Keays says the Masters Apprentices read the magazine ‘avidly in Adelaide’; he describes it as ‘a crazy, unorganized mess, but it worked.’98 Later, the publishers were to launch a subsidiary, more pop-oriented version called Gas and a more adult, political publication, Revolution.99 Go-Set continued on into the 70s with, it claimed, a circulation of 57,000 per week.100 Its format had implications for the way the Australian music press would operate for at least two decades after its demise in 1974. Juke, which was initially edited by former Go-Set chart compiler (and critic, writer and ultimately editor) Ed Nimmervoll, was arguably a direct successor to Go-Set, particularly in its post-Nimmervoll era, when it became a much more uncritical reporter on the music industry, unlike the relatively partisan and left-field Rock Australia Magazine (better known as RAM). Ian Meldrum – who will be discussed further anon – joined the staff of Go-Set early in its existence; his original job was to clean the house the magazine was run from.101 He was soon writing for them, with a story about Ronnie Burns meeting the (flamboyant and gay) thespian Frank Thring.102 It is possibly true that Meldrum was the magazine’s greatest gift to Australian music – and like the magazine itself, it was a gift with both positive and negative implications.
MOLLY
Ian Meldrum was born in the regional Victorian town of Orbost, near the holiday beach settlement Lakes Entrance, in 1946.103 He has always been relatively secretive about his background, and it is plain that he did not fit in. He learnt piano from an early age, then did musical comedy at school; he liked ‘classical music and musical comedy and all of that’ and experienced pop music through the Tarax jukeboxes in Kyabram, a town north of Melbourne104 – ‘I liked it, but it didn’t move me.’105 He relocated to Melbourne for his final years of schooling, attending the prestigious Wesley College. In 1962, while studying law at the University of Melbourne, he was billeted with some aunts in St Kilda. In a strange and audacious move, he asked their neighbours across the road – the Burns family, whose son Ronnie was a singer – if he could live with them instead.106 What was even more extraordinary was that Meldrum did go on to live with the Burnses – for almost a decade.107
Another turning point for Meldrum was hearing the Beatles on a transistor radio ‘in the sand dunes’ at yet another regional Victorian pleasure spot, Point Leo.108 And in a happy accident for his future career, he once tripped over singer Lynne Randell on the beach ‘and we became great friends.’109
A friend from school, Max Ross, had gone on to be a member of the Groop, a hit band which began as the Wesley Trio and which, Meldrum later recalled, ‘was the first band I could get into because it was Australian music.’ It was late 1965.
I knew some people in the industry like Stan Rofe and Ken Sparkes . . . I said I’d try to get their record “Ol’ Hound Dog” on air. I never looked at it then as even publicity, because I was being the regular band moll.’110
The ‘moll’ tag, which Meldrum happily applied to himself with all its sexually subservient connotations,111 possibly led to Rofe’s dismissive nickname for him: ‘Molly’. Within six months – in tandem with his Go-Set activities – Meldrum was not only a reporter on the TV show Kommotion, he was also miming international hits for the show (a briefly popular practice until it was banned by Actors Equity in 1967).
Go-Set, August 30, 1969.
Meldrum’s involvement in Russell Morris’s career included his first acknowledged production job, ‘The Real Thing’. The song was supposedly written by Johnny Young for Ronnie Burns. The story goes that when Meldrum heard the demo tape as he was passing by Young’s dressing room at Uptight, he cajoled a copy from Young and insisted to EMI that the song be given to Morris, whom he was now managing. On the recording, the song, which is in three distinct parts, was played by the Groop; Meldrum impulsively urged them to play for twice as long as was originally intended, speeding up as they went. He then added an overkill of sound effects and overdubs – everything including the kitchen sink and a Hitler speech and a nuclear explosion – as well as Groop member Brian Cadd reading the ‘conditions of sale’ wording from the back of a tape box:
‘I said, “Just read part of that.” So where you hear the talking it is in fact Brian reading and then he and I going into hysterical laughter.’112
Howard Gable, who had recently come to Melbourne from New Zealand as resident A&R/producer for EMI (he had produced ‘Sadie’), saw no commercial potential in the recording, and initially refused to release it, at which Meldrum ‘really kicked up a stink . . .’113 The battle to see the record become Morris’s solo debut, and to have it available nationwide, was possibly as arduous as the recording process itself, if not more so. But by April 1969, Go-Set was reporting that ‘The Real Thing’ was ‘a real hit’: ‘Record bars are finding it hard to keep the record in stock. In Sydney you can’t buy a copy of “The Real Thing” anywhere.’114
Achieving a number one single allowed Meldrum, Morris and Young to have a free hand in creating its follow-up, which was a Morris and Young collaboration in the way that ‘A Day in the Life’ was a Lennon-McCartney song – it was two separate tunes jammed together. Former Missing Link Doug Ford played on ‘Part Three Into Paper Walls’ as well as its flipside, ‘The Girl That I Love’.115 The A side – which is seven minutes long, forty seconds longer than its predecessor – starts up where ‘The Real Thing’ ends (and then ends with the beginning of ‘The Real Thing’!); it’s as if the team were making a concept album in instalments. Meldrum was, incidentally, never paid for his production work, as this would have been seen as a conflict of interest.116 Twenty-five years later, he remarked with his usual candor and garbled syntax, ‘I’d be the last person to hire myself to do a record production.’117 His meticulous muddle-headedness – ‘he only ever understood passion’, according to engineer Ern Rose118 – might have been the reason that Brian Cadd, when he was ‘going through a period of slight disenchantment’ with his friend, recorded a song about Meldrum called ‘Handyman.’119
WINGS OF AN EAGLE
Meldrum’s ascent as a record producer is one way to look at the success of ‘The Real Thing’; another is through the career of the 19-year-old whose name was on the single’s label, Russell Morris. In early 1968, Meldrum had written in Go-Set that ‘the biggest threat to Ronnie is the golden wonder boy, Johnny Farnham, who with his first record “Sadie” has reached the coveted No. 1 position in most states.’120 Ronnie Burns’s biggest hit, ‘Smiley’, was still ahead of him, but as we have already seen his status as ‘golden wonder boy’ would be usurped not only by Farnham but by Russell Morris – and as a result of Meldrum’s own efforts.
Russell Morris may have seemed like the flipside (substantial, ‘with-it’, sensitive) to the jovial showman Johnny Farnham in 1968, but he was still in many ways the same kind of product. Indeed, ‘The