To view and download issues, click on thumbnails below Roadrunner’s first national issue hit the newsstands in February 1979. The cover story on the riots and run-ins of Elvis Costello’s summer tour was by the hard-hitting Ross Stapleton, whose fascination with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the music industry was to yield a series of lengthy features over the following twelve months. As well as being engrossing exposes in their
As the 1970s wound to a close, the local music scene in Adelaide was struggling, although there were some new shoots starting to appear. It seemed everyone involved was either trying to get out, or just killing time, waiting for something GREAT to happen. And it did. The advent of the Progressive Music Broadcasting Associations’s community radio station 5MMM-FM in 1980 gave Adelaide music an absolute turbo-charge and helped to
I first met Keith Shadwick in 1978 when he came to Adelaide on tour with the High Rise Bombers. Keith was a poet and a saxophone player and he was friends with my housemate Larry. They’d both been part of the Melbourne mid-70s performance poetry push, with people like Eric Beach, Gig Ryan and πο. Keith had an impressive musical pedigree too, having been in Renee Geyer’s first band Sun, Sydney
Brian Johnstone, one of my oldest and dearest friends, passed away in Adelaide in January 2015 after a long battle with cancer. We met in Adelaide in the late 70s, in the early days of Roadrunner, were housemates for awhile and he wrote a few pieces for the mag, including this entertaining account of the media shenanigans surrounding the Stranglers tour which was the cover story in the March 1979
