RIP Smash Hits: 1978-2006

Top 5 SH memories:
* Morrissey and Pete Burns interviewed together!
* Nebulous Neil Tennant asking Paul Weller if he and Mick were gay.
* The first Beastie Boys interview in Brighton (by Sylv Patterson?)
* "Stan of the Housemartins, have you ever grown cress in a shoe?"
* "Ahoy there! Where's the cougar?"

Heck, I'd buy it!

Yes. Frequently. But mostly, yes, it was for work reasons or because I knew people who worked there.

But it was their pop coverage that they really excelled at.

Sad. I was 13, I was for first time in England, I was given a Smash Hits copy by my English family´s girl, and taken to a Bros concert. That´s how everything started.

you are so indie

That's not true.

The memories are flooding back of my friend's sister's bedroom, covered in Smash Hits posters.

Do young girls even cover their bedrooms with popstar posters anymore? I hope they still do...

or even parsnips in a gumboot?

"I am Boris Becker and I claim my £500!"

But! But! Late 1980s Smash Hits had A-Ha being assaulted by an inflatable panther and smurf! Surely that has to count for something?

Buying Smash Hits was the coolest thing that I did as an eight-year-old, though I never worked up the courage to subject myself to Black Type's cruelty.

signed, Tiffany's lacy bra

Why should they perform in such stupid places as Universities when there are places like the Locarno, the Cedar Ballroom. or Digbeth Civic Hall, which would suit them just as well?

i don't read smash hits but my friend got your recent 1 because of the bands listed in it. the 'rock' bands that you put in it.. why don't you do your research first. cradle of filth, slipknot and mudvayne are not rock.. you only have to listen to them to realise that. AND most of the other bands you listed arn't either. i hate the fact that you have put some not well known bands in your magazine because now there will be the little effing teeny boppers that read your magazine at the concerts and listening to these bands thinking they are cool and ruining a good band. so stop putting these good bands in your [censored] teeny bopper magazine and why don't you put [censored] about eminem or some other fagget no one cares about instead of ruining a good band.

http://ubb.smashhits.net/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=657149&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1

In fact, the website is terrible. Have a horrible feeling that either it'll get turned over to be an advert for the TV channel or they'll sell off the url to some horrible ringtone company like Worldpop did when they closed.

Eh? What are they, then? C86?

You saw Brow in concert? Fuck me, I'm jealous!

I think the bands have done a very good job doing this already.

Tis an ebay picture so it won't last on here long, but I fondly remember the days when bands like Splodgenessabounds & The Mo-Dettes could be on the front covers.

This ad has Siouxsie and the Banshees "Pop Factory" on album or cassette for £3.99. Was that the original title for Once Upon A Time? Was it actually released as "Pop Factory"?

Having bands like the Smiths and Teardrop Explodes and Japan and etc in magazines I could buy at the *newsagents* was like manna from mars to me. AFAIK it was alterative music, and I was a weirdo for liking King or the Smiths (fact!).

I remember standing in the newsies reading a Howard Jones interview and finding out he was married, and almost crying.

Sometimes I miss being 15.

Also, I still will always think of Sir Paul McCartney as Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft, and for that alone I will salute Smash Hits for the rest of my days.

very sad. :(

Er, love from Martin Degville's 'Frightwig'.

And The Face!

i.e. now you can't get SmashHits, Face and Select, you have to buy xxxx, the only youth culture magazine that they publish and care for?

(xpost in brackets)

Then it went totally where the money was, I guess.

I retired in shame after I sent in a spoof Classified in a schoolmate's name- 'Hi chicks! My name's Paul, but most people call me God..'. He received HUNDREDS of replies. Oh, the japes.

I just went out and bought the last one. And was pleasantly surprised really, it's not all that different to what it was like when I stopped reading in 95/96ish (except that the whole mag now seems to be what the first 3-5 pages were like, then. Any longer features or interviews seem to have vanished).

Then I got the last page, and it said "the next issue of smash hits comes out on Feb 14th!". ie This isn't the last one, I've just gone and bought the bloody penultimate issue by mistake! Bah.

But in truth, this seems one of those cases where the object is mourned when gone but not much liked when present. That is: even I can join in the mood of loss; but none of us have read it in recent years; and I didn't even think I liked it when it was supposed to be good; indeed I thought I didn't like it. Probably I didn't know much about it. But - was it really good? No, I can't imagine it was ever really very good.

When it was good they employed Tom Hibbert and they printed Lloyd Cole and Go West lyrics. I'm not sure how much these two factors contributed to it's goodness though.

