Full Transcript for Donald Robertson

in the book, you're never the new kid for long. There's always another boat arriving and a new kind of group of families coming up to Wyala. So as I say, it was a boomtown. It was the boomtown period for Wyala. You know, so there are a lot of people there in the same boat dealing with the same issues, forming, you know, community groups. I played soccer. My dad became a, he was my coach and then later became a referee, soccer referee. Yeah, and so there was a strong sense of community, I think, was established in Royala in those years. 00:07:40 Speaker 1: Do you know what part of the steelworks your dad worked in? This is self-indulgent because I was there in the Quality Control Centre and I And often over at the BOS, the basic oxygen still made him fly. 00:07:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he was an overhead crane driver. So I think in the BOS, he would carry the molten metal from one part of the works to another. 00:08:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, well, as I said, it's a bit self-indulgent on my part, but it does bring back memories. Tell me a bit about your soccer, because sport is a great vehicle for helping people integrate into a community, isn't it? 00:08:16 Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, no, look, so I played soccer in Wales. I also played Australian Rules for a couple of years. I played for the Bays up there, Waroona Bay. 00:08:28 Speaker 1: When I was there, there was no Waroona Bay. 00:08:31 Speaker 2: No, it was a club that started in my later years at school, so Rapina and Waroona Bay. There were four teams there and then two new ones joined. And one of my mates at school, a guy called Chris Brome, he recruited a lot of the soccer players to play in this new, you know, the Colts in this new team. So I played a couple of years. 00:08:55 Speaker 1: Did you enjoy it? 00:08:56 Speaker 2: I did, yeah. No, it was fun. We used to play Australian Rules on the Saturday, soccer on the Sunday. So it all worked well. 00:09:05 Speaker 1: What was your introduction to music? Were you a musician yourself? 00:09:10 Speaker 2: No, I was never, look, I had a guitar for about a year maybe at school and mucked around, but never really took it seriously. Look, I guess my interest in music really blossomed in the UK, first of all, before we came out to Australia. And it was the, you know, the time of the British beat explosion, the Beatles, the Stones explosion. the Animals, all of those bands when I was in the UK. And then arriving in Wyala was actually, my music horizon expanded in Wyala because the radio in Australia was much better than the radio in the UK. So we used to get 5AD, 5KA, loud and clear in Wyala on my little transistor radio and my dad's radio. And the charts were just brilliant. 00:10:05 Speaker 1: I see you made that point in the book. We need to take a break now, but I want to explore that about how much more progressive music was in Adelaide compared to the rest of the country. My guest is Don Robertson. He's written or compiled a book, My Back Pages, a compilation of lots of articles that were written in Roadrunner magazine and the Countdown magazine and other parts of his life. Back shortly, folks. Welcome back, everybody. My guest on Conversations is Donald Robertson, who, a young Scot, lives in England and his parents immigrate to Australia. They settle in Wyala. As well as playing sport, he's becomes quite interested in the music scene. But, Don, it seems to me you were a pretty good student as well. 00:10:52 Speaker 2: Ah, yeah, look, I was OK. I was kind of near the top of the class most of my high school years. And in my final year, my matric year, I actually did well enough to get a Commonwealth University scholarship, which enabled me to go to the University of Adelaide, which was, you know, that was a life-changing experience for me. 00:11:12 Speaker 1: What was it like coming from Wyola down to... university life? How did you support yourself? Where did you live? 00:11:20 Speaker 2: Yeah, I lived, first year I lived with a couple in St. Peter's who were friends of my father's cousin from Wyala. And they had a couple of young boys. So, you know, I just, I was a lodger, I suppose. But we, you know, they had an interesting circle of friends. There were other people from Wyala at uni who But I guess I gradually kind of established a circle of friends. I played soccer at Adelaide Uni, so that was good. But it was the music scene in Adelaide at the time, this is 1971, was just a real eye-opener. There were bands at the Uni a lot. Every Friday lunchtime, Fraternity with Bon Scott used to play at the Union Hall, and they were one of the best bands in the country at the time. There were bands on the barsmith lawns. There was venues in the city, headquarters and other town hall performances as well. So the music scene was really, really, really healthy. And I remember I went to the Maiponga Pop Festival and the Meadows Pop Festival, saw Daddy Cool. 00:12:33 Speaker 1: Everyone talks about Daddy Cool at that Maiponga festival. 