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Rock Australia Magazine
Rock Australia Magazine or RAM (its acronym and popular name) was a fortnightly national Australian music newspaper, which was published from 1975 to 1989. It was designed for people with a serious interest in rock and pop, and was considered the journal of record for the Australian music scene, along the way producing some of the country's best writers on music and popular culture.
RAM was founded in Sydney by Anthony O'Grady – a former advertising copywriter who had contributed to the earlier pop weekly, Go-Set, in its dying days, and had edited the short-lived Ear for Music magazine – and Phillip Mason, a young British publishing executive with the IPC media empire who'd been seconded to Australia. It was modelled on the English music trade papers, New Musical Express and Melody Maker, and O'Grady's stated objective was that there would be no drop in quality between the copy it imported from those papers - which it was able to arrange thanks to Philip Mason's relationship with his former employers, who owned both the NME and MM - and the copy it generated domestically, which had been the case with previous Australian rock magazines.
There were three eras of RAM, each defined by their editors/ownerships – with O'Grady, Greg Taylor and Phil Stafford as successive editors - and launched with a first issue, with Mick Jagger on the cover, on 8 March 1975.
Under O'Grady, who at first virtually wrote the magazine single-handedly under a variety of pseudonyms – his then-girlfriend Annie Beaumont taking the photos – RAM charted the transition of the Australian music scene from the Countdown era, with its teenybopper battles between Sherbet and Skyhooks, to the emergence, in the latter 70s, of the fabled pub circuit with its figureheads like Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and the Angels. Recruiting writers like Jenny then-Hunter/later-Jewel Brown, Glenn A. Baker and Annie Burton plus an older hand like Vince Lovegrove, the magazine was starting to reach a significant audience, and reach O'Grady's objective of putting Australian rock journalism on a par with its counterpart overseas.
The late-70s' punk uprising that took place as readily in Australia as it did elsewhere around the world was a challenge for RAM, but one that O'Grady, with his personal championship of Radio Birdman, managed to meet quite successfully. Additionally bringing in new younger writers like, progressively, Andrew McMillan, Jodie 'J.J.' Adams, Stuart Coupe, Richard Guilliatt, Samantha Trenoweth and Clinton Walker, RAM integrated the new wave alongside its coverage of the mainstream, and this gave it another edge over its competitors like Juke and Australian Rolling Stone, who were slower on the uptake.
By 1980, after having started out in a terrace house in Paddington and then moved to another terrace in Glebe, RAM had taken over a building on Crown St. in the heart of Darlinghurst, and so successful was the burgeoning little media empire overseen by Philip Mason and his partner Barry Stewart – called Soundtracks – that it had bought up the surfing magazine Tracks and launched a fashion magazine called Ragtimes too. Like RAM, Tracks was the leader in its field, and the pair were trailed by Ragtimes, which Mason had created as a plaything for his wife, Alexandra Joel.
In May 1980, Soundtracks sold RAM to Eastern Suburbs Newspapers, thus beginning O'Gradys slow exit from the magazine. (Mason-Stewart would go on to long publish Australian editions of Playboy and Smash Hits.) Greg Taylor, a musician as well as a journalist (sax player with Jimmy and the Boys), meantime served an apprenticeship as assistant editor under O'Grady. New writers like Kent Goddard, Miranda Brown (Jenny's younger sister) and Elly McDonald were blooded. In late 1981, O'Grady finally, formally left his creation and Greg Taylor took over the editorship. O'Grady went on to work successfully in print, film, TV and radio, founding the influential tipsheet The Music Network in 1994; he died in 2018. RAM left Darlinghurst to move into new corporate headquarters in central Sydney; Eastern Suburbs Newspapers was a division of Fairfax, the media empire that owned the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's Age, meaning that ironically RAM was now owned by the same company that also owned its principal rival Juke.
RAM and the corporate world was not, unsurprisingly, a good fit – no longer were there joints before lunchtime, or at any time for that matter – but still the magazine continued to thrive. The early 80s was a very real golden age for Australian music, in terms of both numbers that reached heights that would never be repeated and quality that was consistently spread across a wide base, and RAM was the chief chronicler of the period, despite increasing competition from the now-monthly and ever more localized Rolling Stone finally making up some ground. Juke's reach was never much beyond its base in Melbourne, and start-ups like Roadrunner and Vox had already folded.