One thing I really liked from my time reading it was that they would always have a guest pop star reviewing the week's new singles in tandem with a staffer. These would range from Holly Johnson to Marti Pellowe to Stock & Aitken. I don't know if they ever managed to get any Americans in. Did they stop doing this in the 90s?

but maybe sh moved across the street -- cranna wz certainly editor in 88 when i did some stuff for something else he wz editing and spoke with him in the sh office (he wz a nice man -- what does he do now?)

we did this A LOT at melody maker in the late 90s, and i've done it a couple of times for Kerrang! now... magazines don't really have singles reviews now, its all 'Tracks', as if itunes downloads were different from buying singles in some way.

"Ian Cranna was finishing his PhD at Edinburgh University in history in the late seventies, whilst also penning reviews for the NME. His superlactive review of Simple Minds in October 1978 gained the band their first column inches in a national publication, but created an expectation that the band felt they couldn’t live up to."

Hilarity ensued when the journalist had to surrender her copy, because she went to interview Nick and returned somewhat dishevelled FOUR days later with a story that Could Not Run In A Teenage Setting.

Unsurprising that the indie/pop crossover worked with ex-manager of Postcard band as editor of pop mag. Suppose he would have been happy to commission stuff about artistes the female writers ("early adopters") deemed fanciable, based on erm marketing LOGIC maybe?

(haha i think the real breach came when SAW threatened -- quite correctly!! -- to invade the indie charts)

(nme was always on the east side of carnaby street: SH was on the west side when i visited the office in c.87-88, and J17 too)

Sylvia P on its demise:

Girlie-sap tears flow as swingorilliant pop mag goes down the dumper

Twenty years ago this very month, a naive, obsessive pop fan with a tea-chest full of records boarded the train from Perth to London for the parallel universe known as 'Britain's Brightest Pop Magazine!' Walking through Smash Hits' Carnaby Street door smelling, I was later told, "of talc", here was the kaleidoscopic planet populated by stars the world was beginning to know as 'Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft' McCartney, Lord Frederick Lucan of Mercury, Dame David Bowie, Mark Unpronouceablename of Big Country, Mark 'Horrible Headband' Knopfler and, of course, Morten 'Snorten Forten' Harket out of A-ha.

Here was pop's rudderless pirate ship, where stars' noses would forever "look like Bulgaria", who wore "fright-wigs", "flapaway flares" and "spewgusting perv-breeks" (especially Joey Tempest out of Europe) where the letters page was edited by a mysterious entity called Black Type, who encouraged nationwide obsessions with Una Stubbs, Dickie Davis and Umbongo, Umbongo, They Drink It In The Congo, where Brother Beyond wore pineapples on their heads, no one fancied 'Ken' out of Bros and Boris Becker would provide the endless aside "so do I, mate" (often followed by Jason Donovan's disembodied head piping out of nowhere "that'll do!").

When the news came in that Smash Hits was, as Ver Hits would say, "down the dumper", I burst into girlie-sap tears, the news arriving like the sudden death of a beloved childhood chum, a magazine which has never been surpassed in its hilarity, stupidity, innocence, irreverence, warmth and genuine love for a subject it deemed both the most important, and ridiculous, in the world.

We were a bunch of giggly indie kids, mostly aged 18 to 23, given 100 per cent creative freedom to invent a fanzine for ourselves with no interference whatsoever from The Baron (Emap), who's bewilderment at, say, a 'Fashion' 'Special' featuring Shane McGowan was matched only by their glee at the incoming millions which laid the foundations for the publishing giant today.

The Hits' legacy remains its attitude, the one which invented the pomposity-busting Stupid Question, ranging from, "Have you ever grown parsnips in a gumboot?" (Stan out of the Housemartins: "No, but I once grew cress in a hippopotamus! It was ceramic") to quizzing a bamboozled Billy Gibbons out of ZZ Top: "Do you wear your beard in, or out, of the bedclothes at night?" Famously, Smash Hits was once colossal enough to entice Margaret Thatcher to its pages - at its peak in 1988, then selling 800,000 copies - interviewed by surrealism maestro Tom Hibbert (the Hits' very own Vivian Stanshall) who disarmed The Iron Lady into eulogising on her favourite ever song, How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?

