Considering Molly Meldrum’s meandering and stumbling interview style, it seems a minor miracle that he lasted on Countdown for so long (thirteen years, from 1974 to 1987). Journalist Jennifer Byrne famously described Meldrum as a ‘truly awful’ interviewer. Others described Countdown as ‘the ultimate squirm tv’ (Deborah Conway). Still, he has been recognised for his contributions to Australian music over the years, from his earliest days at Go-Set rock magazine in 1966.
Though Meldrum had Jeff Jenkins help on this project, the story is told in Meldrum’s voice. It is a very funny, anecdote laden book with all of Meldrum’s most famous interviews and celebrity stoushes, though he is very quick to kiss and make up. Meldrum’s take on Elton John’s 1984 Sydney wedding to Renate Blauel? Elton simply wanted to knock Michael Jackson from the headlines. (Jackson’s hair had accidentally been set on fire while filming a Pepsi ad two weeks earlier). In an ironic twist, when Jackson toured Sydney more than a decade later he married the pregnant Deborah Rowe here. Sydney seemed, for a while at least, to be the place for the famous and sexually confused to tie the knot.
Meldrum’s Countdown career was thanks to ABC co-creators Michael Shrimpton and Robbie Weeks, at the direction of ABC’s director of television Ken Watts. Watts complained that the ABC’s aging audience would be the death of the station. He stated of their audience ‘We get them until their ten, and then they don’t come back until they’re about to die’. His instruction was to do something about this gap in the audience.
Do something about it they did and Meldrum became one of Australia’s most influential music critics, in spite of his many faux pas’. I think that is where his appeal lay, his fawning interviews were hardly hard-hitting journalism, but his goofs became legendary. He was the antithesis of the slick American music presenters like Dick Clark, and he was loved for that.
This is the perfect summer read, nice and light, amusing and though the writing style is a bit waffling, it is what you would expect from Meldrum. Some great quotes are included from Meldrum’s friends, colleagues and various musos, and I will conclude with one from Stan Rofe, from Go-Set magazine, from 1971:
‘I must give Molly credit where credit is due – I know of no one else who can write so much about so little and take up so much space saying it’.
THE NEVER, UM, EVER ENDING STORY by Ian Molly Meldrum with Jeff Jenkins is published by Allen and Unwin, hardcover. ISBN 978 1 76011 205 9. RRP: $39.99
Joy Minter’s review was originally published on her website – http://www.thebuzzfromsydney.com/