operas.
• A public spat between Steve Kilbey of The Church and music journalist Stuart Coupe in the early 1980s springs to mind.

Smash Hits and Rolling Stone

• Back to the topic of Countdown: Fell pays its competitor, Australian Smash Hits, minimal notice.
• Fell didn’t talk to anyone from (or even really about) Australian Smash Hits.
• Rolling Stone has, of course, a 50-year history in Australia.
• Whereas Australian Smash Hits was often criticised for including content from its British parent, the first decade of Rolling Stone in this country was typically little more than a distillation of old cut-and-pastes from the American magazine.

‘I thought it was sci-fi nonsense’

• I was impressed that he believed it, but I thought it was sci-fi nonsense.
• Of course, there is still a music press: look at the preposterously overblown global influence of Pitchfork, for instance.
• In Australia, the music press only takes print form in the most boutique of varieties, like Melbourne magazine Efficient Space.