The Best of Smash Hits: the ’80s
edited by Mark Firth
Sphere, 192 pages, 2006
If there is one guilty pleasure from my teenage years in the 1980 that stands out from the rest, it has to be my addition to Smash Hits. A local independent record store used to bring it in weekly from the UK. The price was high, but I couldn’t resist and would buy it along with NME and Melody Maker, music papers that were sought after and respected in my small circle of music-obsessed friends.
The Face and i-D were passable glossies to tote around school and have laying about in one’s bedroom, Smash Hits was a bit of a guilty secret and always the one I couldn’t wait to get between the pages of. I rationalized my love of Smash Hits by telling myself it included bands that, while considered “alternative” or that were unknown in North America, were in fact top 40 hit-makers in the UK and Europe. This was indeed true, but still, I hid my stash from my coolest friends when they came over.
Smash Hits was different from its American counterparts like BOP in that the writing was actually good. It was cheeky and fun and a proper magazine in that respect. This came from its roots. The magazine was founded in 1978 by Nick Logan, the former NME editor who two years later in 1980 founded The Face. Logan set the tone and real music journalism was published in Smash Hits — at least in the early years and through the mid-’80s.
After a good read, many of my copies of Smash Hits were pillaged, the photos cut out and stuck on my bedroom wall or my locker at school. Almost all are unsalvageable. So when The Best of Smash Hits: the ’80s was published in 2006 I couldn’t get my hands on it fast enough.
This was a book that was made for me (and for my fellow Smash Hits super-fans). The book features everything from song lyrics to interviews, pen pal want ads to all 262 covers of issues published in the 1980s. With the exception of the forward by the magazine’s former news editor Neil Tennant (yes, that Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys), all content is reproduced from the original magazine. There’s no analysis and it isn’t bogged down with stories and reflections of the magazine’s impact looking back three decades years on. It’s simply all what is was, exactly how it was and I remember so much of the content chosen for this book — editor Mark Firth has done an excellent job.
I no longer feel the need to hide my guiltiest ’80s pleasure of Smash Hits love. The Best of Smash Hits sits front and centre on my most prominent bookshelf and while I won’t be posting the free John Taylor/Wham! double-sided poster that comes with the book up on the wall any time soon, the temptation to snip out the Depeche Mode and Morrissey pin-ups and clip the non-lyric lyrics to Close (to the Edit) by The Art of Noise remains the same, just as it did so many years ago.
