The reviews are coming in. And people seem to like the book.

Print reviews

‘Roadrunner was the Chrysler of the Big 3 R rock magazines in Australia at the turn into the 1980s, trailing the GM and Ford of RAM and Rolling Stone, and like the Hemi-powered Plymouths and Dodges, it was wild and untamed, and it’s a blessing that there’s now a permanent record of it, all 500 pages of it and bound in a beautiful hard cover.’ —  Clinton Walker — 12 November 2019

‘Robertson has assembled a 500+ page hardcover book distillation of the 48 issues of the magazine. The result is a magnificent, as it happened, look at rock’n’roll in Australia in the years 1978-1983’ —  Stuart Coupe, Rhythms magazine —  November/December 2019 (pp 26-29)

‘It’s a fucking brilliant read, a wonderful document of a strange sparkling moment in Adelaide’s past …’ — Robert Brokenmouth, i94bar.com — 21 October 2019

‘The Big Beat is a heavily illustrated, beautifully presented year-by-year history of Adelaide-based punk fanzine Roadrunner, which was founded by Robertson and music-press legend Stuart Coupe, and was distributed (in its first year) only in South Australia. The book features a selection of more than 400 fully indexed pages from the original issues; just looking at it, you can see that it’s a labour of love that doubles as a highly eclectic, expertly selected history of music in Australia during the late ’70s and early ’80s.’ — Jo Case, InDaily — 14 October 2019

‘To flick through the pages of The Big Beat – a bound collection of rock magazine Roadrunner – is to be transported to an Adelaide that no longer exists.’ — Nathan Davies, The Advertiser (Adelaide) — 4 October 2019

Radio interviews

Two hours of tunes from 1978-1983 interspersed with chat about the Roadrunner magazine anthology, The Big Beat on Dirt Music with Stuart Coupe. — 29 October 2019

A one hour Sonic Journey with ABC Radio’s Simon Marnie on 4 October 2019