Britain’s most fanciable

The wit and wisdom of Smash Hits

Some time in the autumn of 1983, a woman walked into a newsagent in southwest London and had an extremely confusing conversation with the shopkeeper. That woman was my mother, and after some determined badgering she had finally agreed to add the British pop magazine Smash Hits to our regular paper delivery, which until this point had been pristinely focused around The Guardian. But when she started talking to our newsagent - with whom she was in a vicious running dispute over his decision to display porn magazines at eye level - she couldn’t remember the name of the magazine, or when it was published, or how often, or how much it cost. When she got home she was tired and irritable, and needed an immediate infusion of instant coffee and Dunhill cigarettes. 

‘Nice to see him looking more casual’

Caption for a picture of Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley getting married in an Antony Price morning suit, a top hat and a splendid silk cravat

At least, that was the way she told the story. My mother had been a rebellious teen, sneaking out of her bedroom window to dance rock ‘n’ roll with the local hotheads. She found my newfound enthusiasms - vanilla pop music, antiseptic young men, teeny-bopper magazines - unspeakably cringe, and her pantomime of ignorance at the newsagents’ shop was probably a distancing technique. I think I kind of suspected this even at the time, but I didn’t care. I knew Smash Hits wasn’t cool: even among the second years at my all-girls’ school, Smash Hits was never cool. But what my mother didn’t know was that it was a singular beast. In its fortnightly pages, I’d found my people: not the pop stars, but my fellow readers. And the writers.

‘Fell-walking with Fallon from Dynasty’ 

A staff writer’s entry to a list feature about ideal dates (note the direct line between this and the Alan Partridge ‘monkey tennis’ sketch, 20 years later)

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Young girls are stupid and giddy and have no taste, and the things they like are bad by definition. We all agree on this. Or at least we did, until Nick Logan set up Smash Hits in 1978 and turned it into something very unusual: a pop magazine that liked and respected its audience, and took its craft seriously. Most of my school friends read No. 1, in which the prose was what you might politely call ‘sufficient’: this is Nik Kershaw, Nik Kershaw is wearing a hat, Nik Kershaw looks cute in his hat - very much the Ladybird book of chart music. Smash Hits was a whole other fistful of popcorn. Its audience was hormonally driven, and their crushes informed many of their purchasing choices. Instead of pretending that this was a dirty secret, the squarely-named ‘Most Fanciable Male’ (which I’m pretty sure John Taylor won five years running) was given pride of place in its annual Readers’ Poll.

‘Lol Tolhurst is apparently “immensely into vice”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. “More so than anyone I’ve ever met” muses Robert.’

Interview with The Cure, 1983 

It brought a meta-awareness to everything it did, combining distance and irony with an immersive friendliness. It knew that many of its subjects and interviewees were entirely ridiculous, but - crucially - it also knew that its readers were not. It managed to acknowledge the lunacy of the pop world while wholly identifying with fans, which is not an easy trick to pull off. Nothing Smash Hits did was easy to pull off, and yet every sentence felt effortless thanks to its endoskeleton of flexible intelligence and fierce editing. It spoke to its readers as though they were intelligent friends, a technique that was common then for ‘premium’ adult brands but hadn’t previously been applied to teenagers in Kajagoogoo t-shirts. (These days every single brand assumes one of two voices: ickle cutesy, or brightly hectoring.)

‘Regardless of what it said on the contents page, the cover pic last issue was of OMD.’

Correction note 

The design might have been full of Studio Line neon pastels and pointy graphics, but the copy carefully balanced the ludicrous against the serious, and always knew which was which. A pulverising cannonade of jokes shared space with highly legible explanations of pop stars’ current preoccupations, from the music of Fela Kuti to unilateral disarmament. ‘I’ve spray painted “The Cappuccino Kid” on my scooter but I don’t know what it means’ wrote Barry from Wigan with a note of panic, having been momentarily maddened by the marketing for the new Style Council album. Barry knew a Smash Hits writer would be ready to explain, and explain they did: espresso, frothy milk, Italian cafe culture, the transferral of all this to bougie parts of England in the ‘60s, and the consequent cultural associations. These days young clueless people can get this kind of stuff from benevolent YouTubers, but back then Smash Hits was really your only hope.

‘According to Ancient Greek legend, lotus eaters (or lotophagi if you really want to brag) were a bunch of wasters who sat around all day gorging on great hunks of lotus fruit. As a result, lotus eater has become a term used to describe someone living a life of shocking idleness and luxury.’

Intro to an interview with one-hit wonders The Lotus Eaters

It was a brilliant technical feat of copywriting and editing, particularly when you consider the number of writers involved, and even more so when you know how precious writers can be and how many commercial considerations were in play for magazines like this, magazines that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and could make or break careers. (There are no magazines like this any more. The bottom fell out of the market a decade ago, and being a magazine journalist is a dying art.) 