Mostly, though, Hibs was seated centre office with 20 Benson & Hedges, writing things like the following for the 'news' pages: "The History Of Rock 'n' Roll Part Three: Elvis Presley. Born in a coal skuttle in Tucson, Arizona, Elvis Priestly, to give him his full name, was discovered wriggling his hips in a biscuit factory and soared to international stardom with his debut vinyl outing Blimey, Mum, You Should Hear My Pelvis Yodel, before donning a clip-on quiff and taking to the 'road' doing 'provocative' impersonations of a tap-dancing donkey and ending up in Hollywood, where he starred in a string of boxoffice smashes such as Lassie Meets The Three Musketeers, in which he kissed a girl in a bikini on the lips and said, 'Aw, shucks ma'am!' quite a lot. Not much else is known about this showbiz phenomenon." ("That'll do!" - Jason Donovan. ) Much has been written on the passing of Hits, the
source of its demise after 28 years attributed to the internet and the pop-saturation choices of the ring-tone generation. The truth is, the spirit of Smash Hits was systematically snuffed to death as far back as the early Nineties, a victim of its own success, its million-selling revenues causing The Baron to inevitably stick its Bulgaria-sized nose in and turn the pop bible which once put The Jesus And Mary Chain on the cover ("Loud, Spotty And Weird!") into a weedy teen-pop poster-mag for saps (which, eventually, no one bought).

Smash Hits, the way it was, wouldn't be allowed to exist today, its language surely 'indecipherable' in Focus Group Hell; some of the time it was, its cavalier attitude even to the rules of punctuation seeing inverted commas appear around a full stop"."

Three of us were Scottish, our first postschool jobs in the teen-mag penitentiary known as Dundee's DC Thomson's, where the then-managing editor, Gordon Small, would tell us "the secret" of successful publishing: "KISS!" he would puff, "Keep It Simple for the Stupids!"

And so, 20 years on, the KISS rule killed Smash Hits, dumbed into history by publishers with no vision to adapt its immortal soul for the technokids today.

Ver Kids were far from stupid, even if their culture has now become so, a pop world based on brutal bitching where media-trained robopop roolz and parsnips do not grow in the gumboots of Son of Dork.

So 'Avanti!' Hits; too bright for this shadowy new world. Or, as its own obituary might've read: Revolutionary Mags In Pop Called Smash Hits, Part 1: Smash Hits. Swingorilliant pop mag invented in the hoary old Seventies, v. good in the Eighties, went a bit 'Howard out of Take That's bum' (speryoo! ) in the Nineties and in 2006 went to hospital for a very long time, ie forever. Swizzle! (Series Discontinued. ) "It's simply all too horribilis!" - The Queen. "Look at what yer could've won!" - Jim Bowen. "So do I, mate." - Boris Becker.

she lost me a little here tho.

The reason Star Hits, the US version of Smashers, didn't last was the American reluctance to mock celebrities, I always thought.

Of course Felix "we're not exactly going after the Pulitzer Prize here are we mate" Dennis' current US music magzine Blender reads like Smash Hits crossed with Maxim plus a extra dollop of cynicism/contempt tossed in the mix.

What was that classic Neil Tennant kicker? "And the rest, as they say, is history."

I don't know if that's just wistful fings-aint-what-they-used-to-be talk though. Pop World seems to be a direct descendant of the Smash Hits irreverence and been a huge hit.

Ah, poor old SH. I was thinking about how one of the best things about it was the way they always set interviews out as question-and-answer, which meant you could always play at being a pop star yourself, and think about what your own answers would be when you got famous. I think that was a huge part of the appeal. And that's something they still do now. It's managed to maintain its irreverent-but-affectionate tone of voice up to the end too.

Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere but some kind soul on the internet has been scanning in all his old copies of Smash Hits here.

Some of those covers are amazing and obviously before the days of airbrushing. Debbie Harry appears to be about 45 in her 1979 pic

the sod she does. she looks great! though it is a bad photo tbf

Christ I only remember Smash Hits from when it was wall-to-wall Bros and Mel & Kim posters, lol, seeing the older covers is pretty cool.
But they were v useful for song lyrics iirc

Absolutely.

"NEW FACE IN HELL!!!!"

'nuff said.

Smash Hits is now formally part of the Internet Archive:

http://www.archive.org/details/smash-hits

It seems still only the first few years. But still an interesting read.

It seems still only the first few years.

yes, "with a thirty year delay" only allows issues from... let's see here... carry the two... thirty years ago and older.

RIP Tom Hibbert, who as much as anyone was responsible for Ver Hits' Imperial Phase. A nation blubs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/01/tom-hibbert-obituary

yes, sad to read this on the obit thread. whenever i use inverted commas in a sentence i "think" of tom hibbert. as much of a stylist as r. meltzer, in his way; and often v. funny. i always pegged him as a byrds/big star/beach boys fan.

Was reading the obit and wondering who wrote it - lovely to scroll back up and see Mark Ellen. Very well written, and a great appreciation.