https://www.nfsa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-02/Colour%20TV%20Mega%20Menu%203%20TVs_1000x745%20px.jpg
The Trouble We All Have With Album Covers
Title:
The Trouble We All Have With Album Covers
NFSA ID
1230112
Year
1971
In this editorial about the trouble with album covers, Lillian Roxon is clearly addressing her audience as one rock fan to another (‘You can say it’s irrelevant, but you know and I know that it isn’t’).
She sets out her list of demands – mainly to do with giving fans as much ‘vital’ information as possible (remember this is pre-internet) about a band or artist.
She uses wry humour in her diatribe, saying that if record people think it insults their listeners to spoon-feed them with too much information, then ‘you can insult me any time’.
This is an episode of the radio show Discotique – a two-minute ‘daily newscast from the world of music’ produced in 1971 and syndicated on 250 radio stations in the United States.
The cover image of this title is a photograph of Roxon taken in 1965, courtesy of the family of Lillian Roxon and the book Mother of Rock: The Lillian Roxon Story by Robert Milliken (Black Inc 2002).
Notes by Beth Taylor
Lillian Roxon (1932–1973) was an Australian journalist who lived in New York in the 1960s and 70s. Dubbed ‘the mother of rock’, she wrote the iconic Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia, which was published in 1969.
In the 1970s Roxon documented the emerging rock revolution and later the birth of punk from her haunt – the New York city music club Max’s Kansas City – which was frequented by Iggy Pop, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Alice Cooper, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie.
During 1971 she wrote and presented a show called Discotique – a two-minute ‘daily newscast from the world of music’. The shows, which ran from March to October 1971, were recorded and then pressed onto vinyl LPs (20 shows fitted onto one LP) and syndicated on 250 radio stations in the United States. At the time, her voice would have been a curiosity for listeners unaccustomed to hearing Australian accents.
Roxon died tragically at the age of 41 from a severe asthma attack.
The Discotique recordings in our collection date from 28 June to 23 July 1971 and appear on an LP that the Roxon family donated to the NFSA in 2013. Given Roxon’s significance to the history of rock music, Radio Archivist Maryanne Doyle had long been looking for radio recordings of Roxon reporting on the music scene.
Maryanne first heard about the Discotique recordings thanks to Robert de Young, producer of the documentary Mother of Rock, about Roxon’s life. Mother of Rock (2010) is preserved in the NFSA collection as part of the National Documentary Program funded by Screen Australia.
Notes by Beth Taylor
Author
Lillian Roxon
Presenter
Lillian Roxon
Production company
Syndicated AirTime
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.