![]() ![]() Every fortnight, it seemed, a picture of rouged-up young hopefuls - Blue Zoo, perhaps, or Cava Cava or Classix Nouveau - would appear with the caption: “It’s like punk never ‘appened.” When Weller surveyed the glitz and glamour of early 80s pop with the withering phrase “it’s like punk never ‘appened”, Smash Hits seized on it, and used it at any opportunity. ![]() Most of the pomposity seemed to come from the mouth of Paul Weller, barely out of his teens and already giving a convincing impression of being the most humourless man ever to pick up a guitar. Any kind of pomposity was held up to endless ridicule. Its tone was never fawning or respectful, but impudent, wry and occasionally merciless. ![]() While the traditional music press, most notably the NME, became ever more verbose and sullen and rarefied in response - this was a time when it couldn’t review the new Shakin’ Stevens single without mentioning Roland Barthes, Wyndham Lewis and Ingmar Bergman’s Sommaren med Monika - Smash Hits truly understood what pop music was about. The period between the rise of Adam and the Ants and the collapse of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s “Hit Factory” empire may prove to be the last truly great pop era, in that it produced not just great pop music, but great pop stars. The indie page also went: The Notsensibles would never grace Smash Hits’ pages again, despite having followed up I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher with the equally winningly titled I Thought You were Dead. Bev Hiller was released from the Steppin’ Out column, presumably to devote more time to that three-volume biography of John Betjeman. It’s one of the weirder side-effects of Smash Hits’ existence that it got me hooked on indie music without ever actually hearing a note.īut Smash Hits was about to change: out went the marginal stuff and in came blanket coverage of teen pop, then undergoing a massive revival in fortunes, thanks to Adam and the Ants and the Human League. Here was a world fascinatingly beyond my ken. I can still remember reading the chart every fortnight, bewildered and thrilled at the names it contained: Poor Old Soul by Orange Juice, Let’s Build a Car by Swell Maps, There Goes Concorde Again by And The Native Hipsters, even I’m in Love with Margaret Thatcher by The Notsensibles (released, unbelievably, by a record label called Snotty Snail). It carried a specialist disco page, Steppin’ Out With Bev Hiller (well into adulthood, I laboured under the misapprehension that Bev Hiller was the same person as the academic and author Bevis Hillier, perhaps relaxing after a hard day researching the decorative arts of the 1930s by reviewing Zapp’s More Bounce to the Ounce).Įven more esoterically, it ran a specialist indie page: this when “indie” didn’t mean Oasis filling stadiums and the Arctic Monkeys breaking sales records, but music of an unbelievably arcane stripe. It had interviews with the Sex Pistols and Ian Dury and the Clash. In its early days, it was a very different magazine. I devoured Smash Hits fortnightly from the age of eight. Its death knell may not have been sounded by the rise of the internet or the popularity of mobile phones but by the fact that the music industry has spent the past few years trying to rid British pop stars of precisely the factors that make them interesting. ![]() Smash Hits, with its impertinent tone and peculiar sense of humour (as one former writer pointed out, the magazine’s standard line of questioning was never, “What’s your favourite colour?” but “What colour is a Thursday?”) seemed to understand that perfectly. It’s the difference between David Cassidy and Dave Hill of Slade, between Justin Timberlake and Robbie Williams and between blonde, bland, perma-grinning Jessica Simpson and Nicola Roberts, the ginger Girl Aloud who permanently wears an expression that suggests she’d be happier working on the tills in Woolworths. Americans like their pop stars to be just so the British like theirs to be a bit wonky. At its best, British pop music has always been about irreverence and irony, individuality and wit. As anyone who actually read it will tell you, that’s desperately wide of the mark. Smash Hits exists in the popular imagination as an ephemeral magazine that asked pop stars what colour socks they wore. Eulogies have a tendency to be lachrymose and overblown but I don’t think it’s overstating the case to say that a part of British pop music has died with it. Today, Smash Hits is a lost cause that has somehow contrived to shed 840,000 readers in the past 17 years. ![]()
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