00:12:37 Speaker 2: Oh, they were just unbelievable, you know. They blew everyone away. And a lot of the crowd was really drunk and half of them were lying on the ground in the sun. And Daddy Cool came on, they all got up and started dancing. It was just incredible. 00:12:51 Speaker 1: Did you see many bands come through Waila? As I said, it brings back memories. I remember seeing the Twilights at the Waila Institute. 00:12:59 Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, I remember seeing the Masters Apprentices and Zoot at the Institute and I remember seeing there was a couple of blues bands, I think, came through as well, a band called WG Berg and a band called Bucket. They were kind of more kind of underground bands. This is kind of your late 60s now. And there were local bands as well. There were a couple of local bands who were pretty good. 00:13:25 Speaker 1: Well, I was going to ask you about that because the book that you, the magazine that you founded was called

Roadrunner. There was a band called The Roadrunners. Oh, okay. Did you not see them? Was there no association? 00:13:38 Speaker 2: No, no. Look, the magazine was named after a song by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, which came out, I think, initially in 1971, but the version that I first heard was a single when I was in the UK in the mid-' 70s. It's a song about, you know, the... I'm in love with rock and roll, the power of rock and roll. It just seemed like a good title for a magazine. 00:14:05 Speaker 1: I can't say I've heard it. We'll play a grab of it now. You just had a little clip of a song called Roadrunner. It was the song after which Don's magazine, Roadrunner, was named. But let's go back to uni. So you're at uni. You're a uni student. You're studying. What were you studying? 00:14:23 Speaker 2: I did a science degree, uh, ended up majoring in psychology and biochemistry. 00:14:29 Speaker 1: So where did that take you? 00:14:31 Speaker 2: Well, as I always say, it kind of qualified me to psychoanalyze germs, but there wasn't a lot of call for that. So, um, uh, I, I got to become a graduate clerk in the federal public service, went to Canberra for a year, uh, worked, uh, worked over there. This is 1974 sort of dying days of the Whitlam government. Um, quite an exciting time to be in Canberra. But after a year, I didn't really see a long-term future for me there. So I decided to go back to the UK with the money that I'd saved up. And I guess really to kind of try and work out why my parents had made the decision to leave. Because at that time, I still felt very much Scottish. I didn't really feel Australian. It was while I was over there in the UK that I think I finally realised accepted that I was, in fact, Australian. And it was Barry Humphreys, I think, who gave me the lightbulb moment, the adventures of Barry McKenzie. He did some records as Sir Les Patterson, which, you know, just struck a chord in me. I thought, oh, yeah, OK, I'm Australian. I'm Scottish, but I'm also Australian. 00:15:48 Speaker 1: There's a couple of threads that I want to pursue. Firstly, you're back in England at the genesis of the punk movement. 00:15:55 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:15:56 Speaker 1: How did you receive that? Because most of us who have grown up with traditional rock and the development of rock and roll music, punk was such a clashing, glaring occurrence. How did you receive it? 00:16:11 Speaker 2: Look, I'd been a big fan of what I'd call, I guess, prog rock in my uni years, you know, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis, those kind of bands. But I'd kind of lost a bit of interest in that. I'd actually gotten into folk music. That was kind of my, I went to the Cambridge Folk Festival when I went back to the UK. But look, in the UK in the mid-70s, society just seemed very kind of, grim economic environment, grim social environment. So when punk came along, it kind of articulated a feeling among young people there that things were pretty buggered, things needed to change, they were angry. And it just, it kind of gave voice to that feeling. And, you know, it really, I think it only really made sense if you were there at the time. I mean, you could appreciate, you know, from a distance, the, you know, the sentiments being expressed, but it really was like a cry from the streets when you were there. And so I, and the music papers were very much into it, all the Melody Maker, New Musical Express sounds, which came out every week, they really championed the movement. And as I said, radio, even back then, radio over there was pretty terrible. So you didn't really hear this stuff on BBC Radio 1. Even when it got in the charts, they hardly ever played it. And I actually went to see the Sex Pistols. I was working for a survey company in Newport in South Wales and the Sex Pistols were you know, before they released any records. They played there one night and I went along to see them and write about that. I wrote about that as one of the first articles I wrote as a sort of rock journalist was an account of meeting them and seeing them that night. 