‘This is the new Soft Cell single, and this is me reviewing it. If you like Soft Cell you’ll probably like it because it has a tune, although that fact seems to occasionally slip Marc Almond’s mind. That was the Soft Cell review. The next Soft Cell review will be in three months’ time.’

Review of a Soft Cell single (‘Soul Inside’, if you’re interested)

Now that I’m old and cynical and have worked in press and communications for 20 years, I can see that a double-page feature about Double Dutch - the skipping game that Malcolm McLaren tried to turn into a British craze - has all the hallmarks of a puff piece set up by some record company PR. Most readers don’t have my dubious ‘expertise’ in these dark arts (and frankly, good on you if you don’t) but any intelligent reader senses when they’re being fed marketing guff by a captive journalist. This is an example of the kind of thing that made Smash Hits different: instead of phoning in some limp promotional copy, it sent a twentysomething male journalist to actually do some skipping, and published a page full of photos of him falling over while the two young women holding the rope laugh at him. 

‘Elvis Costello’s slow songs are better than his fast ones. When he goes up-tempo he crams in too much wordplay, so the listener feels as though someone’s just read him a major novel very very quickly.’

Review of an Elvis Costello single

Going back through old issues, I’m astonished by the strength of the ‘voice’ in everything from singles reviews to competition copy. Competition copy is an absolute bastard to write, boring in its bones and full of tedious-but-critical details. These predictable, format-driven squibs of text reveal the Smash Hits genius better than anything else: they are full of hidden messages to readers and great big meta jokes.

‘See that colourful example of modern technology (top right)? That’s a camera.’

Competition to win a camera, below an enormous picture of a camera

This, fundamentally, is why people still talk fondly about Smash Hits decades later. (I’ll bet my mention of No. 1 is the first you’ve seen since about 1985.) An ordinary reader wouldn’t know anything about the underlying technical processes, but all the readers intuited the craft involved in its production, and how the super-abundance of skill signalled respect. The writers were a good 10-20 years older than their readers, but you never had a sense you were being talked down to. Unlike people who wrote for the ‘serious’ music press, they were entirely at peace with their young audience. 

‘Family favourites The Anti-Nowhere League are in trouble with the police again.’

News item about the cult anarchist punk outfit having records seized by the Obscene Publications Squad

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As long-term Smash Hits writer Dave Rimmer explained in his 1985 book Like Punk Never Happened, the journalists were old enough to know that Howard Jones’s ‘New Song’ sounded a great deal like Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’. But unlike No. 1 they would say so, and unlike NME and Sounds they didn’t think that being older and better informed made them superior to their readers. They just knew that if they mentioned Peter Gabriel it was their job to explain who on earth he was. Rimmer’s title, ‘like punk never happened’, was in itself a knowing wink to the Smash Hits generation; the phrase was a longstanding joke in the magazine, inserted impishly after descriptions of Duran Duran jetting off to Montserrat or Bryan Adams selling out a stadium. It was a catchphrase that signalled its firm alignment with younger audiences, who were utterly sick of craggy twentysomethings banging on about ancient history. 

‘My gran likes it, but she’s a bit deaf in her left leg.’

Review of a Vangelis album

My favourite part of Smash Hits back then was Black Type, the anonymous editorial writer who wrote replies to readers on the Letters page. (Black Type was called Black Type because their copy was printed in bold. A less intelligent magazine might have called it ‘Bold Type’, which would have meant nothing to the readers.) Puckish and surprisingly fighty, Black Type provoked readers to ever-greater heights of benign teenage surrealism in missives signed by such luminaries as ‘David Popple (A Normal Person)’. And then one week, Black Type wasn’t there any more. I mean, there was a Black Type, performing the same letter-answering, joke-cracking function, but it was qualitatively different and (to my taste) not as funny or interesting, and I realised it was being written by a different person. I remember being intrigued by the realisation that even a completely anonymous author writing to a set format could have their own recognisable style, and that behind the previous Black Type had been a person. A person who got paid to do this stuff. 

‘We would like to know how tall Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 is. Also his chest measurements and the width of his shoulders from one end to the other.’

Letter redundantly signed ‘Heaven 17 fans’

This moment of meta-awareness about Black Type marked the time I began to grow up and out of Smash Hits, although my parents continued to have it delivered until I finally asked them to stop when I started my A Levels in 1987. I wasn’t 13 any more; I didn’t like Bros. But you don’t leave Smash Hits behind that easily. It was as deathless and influential as Dare or ‘The Look of Love’. Any time you’re in the vicinity of fiftysomething Brits, you will hear its voice, loud and silly and intensely self-aware, echoing down the years.

‘We’ve never rabbitted on about unemployment or nuclear weapons. We consider those to be trivia, to be symptoms of a larger problem. And that is… the entire mental framework of the Human Species.’

Andy McClusky of OMD, sharing his thoughts

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