It is January 1985, and the Smiths are soon to release their political opus, Meat Is Murder. NME’s December 1984 interview teasing the album begins with the earnest question, “Rather than writing about yourself in the abstract, your new songs seem to isolate particular instances …” Students across the nation are going vegetarian at Morrissey’s lead. This is very serious stuff.
Over in Smash Hits, Tom Hibbert’s first question for the singer is: “What’s the matter with you?” Moz’s persistent lethargy, Hibbert suggests, may be down to the vegetarian’s “daily intake of yoghurt and bread”. He grills him on whether his heroes ate meat and what he feeds his cat, and concludes by asking, “If you died tomorrow, went up to heaven and met Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, what would you say to him?” Morrissey suggests a knee in the groin. Hibbert points out that it is a trick question: “You should have said Colonel Sanders wouldn’t be in heaven.”
“Oh.”
This single-issue Q&A is an immaculate example of the Hibbert approach. At Smash Hits and then Q magazine in the 80s and 90s, he deflated pomposity with religious adherence to the facts and wielded absurdism to discern whether stars recognised their ridiculous good fortune. Apparently banal questions turned out to be dangerously revealing: what colour was Tuesday? Sometimes he asked no questions at all, sitting back and smoking as his interviewees squirmed and ended up blabbing. His more descriptive pieces cultivated a conspiratorial lexicon that put PG Wodehouse and Geoffrey Willans’ Molesworth through a filter of psychedelic fancy, yet they were grounded by his exacting eye. And much of this took place in what was ostensibly a teen pop magazine, creating a generation of his “dear readers” who were thrilled at being taken seriously by a writer who took pop seriously by loving it at its least serious.
Without Hibbert, there might have been no Popworld, no Popjustice, no Guardian Guide (RIP), although his ability to pierce delusions of grandeur may have hastened the PR-led clampdown that made celebrity journalism a lot less fun once he was done with it. (Ringo Starr flounced out of one insufficiently respectful Hibbert interview, indignant that “this is an actual bloody legend in front of you”). Almost 13 years after his death at the age of 59, his influence remains rife. “I was listening to the Today programme the other day,” says friend, colleague and Q co-founder Mark Ellen. “Amol Rajan was describing some political story and said, ‘… and it all went horribly wrong!’, which is a Tom Hibbert phrase!”
A new book, Phew, Eh Readers?, collects Hibbert’s writings, from early essays about his love of the Byrds to the letters he made up at New Music News, a short-lived magazine that emerged when NME and Melody Maker were on strike in 1980, through the pop periodicals and into his cod-curmudgeonly broadsheet columns. It also includes essays about Hibbert written by friends and colleagues. Nine Eight Books publisher Pete Selby was a devout Smash Hits reader from 1981, “so when Tom joined a few years later and ’ver Hits – as they called it – “entered its imperial phase” – as erstwhile deputy editor Neil Tennant would later term the Pet Shop Boys’ unstoppable period – “I was absolutely primed for his idiosyncratic take on all that I held dear,” he says.
Tennant, then deputy editor of the magazine, gave Hibbert his in. Hibbert had joined New Music News after stints at DIY magazines and failing to make it as a musician. He had also published the excellent and self-explanatory book Rare Records in 1982. Ellen also worked at New Music News, but left for Smash Hits when the stopgap title was floundering. He asked Hibbert to submit some reviews. Tennant found them “and said, ‘Who wrote these? They’re incredibly funny’,” says Ellen. “There was a review of a Genesis single done as a play, where three incredibly boring blokes with very expensive hi-fi equipment were talking about their tweeters and woofers. Their way of trying them out was by playing the new single by Genesis. It was so clever.”
Smash Hits already had its own voice, but on getting hired in 1983, Hibbert “brought it to its full fruition”, says Tennant. “He really brought the bonkers to Smash Hits, in a kind of baroque way.” Past-it pop stars went to “the dumper”, booze was “sauce” or “rock’n’roll mouthwash”; inverted commas equalled irony and the letters page was run by a Hibbert-ghosted entity known as Black Type, who “came down at night when everyone had left”, says Ellen. “Its mother was a bottle of Tipp-Ex and its father was a visual display unit. It answered the letters with these flippant comments that got more and more psychedelic.” (The fortnight’s prize letter won a Black Type tea towel, and the notion that a preteen reader would have any business with a tea towel seems in itself very Hibbert.)
Ellen recognised the roots of Hibbert’s worldview when his father – celebrated historian Christopher Hibbert – visited Tom’s garden in Fulham and asked, “‘How do you get the flowers looking so lovely?’ Tom says, ‘Well, requires a bit of fertiliser and a bit of watering, TLC.’