00:18:12 Speaker 1: What were they like? 00:18:15 Speaker 2: Well, look, they came on, the first couple of songs, the oral assault was just incredible, you know, and Johnny Rotten as a stage persona was really transfixing. He was kind of all over the place and the crowd kind of took three steps backwards. Whoa, what's this? But after the first couple of songs, Glenn Matlock, the bass player, broke a string on his bass guitar. He was playing so hard and fast. I'd never seen that before. I'd never seen anyone break a bass string. 00:18:46 Speaker 1: You can't break a string on a bass guitar. 00:18:48 Speaker 2: Well, he did. 00:18:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:18:50 Speaker 2: And that kind of, you know, put a, there was a pause while, you know, they tried to, the road crew tried to find a replacement bass string. And that gave the crowd kind of time to gather its wits and decide what they thought about this, you know, spectacle. And most of them decided they didn't really like it. So the catcalls began. 00:19:13 Speaker 1: Okay. So. 00:19:15 Speaker 2: They did start up again, but it wasn't the same. They'd kind of lost that momentum. So that was the only time I ever. 00:19:24 Speaker 1: Donald Robertson is my guest, folks. He published Roadrunner magazine, edited the Countdown magazine, and he's got a collection of all those articles in his book called My Back Pages. Back after the break. Welcome back, everybody. If you just tuned in, my guest today is Donald Robertson, and as I said right at the start, John Schumann. Legendary John Schumann said, you have to interview Donald Robertson. And it's interesting, a guy born in Scotland, raised in England, moved to Adelaide in his teenage years, goes to university, studies science basically, and then goes back to England to absorb the music scene. It seems to me, Don, you must have been a bit confused as to

your own... I know we touched on it in the last break. When you're back in England, you're felt for the first time Australian, but there's still that Scottish nationalism, the fact you were raised in England, and then is it an amalgam of all those things? 00:20:23 Speaker 2: I think it is, yeah. Look, you know, my big kind of dilemma comes whenever Scotland plays Australia at soccer or they don't play each other at cricket much, but particularly... And I guess another kind of light bulb moment, when Socceroos played Scotland for a place at the 1986 World Cup, I found myself supporting Australia. But usually in rugby, if the Wallabies are playing Scotland, I tend to go for Scotland. So, yeah, a bit. 00:21:00 Speaker 1: But you explore that Scottish nationalism there. There's an article on John McLean. Now, I've never heard of John McLean, and it seems to me that you didn't know much about him either until you explored his nationalism and his socialism and actually visited his grave. So tell us about John McLean. 00:21:21 Speaker 2: Okay, well, John McLean was a socialist schoolteacher in Scotland before and during and a little bit after the First World War. So he was part of the anti-war movement in the First World Wars and not a lot said about the anti-war movement, but it was pretty strong at the time in Scotland and the rest of Europe, in fact. But yeah, I'd never, growing up, I had an interest in Scottish history. My father also had that interest. And I'd never heard of John McClane until I heard a folk record by a singer called Dick Gochins. And he sang a song called the John McLean March, which has a great John, one of its kind of choruses, great John McLean has come home to the Clyde. Now it was obvious from the song that this was a real person and that he was being welcomed back into Glasgow after a stint in prison. So I was intrigued. And eventually I found a couple of books a biography of him by his daughter and another book about that period, that First World War period. And the more I read about him, the more I kind of wondered why he wasn't more prominent in histories of the First World War or indeed in histories of Scotland. And I guess I came to the view that there had been an attempt to kind of airbrush him out of those histories. And I thought, well, why is that? Why would that be the case? And I guess I came to the conclusion that that had happened because the ideas that he was promulgating were still quite dangerous ideas. 00:23:13 Speaker 1: He was a Marxist, surely. 00:23:15 Speaker 2: He was a Marxist. 00:23:17 Speaker 1: Mine was the Russian Revolution. I'd argue with you on this that he picked the wrong side. 00:23:26 Speaker 2: Well, that could be a long discussion, Graham. 00:23:31 Speaker 1: But this is your program. You're going to be allowed to smack me down. No. 00:23:36 Speaker 2: Well, look, he had grown up in Glasgow. He'd grown up in a city and an environment where the rich were rich, the poor were poor. There were terrible kind of social and housing conditions in Glasgow. He saw that as a child growing up. He became a socialist. because of that experience. And the socialist movement was very strong in Scotland before and during the First World War. So he was looking for a reorganisation of society, absolutely. And he actually stood for Parliament a couple of times, did reasonably well, didn't get a seat. But his anti-war agitation was, got him in trouble with the authorities during the war. There was an act of parliament called the Defence of the Realm Act, which basically, you know, was designed to capture anyone who was too strident in their anti-war utterances. And he was arrested, convicted, put into hard labour prison in Peterhead in the north of Scotland for basically saying that he was against the war. 00:24:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, it has a different, you know, when you look at it from this age and, you know, you can understand why, because that was a terrible war, World War I. He died young and has he faded from, you know, history? Has he faded from Scottish memory? 