I’ve done a few things in my time – launched magazines, presented Live Aid, written best-selling books – but my best line is still
“I was once the editor of a magazine called Smash Hits – did anybody read it?”
And of course back in the 80s and 90s they did. Every fortnight millions of British teens pored over it at bus stops, papered their bedrooms with its pull-out posters, used it to decipher the words of Althea and Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking”, voted for Most Fanciable Male (often John Taylor of Duran Duran) or Most Very Horrible Thing (spiders generally) in its annual Readers Poll, and generally looked to it to ward off the tedium of the school week in the days before multi-channel TV.
They were all young teenagers then, living in a world rendered unimaginable by the mobile phone. Many of them are parents now. A few are captains of industry or Members of Parliament or even doctors asking you to take your clothes off. As soon as they find out you were once the editor of Smash Hits that’s all they want to talk about. They read it at an impressionable age and boy, it appears to have left an impression.
