1 contained articles on The Saints, Models, The Psycho-Surgeons, The Lipstick Killers, The Thought Criminals and Au-Go-Go Records, together with interviews with Ed Kuepper, Sean Kelly and Mark Taylor. Issue 2 included articles on The Scientists, The Birthday Party, Citadel Records and The Laughing Clowns and interviews with Kim Salmon, Rowland S. Howard and Kuepper. Issue 3 had articles on Radio Birdman, The Visitors, New Race, Deniz Tek, New Christs, Fun Things and The Hitmen, as well as interviews with Rob Younger and Brad Shepherd. Issue 4, which was also the final issue, contained articles on Beasts of Bourbon, Died Pretty, The Moodists and Greasy Pop Records, as well as interviews with Tex Perkins, Brett Myers, Ron Peno, Dave Graney and Clare Moore. McFarlane wrote The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop in December 1999. His magnum opus is described by the Australian Music Guide as "the most exhaustive and wide-ranging encyclopedia of Australian music from the 1950s onwards". Fellow music journalist, Debbie Kruger, describes it as "brilliantly researched, unfailingly thorough, never boring. Essential". From the late 1990s he was a writer for The Australian. He worked for Raven Records, a reissue specialist label, preparing compilations, writing liner notes and providing research. He wrote most of the liner notes for Aztec Music releases from its establishment in 2004 to its closure in March 2012. McFarlane detailed the importance of Aztec Music's reissues after decades of recovery from a mid-1970s punk-inspired backlash "those punk bands came in and said 'Anything pre-1976 is crap' ... That carried over well into the '80s and '90s' ... It took a long time for people to get over that post-'76 thing of 'No, we don't care about our heritage'". In June 2008 The Age newspaper commemorated 50 years of Australian rock 'n' roll (the anniversary of the release of Johnny O'Keefe's "Wild One") by selecting the Top 50 Australian Albums, with McFarlane selected as one of the industry judges. From July 2013 he has been a contributor to Addicted to Noise, writing a column. McFarlane updated his encyclopaedia for a second edition in 2017. 'The Sydney Morning Heralds Steven Carroll observed, "It's so easy to get lost in this revised edition: one band leading to another, and so on, until you're suddenly asking yourself what happened to the last hour." Bibliography References 1959 births Australian music journalists Australian people of Scottish descent Living people