00:25:07 Speaker 2: I think in Scotland there's still, you know, there's a John McLean Society. There are monuments to him around Glasgow. Not many, but there are some. Anyway, I was intrigued by his story and, yes, I went back to Scotland a few times after I'd taken a voluntary redundancy package from my job 10, 13 years ago. I went back to it was my kind of my project to get my teeth into after I wasn't working full time anymore. So I went back to Scotland a few times researching the story. Initially I thought I'd write a film script but ended up writing a book. 00:25:47 Speaker 1: So all of this is happening. What gives you the idea or the inspiration to establish a music magazine? 00:25:58 Speaker 2: So coming back from the UK in 1977, I came back, you know, sort of flush with excitement for all this music that I'd been listening to over there. And I went around to all my old uni friends. I brought back 25 singles. I went around to all my friends, tried to play them these singles to get them interested. Most of them looked at me quite strangely and said, would you like another cup of tea? 00:26:26 Speaker 1: What singles are you talking about? 00:26:30 Speaker 2: Oh, I'm talking about the Sex Pistols singles, Clash, The Damned. Slaughter and the Dogs, The Zillows, The Buzzcocks. 00:26:41 Speaker 1: Gee, I wonder why they looked strange to me. 00:26:44 Speaker 2: Elvis Costello. 00:26:45 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Fair enough. Okay. 00:26:48 Speaker 2: The acceptable face of them. But anyway, one of them knew Stuart Coop, who was editing Empire Times, Flinders University at the time. And I actually listened to your interview with Stuart from last year in preparation for this so good interview but anyway Stuart and I shared a kind of love for this new music and we decided in the spirit of the times I guess the spirit of the times was do it yourself a lot of these young bands in the UK

cobbled together enough to record a single and put out a single and you know they didn't have enough money to do an album the record companies weren't interested in signing them but you know they did it themselves and around that there grew up what were called fanzines. So these were like little kind of magazines that fans put together, photocopied, stapled, sold, but, you know, talking about this new music. So Stuart and I decided, you know, why don't we do a fanzine? So we did a fanzine in Adelaide, December 1977. We enjoyed it. And then we thought, oh, that was fun. So we went around the Adelaide music industry uh at the time to see if there was any interest in if we did a magazine because that's what we thought would be the next step whether there would be any interest in the industry and kind of you know giving us ads and uh you know trying to put a magazine together and there was so there's a guy called chris plimmer who worked at sphere at the uh in lefevre terrace in north adelaide uh they used to book all the local bands and bring the interstate bands in. So he was a big supporter and they kind of coordinated the advertising and the gig guide for the magazine. And so Stuart and I, and we got Empire Times at Flinders Uni to print the thing and we used to sneak into 5UV to use their electric typewriter to type out the stories because they had this golf ball typewriter which was cutting edge at the time. So yeah, the first year we put, put this magazine together and then Stuart left. He went to Sydney to work for Ram and I was, you know, I was in, I had a job by then, but I was enjoying what I was doing with the magazine much more than the job. So I quit the job. I went full time into the magazine, took it national because initially it'd been only South Australia. And yeah, so that, that ran for. 00:29:27 Speaker 1: 48 issues, five years, um, Okay, well, hold that thought while we take a break and we'll come back and explore some of that journey of those 48 issues. My guest today is Donald Robertson. who's uh well it's it's a book but it's a collection of it's a really easy thing to read actually because it's a collection of articles and uh and the life it's called my back pages back after the break don robertson is my guest donald robertson is proud scott via wyala adelaide everywhere else um You've assembled a collection of articles and columns that you've done, mainly from your time publishing Roadrunner and editing Countdown. You've called it My Back Pages, and I wonder why, because that's a famous Bob Dylan song, My Back Pages. Was there any association with that? 00:30:18 Speaker 2: Not really. I like the title, as you say, the collection of mainly previously published pieces. There's some new material in there as well. But no, it just, it struck me as quite a descriptive title of, you know, gathering together work that you had previously, that had previously been published. 