RAM was founded in Sydney by Anthony O'Grady – a former advertising copywriter who had contributed to the earlier pop weekly, Go-Set, in its dying days, and had edited the short-lived Ear for Music magazine – and Phillip Mason, a young British publishing executive with the IPC media empire who'd been seconded to Australia.
Under O'Grady, who at first virtually wrote the magazine single-handedly under a variety of pseudonyms – his then-girlfriend Annie Beaumont taking the photos – RAM charted the transition of the Australian music scene from the Countdown era, with its teenybopper battles between Sherbet and Skyhooks, to the emergence, in the latter 70s, of the fabled pub circuit with its figureheads like Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and the Angels.
Adams, Stuart Coupe, Richard Guilliatt, Samantha Trenoweth and Clinton Walker, RAM integrated the new wave alongside its coverage of the mainstream, and this gave it another edge over its competitors like Juke and Australian Rolling Stone, who were slower on the uptake.
The early 80s was a very real golden age for Australian music, in terms of both numbers that reached heights that would never be repeated and quality that was consistently spread across a wide base, and RAM was the chief chronicler of the period, despite increasing competition from the now-monthly and ever more localized Rolling Stone finally making up some ground.
Photographers Phillip Morris, Bob King, Linda Nolte, Francine McDougall and later Ian Greene, Tom Takacs and long-serving Art Director Garry Fletcher, gave the magazine its visual signature.
But new waves of writers continued to come through, including Wanda Jamrozik, Jon Casimir, Mark Demetrius, Bernard Zuel, Jack Marx, Paul Toohey, Craig N. Pearce, Lynden Barber, Tim McGee, Pat Sheill, Ignatious Jones, John Encarnacao, Brent Clough, Mara Smarelli and others.
[5] Clinton Walker has also published online a personal history of the Australian music press in the era of ink, called Lowest of the Low, and it gives much coverage to RAM generally as well as his involvement with the magazine.
[6] When Anthony O'Grady died just before Christmas in 2018, it prompted an outpouring of affection and admiration, and finally the tag that he himself so modestly resisted - the Godfather of Australian rock journalism - could be applied and would stick.