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Rock Australia Magazine
Rock Australia Magazine or RAM (its acronym and popular name) was a fortnightly national Australian music newspaper, which was published from 1975 to 1989. It was designed for people with a serious interest in rock and pop, and was considered the journal of record for the Australian music scene, along the way producing some of the country's best writers on music and popular culture.
RAM was founded in Sydney by Anthony O'Grady – a former advertising copywriter who had contributed to the earlier pop weekly, Go-Set, in its dying days, and had edited the short-lived Ear for Music magazine – and Phillip Mason, a young British publishing executive with the IPC media empire who'd been seconded to Australia. It was modelled on the English music trade papers, New Musical Express and Melody Maker, and O'Grady's stated objective was that there would be no drop in quality between the copy it imported from those papers - which it was able to arrange thanks to Philip Mason's relationship with his former employers, who owned both the NME and MM - and the copy it generated domestically, which had been the case with previous Australian rock magazines.
There were three eras of RAM, each defined by their editors/ownerships – with O'Grady, Greg Taylor and Phil Stafford as successive editors - and launched with a first issue, with Mick Jagger on the cover, on 8 March 1975.
Under O'Grady, who at first virtually wrote the magazine single-handedly under a variety of pseudonyms – his then-girlfriend Annie Beaumont taking the photos – RAM charted the transition of the Australian music scene from the Countdown era, with its teenybopper battles between Sherbet and Skyhooks, to the emergence, in the latter 70s, of the fabled pub circuit with its figureheads like Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and the Angels. Recruiting writers like Jenny then-Hunter/later-Jewel Brown, Glenn A. Baker and Annie Burton plus an older hand like Vince Lovegrove, the magazine was starting to reach a significant audience, and reach O'Grady's objective of putting Australian rock journalism on a par with its counterpart overseas.
The late-70s' punk uprising that took place as readily in Australia as it did elsewhere around the world was a challenge for RAM, but one that O'Grady, with his personal championship of Radio Birdman, managed to meet quite successfully. Additionally bringing in new younger writers like, progressively, Andrew McMillan, Jodie 'J.J.' Adams, Stuart Coupe, Richard Guilliatt, Samantha Trenoweth and Clinton Walker, RAM integrated the new wave alongside its coverage of the mainstream, and this gave it another edge over its competitors like Juke and Australian Rolling Stone, who were slower on the uptake.
By 1980, after having started out in a terrace house in Paddington and then moved to another terrace in Glebe, RAM had taken over a building on Crown St. in the heart of Darlinghurst, and so successful was the burgeoning little media empire overseen by Philip Mason and his partner Barry Stewart – called Soundtracks – that it had bought up the surfing magazine Tracks and launched a fashion magazine called Ragtimes too. Like RAM, Tracks was the leader in its field, and the pair were trailed by Ragtimes, which Mason had created as a plaything for his wife, Alexandra Joel.
In May 1980, Soundtracks sold RAM to Eastern Suburbs Newspapers, thus beginning O'Gradys slow exit from the magazine. (Mason-Stewart would go on to long publish Australian editions of Playboy and Smash Hits.) Greg Taylor, a musician as well as a journalist (sax player with Jimmy and the Boys), meantime served an apprenticeship as assistant editor under O'Grady. New writers like Kent Goddard, Miranda Brown (Jenny's younger sister) and Elly McDonald were blooded. In late 1981, O'Grady finally, formally left his creation and Greg Taylor took over the editorship. O'Grady went on to work successfully in print, film, TV and radio, founding the influential tipsheet The Music Network in 1994; he died in 2018. RAM left Darlinghurst to move into new corporate headquarters in central Sydney; Eastern Suburbs Newspapers was a division of Fairfax, the media empire that owned the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's Age, meaning that ironically RAM was now owned by the same company that also owned its principal rival Juke.
RAM and the corporate world was not, unsurprisingly, a good fit – no longer were there joints before lunchtime, or at any time for that matter – but still the magazine continued to thrive. The early 80s was a very real golden age for Australian music, in terms of both numbers that reached heights that would never be repeated and quality that was consistently spread across a wide base, and RAM was the chief chronicler of the period, despite increasing competition from the now-monthly and ever more localized Rolling Stone finally making up some ground. Juke's reach was never much beyond its base in Melbourne, and start-ups like Roadrunner and Vox had already folded.