00:30:40 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:30:41 Speaker 2: Nothing particularly to do with the Bob Dylan song. I actually looked at the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song and there was nothing really about. 00:30:49 Speaker 1: Well, it's a stranger song. It is a stranger. I don't know how many songs, he's a genius, but that, The lyrics of that song just don't make sense, basically. 00:31:01 Speaker 2: That's what I thought. 00:31:04 Speaker 1: Okay, so you talked about how you start to assemble a magazine. How successful was it, do you think? 00:31:12 Speaker 2: Look, it was the big rock magazines in Australia at the time were Ram out of Sydney and Duke out of Melbourne. And we were very much, Roadrun's very much kind of the third, you know, on the third tier. But it was a national magazine published out of Adelaide, which was pretty unusual for the time. A few people commented in more recent times how they were kind of a bit impressed by that. In terms of sales, probably peaked at about $ 4, 000 or $ 5, 000 a month. It was monthly. But readership. rule of thumb on readership, four or five people would, would have a look at each copy. So, you know, readership of maybe 20, 20 odd thousand, something like that. So it was reasonably influential and I wasn't afraid to run long articles, you know, long interviews with people, you know, kind of, I guess, minimal editorial interference, let, let the artists and the performers speak, you know, I guess that was my kind of view, but we, I gathered together, I guess, it was a group of writers across the country who used to contribute. I had a London editor, initially a guy called Keith Shadwick, who had been a saxophone player with Paul Kelly in the High Rise Bombers. So he went off to the UK and he liked what the magazine was doing. Kerry Phillips, who was a radio announcer at Double J, she went to New York and she contributed from there. So, you know, we had this kind of network of correspondents and writers across Australia and overseas. I had a really good art director, a guy called Jeffrey Gifford, who had a little studio in the east end of Rundle Street. And so, you know, we laid out the magazine there every month, you know, we got it typeset locally, put it together. Then I'd get someone to drive me up to Murray Bridge every month, because that's where it was printed, printed at Bridge Press in Murray Bridge. And I didn't have a car, I didn't drive, so I always needed to get some. 00:33:23 Speaker 1: So what year was that? In the 70s you're talking. 00:33:26 Speaker 2: This is 79, 80, 81, 82. 00:33:30 Speaker 1: So there's no freeway then? 00:33:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it was the freeway. 00:33:37 Speaker 1: So you drive to Murray Bridge, you get it printed. 00:33:39 Speaker 2: That's right. And not only that, and I'd stay up there, wait for the copies to come off the press. You know, we'd print about 10,000 copies. And then the copies for, initially the copies for Sydney and Melbourne, whoever had driven me up to the printer, we'd load bundles of magazines into the back

of the car, drive them down to the railway station, mark them Sydney and, you know, deliver them to the goods receivable guy there, drive back. get another bundle, drive down, mark them all Melbourne. And that was how kind of hand-to-mouth cottage industry the whole thing was. 00:34:23 Speaker 1: Oh, it sounds hard work and it doesn't sound very profitable. 00:34:26 Speaker 2: Not profitable at all, but absolutely great fun and the best apprenticeship in publishing you could ever hope for. 00:34:34 Speaker 1: You must have had a favourite, did you? Of all those bands you interviewed, you've had associations with, you must have favourites. 00:34:42 Speaker 2: Look, the Scottish band Simple Minds, they were a favourite in the kind of early 80s. I really enjoyed their music and, you know, fellow Scots, that kind of helped as well. In Excess, I got very close to In Excess more in the mid 80s when I was up here in Sydney and went on tour with them up to Queensland and Northern Territory. on the Listen Like Thieves tour, which was quite an experience. 00:35:14 Speaker 1: Explain the charisma of, you know, that band and their lead singer. 00:35:19 Speaker 2: In excess, well, when they really hit their straps live, I just thought there was nothing to beat them. You take all your other international bands and the other Australian bands, they had a kind of, I don't know, a drive, a common purpose. I guess forged, you know, by the fact three of them are brothers, but, you know, also... playing in the kind of mining camps of Western Australia. And that would be tough, you know. And in Andrew Farris, they had, you know, someone approaching musical genius status. And, yeah, in terms of charisma, Michael Hutchence, you know, he's almost like Jim Morrison from The Doors reincarnated at times. Yeah, he was. 00:36:02 Speaker 1: It's a good analogy, actually. What about the other big South Australian band like Cold Chisel? Oh, yeah, Cold Chisel. 