Smash Hits magazine 1980s
By the nineties, Smash Hits was starting to feel too uncool for school. In the eighties it had been a different story. British pop was everywhere, and the magazine was close enough to it to know which bands mattered, what they had said last week and whether Simon Le Bon’s hair was getting out of hand. I bought comics and RAD, but you did not need to buy Smash Hits to know what was in it.
Duran Duran, Culture Club, Wham!, the Human League, Soft Cell, Madness and later Bros belonged to its world. You got songwords, interviews, faces for the bedroom wall and an editorial voice that liked pop without feeling obliged to bow down to every pop star. That combination gave the magazine its edge. It was not just reporting on a British pop scene. It was part of the conversation.
Journalist Nick Logan launched Smash Hits in 1978. It began monthly and became fortnightly, quick enough to follow a chart that seemed to change whenever you turned on the radio. By 1989 it was reportedly selling more than a million copies an issue. Whatever people said about being too cool to read it, plenty of them were reading it.
Some of the people making it went on to rather different things. Neil Tennant worked as a writer and assistant editor before becoming one half of Pet Shop Boys. Mark Ellen later helped launch Q, Mojo and The Word. Miranda Sawyer and Sylvia Patterson wrote for it too. Their interviews could be funny, pointed and gloriously odd. Not every question had to be about the artistic journey behind a new album.
Readers had their say in the annual poll, which became the televised Smash Hits Poll Winners Party in 1988. Duran Duran dominated the early eighties results. In 1989, Bros won Best Group, while Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan took the female and male solo singer awards. At the 1990 party, New Kids on the Block won Best Group, Betty Boo was Best New Act and Pat Sharp’s hair was voted the worst. The last one tells you almost as much about the magazine as the first two.
The party was not always tidy. At the 1991 show, Carter USM’s performance was cut short and guitarist Fruitbat rugby tackled presenter Phillip Schofield. It was a long way from the sort of awards ceremony where everyone thanks their record company and goes home.
There were other ways to keep pop in your hands. You could collect Smash Hits stickers and fill an album with the faces from your record collection. A Smash Hits compilation tape could turn up at a birthday party, somewhere after the Birdie Song. These are the bits you remember: not just the songs, but where you heard them and who was there.
That is why the magazine still feels so British to me, even though it had editions overseas and covered acts from everywhere. It could adore pop and take the piss out of it in the same breath. By the nineties that approach might not have seemed so cool any more. In the eighties, it caught the mood beautifully.
We have put together a 29 May 1990 issue of Smash Hits with its free gift and a Smash Hits 90 double cassette. Magazine and tapes together, right on that turn between the decades. I can still say I was too cool for the magazine. You do not have to believe me.