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The moment that made Molly Meldrum ‘furious’

Meldrum has met all of the world's biggest superstars, but during one interview he was infuriated.

Meldrum has met all of the world's biggest superstars, but during one interview he was infuriated. Photo: Getty

As the face of Countdown and Hey Hey It’s Saturday, not to mention a thriving career as a music producer, manager and journalist, national living treasure Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum has lived an action-packed and, at times, incredible life.

So much so, there wasn’t anywhere near enough room to cover it all in his first memoir The Never, Um, Ever Ending Story, co-written by Jeff Jenkins, which largely focused on the Countdown years.

Their follow-up Ah Well, Nobody’s Perfect, which he launched this week, is a bright blue and pink solid brick of a tome that fills in many of the gaps, both the highlights and the lows.

It’s packed with celebrity close ups, from talking family with Madonna to collapsing on meeting John Lennon, from going way over schedule with Bruce Springsteen, to the time he interviewed the late David Bowie for teen magazine Go-Set and forgot to put on his tape recorder.

“A dead loss to the paper, but an afternoon well spent,” he notes in the book.

But you also get a sense of the man behind all the mayhem, fiercely protective of his family and intensely private. It’s part of the reason he hated being sprung on This Is Your Life under the pretence of presenting an award to Tina Arena.

“It was fine until the very end when they dragged out my son Morgan onto the set,” he tells me. “I was furious, because I’d been protecting him and he was very young.”

Molly certainly doesn’t relish becoming the story himself, pointing to an unfortunate incident in 2011 where a few offhand remarks after an interview between himself and Elton John had concluded, with the latter comparing Madonna unfavourably to Lady Gaga, were broadcast unbeknownst to Meldrum.

Though as he insisted to The New Daily, despite recent news reports to the contrary, he doesn’t blame Channel Seven at all, only the producer of the segment for running something that was clearly meant to be off-the-record.

Elton was furious, but Molly hopes their cherished friendship can be repaired.

molly meldrum

Meldrum’s friendship with Elton John was strained due to the incident. Photo: Getty

Madonna is clearly ok with it, kissing Molly at her landmark Rod Laver concert earlier this year.

He has never allowed his Stetson-wearing head to get too carried away with it all, getting some solid gold advice early on. “‘Basically I’m a country boy, born in Orbost and my grandma brought me up for the first eight or nine years of life,” he said.

molly meldrum

Meldrum is perhaps St Kilda Saint’s number one fan. Photo: Getty

“She hammered into my mind, ‘no one is above you, but more important, no one is below you, and you treat everyone the same,’ so I’ve tried to live by that.”

His lifelong love of St Kilda footy club was also born before he was famous, with the team doing their banking at the St Kilda branch of the Bank of New South Wales, where the young Molly had one of his first jobs.

The book details the passion with which he stood up for Aboriginal player Nicky Winmar, following the player’s iconic protest against racism, lifting his jersey to point at his skin.

“It was a really hard time and, a week later when I had drinks with the Collingwood president [Allan McAlister, who made derogatory remarks about Winmar], I picked up his tie and poured my drink all over it,” he tells me with a chuckle.

Noting his sadness at the loss of Bowie, Prince and Leonard Cohen this year, he says his saddest moment ever has to be the news of Lennon’s shooting.

When I ask him if, like the long-running BBC radio series Desert Island Discs, he was only allowed to keep one record, he says, without hesitation, Lennon’s Imagine.

“It’s not hard, because it’s so relevant today. Often at night time, after seeing the news and there’s always something awful happening with Islamic State or whatever, I listen to that song in my head. Imagine if we could all get along?”

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