00:36:09 Speaker 2: I loved Cold Chisel. And, you know, I kind of got, I guess, I got closest to Don Walker, I suppose, in terms of interviews. I was always interested in interviewing Don because he was the songwriter. I did interview Jimmy Barnes a few times over the years, but probably not so much in the Chisel years. I was kind of zeroed in on Don as kind of the main man. And in fact, I remember Jimmy Barnes telling me Cold Chisel was Don Walker's band, which, you know, it's probably. 00:36:40 Speaker 1: But he seems such a misfit in that band. He's so different, like the image of Jimmy Barnes, the rock singer. I don't know how that... How did it work? You'd probably have a better idea than I would. 00:36:57 Speaker 2: Well, I mean, he... Yeah, I mean, he was. 00:37:01 Speaker 2: What was he, a PhD or something? 00:37:03 Speaker 1: I think he worked at Weapons Research. 00:37:07 Speaker 2: Yeah, WRE out at Salisbury, yeah. You know, physicist or something of that kind. Yeah, so quite a, I guess, an intellectual. But I guess with Don, there must be a wild side to Don because, you know, you see him on stage, he's really getting into it. So he loves the performance and he's now, you know, in fact, he's playing around now promoting his latest album. 00:37:30 Speaker 1: So, Doc Neeson and the Angels, I mean, he was as charismatic as any front man, surely. 00:37:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And again, but a bit like Don, very quiet off stage. You know, he kind of put on a persona on stage, a bit like Chrissie Amflit. Chrissie Amflit's persona on stage was nothing like her off stage. I interviewed her... in the early days of divinals and she hadn't done many interviews. Vince Lovegrove was managing divinals at the time. I knew Vince from his time in Adelaide. Uh, and Vince picked me to do the, the kind of, you know, uh, the interview for countdown magazine, um, out of all the other kinds of magazines. And I think he kind of maybe trusted me a bit, but, um, interviewing Chrissy was, she, she was really, you know. 00:38:20 Speaker 1: Quiet, thoughtful, um, Which was wild on stage. 00:38:25 Speaker 2: On stage, totally. Put on a persona for performance, yeah. 00:38:30 Speaker 1: That didn't last for all that long. So what did you do after the magazine? I know you worked at Countdown. 00:38:39 Speaker 2: Yeah, Countdown here in Sydney up until the mid-' 80s. I had a year in London with Countdown magazine as a London editor. Then I came back and Countdown had been purchased by Fairfax Magazines during its life. And I did a textbook for high school music. It was like a rock and roll textbook for high school music for New South Wales. It's called Roll Over Beethoven. And its aim was to kind of give music students an insight into music the creation and the history and the instrument used to make rock music, you know. So as the title would suggest, roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news, you know. here's this music that most of the students are interested in. Why don't you teach them a bit about that as well as, you know. 00:39:36 Speaker 1: The classical? So in 2026, you've assembled this, is it a memoir, an anthology of my back pages? Is there a, is it? Is it a trip down nostalgia lane for you or is there another reason for doing it now? 00:39:51 Speaker 2: It's a bit of a trip down nostalgia lane. I guess it came together when I came back from launching the John McLean book in Scotland last year. It was the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen, his first show in the UK, in London, which I attended. And that kind of prompted me to kind of go back through, you know, old kind of letters and diaries and stuff like that, and write a piece about, you know, the 50th anniversary of Bruce Springsteen comes to the UK. And that was kind of the genesis of, oh, okay, well, what about all the other stuff that I've written over the years? Could I put that together in something that made sense? 00:40:35 Speaker 1: Well, it makes great reading and it's easy reading because you can sort of, dive into it and come out of it and go back to another spot. And there's different histories there. And you've assembled a playlist too. I mean, I know we're out of time, but there's the playlist which you can link up to Spotify and it connects you to all those different eras, which I've taken advantage of, Donna, I have to say. 00:40:57 Speaker 2: I'm happy to hear that. 00:41:00 Speaker 1: I can recommend it for entry if you love your music. My Back Page is by Donald Robertson. Don, thanks so much for your time. Good luck with it. 00:41:07 Speaker 2: Thank you very much. 00:41:09 Speaker 1: Don Robertson was my guest, folks. Thank you for joining us. And folks, if you want to meet Don and you can hear him interviewed by John Schuman, get along to the Governor Highmarsh Wednesday, the 28th of October, 6pm, and Don will have a chat to John Schuman and introduce the book, My Back Pages. And copies of the book will be available.