Pulp Fanzine, Issue 5, 1978

Melbourne was electric with new music in the late 70s – which was
one of the other reasons I’d moved there, it all just seemed so
exciting – and one of the other things Bruce was doing at the time in
early ’78 was managing the hottest new band in town, the Young
Charlatans. Whose number included my then housemate, Jeffrey Wegener,
who was an old friend from Brisbane who’d briefly played drums with the
Saints before they left for the UK and he headed south, as I would do
too. It was perhaps because Bruce was so busy looking after the
Charlatans or perhaps because I had an aptitude for it – or both – that
I took over from him on doing the artwork for Pulp. Bruce would readily
admit that graphic art is not one of his strong suits.
In March then, as the first issue of a new zine out of Adelaide,
Roadrunner, came out, Bruce and I continued working away on the new
issue of Pulp. I was laying out pages on the stuff we already in hand.
But we needed money to print it, after Bruce had already shelled out
the cash to press up the flexidisc that News had recorded, and that’s
why we decided to put on a benefit gig. The Pulp Benefit took place at
a short-lived venue in the city called Bernhardt’s (the former Thumpin’
Tum) at the end of April ’78, and whether or not it was successful –
and that’s yet another thing I just can’t remember; I don’t remember
the night itself, surviving photos notwithstanding – it certainly
didn’t keep Pulp alive.
But I think that by then Bruce and I had been drawn into the
larger possibilities that Roadrunner presented, or that we felt it had
as it got out a couple more monthly issues, and that’s what really put
paid to Pulp. Roadrunner – Stuart Coupe and Donald Robertson – just
seemed to have so much greater grand ambition than we did. They were
talking about becoming a real rock magazine, like RAM, you know, on
newsprint, in newsagents, nationally-distributed, and with advertisers,
and I suppose it seemed to us like a shortcut to a place where we
wanted to go, piggybacking on the impetus that these guys already had
but from their perspective too, joining forces to make for a stronger
team. I do remember going over to Adelaide a couple of times and
thinking, wow, what a flat, dull little place, it’s even worse than
Brisbane!
Nevertheless, Bruce and I ditched Pulp, with its fifth issue still
incomplete on the artboards, and threw in our lot with Roadrunner.
Bruce even moved over there, briefly, to join the RR collective, which
he was doubly encouraged to do because by then the Young Charlatans had
broken up anyway, but by June he was already back in Melbourne,
disillusioned especially by Stuart Coupe jumping ship to take up an
offer of a staff-job at Roadrunner’s aspirational-rival RAM up in
Sydney.
But both Bruce and I remained mainstays on the Roadrunner
mast-head nonetheless, and after Donald got national distribution for
it in 1979, it became a vibrant player on a very vibrant Australian
music media scene on the turn into the 80s.