“They were all plastic daffodils. I loved the idea that they’ve grown up in this world where they invented these complete fantasies.”
While Hibbert was famously inventive, his Hits colleague Chris Heath makes clear that “we were so rigorous about things being true. It’s people’s perception of what they see as things written for a teenage audience, that you’re just playing fast and loose and nothing really matters. We wanted to be able to see the absurdity and the lack of seriousness in everything, and simultaneously take everything more seriously than you could possibly take it.”
Sylvia Patterson moved from Perth, Scotland, to join Smash Hits in 1986, having impressed Hibbert at her job interview by saying she’d rather meet Stan Cullimore from the Housemartins than Madonna. Just meeting Hibbert was “serious hero stuff”, she says. Together they sparkled up the news in the Bitz front section, though Hibbert kept his head down. “He just worked all day. And he was very much amused by his own jokes, as I think great comic writers should be. It was glorious to see what he would come up with because he was never writing to anyone’s brief.” That “total creative freedom” rubbed off on Patterson (who has made the drying plains of music journalism a much funnier place for nearly 40 years). “He gave everyone the courage to go out and find your voice. There were no rules. I took that spirit with me, always.”
So did readers. In the late 80s, nine-year-old Nadia Shireen was living in Bristol, “at the height of my Smash Hits mania”, having been indoctrinated by her older brother. “We wrote letters to each other that were entirely in Smash Hits-ese,” she says. “We even made a fanzine about our family written in it. It’s hilarious, imagining these brown kids writing to each other in weird cod-Wodehouse language.” From 2002 to 2004, she worked on production at Smash Hits, still keen to follow in Hibbert and Patterson’s footsteps despite the mag’s diminished form. Today Shireen is an acclaimed children’s author and illustrator and Hibbert’s influence still creeps in. In 2016’s The Bumblebear, some bees are shocked that their outsized new bee friend is actually a bear in disguise. “They go, ‘What the jiggins!’ Kids love that line. And I was flicking through my back issues of Smash Hits and there was a feature with the headline: ‘What the jiggins is Morrissey going on about now?’ I didn’t realise I’d stolen it wholesale.”
Such was Hibbert’s reach that in 1987 (wearing a rented suit), he interviewed Margaret Thatcher for Smash Hits, her people being keen to have “you, the youth of the nation, batting on her team”, as Hibbert wrote – in other words, the magazine’s 800,000 readers. Her evasiveness was no match for his waffle detector. Her florid answers were peppered with the classic Hits “(???–Ed)”, and her disconnection from young people became brutally apparent.
But Hibbert, he later said, was “really fed up” at Smash Hits, and accepted Ellen and David Hepworth’s invitation to join the nascent Q magazine around 1987. While Q’s tone was “broadly enthusiastic”, says Ellen, they needed “a little bit of fibre”, and so coined the regular Who the Hell? (as in, Who the Hell Does John Lydon Think He Is?) profile for Hibbert to probe the era’s less self-aware stars.
The profiles are masterclasses in seeing through affectation and arrogant complacency – Roger Waters unwittingly answered the question “Are you or are you not the gloomiest man in rock?” by refusing to answer it – as well as despairing at the thin gruel being served up to pop kids as the charts became more nakedly commercial. His lightness of touch is beautiful: when Status Quo disparage women, gay men and Italians, he simply writes: “They are not very ideologically sound, the Quo, are they, readers?” (However, Hibbert’s grimly prescient 1990 Q profile of Jimmy Savile, in which he asks about the “rumour that Savile is rather fascinated with dead bodies” and is told “I’m not a necrophiliac”, was not included in the new book so as not to overshadow it, says editor Jasper Murison-Bowie.)
Q got away with these executions by telling PRs their charges were sitting for a regular interview by another writer, then subbing Hibbert at the last minute. He was “fearless”, says Tennant, who admits that “for years”, the Pet Shop Boys’ PR would say, “‘Q want to interview you’, and we’d say, ‘It’s not Who the Hell?, is it?’ I thought we were crying out for it, really.”
After Q, Hibbert wrote an offbeat music column for the Mail on Sunday, and an even stranger one for the Observer documenting his ill-fated run for the defunct Whig party. But in 1997, he was hospitalised with pneumonia and acute pancreatitis and spent four months in an induced coma. Afterwards, “he never sprung back again”, his widow Allyce Hibbert writes. After three years, she moved to Hong Kong, in despair at Hibbert’s refusal to get better. He never worked again and died in 2011. “It was so horrible,” Allyce writes. “Suddenly everything came flooding back. But then I could start liking him again, because I didn’t have to deal with the reality of him.”
By the end of the 90s, Hibbert’s influence was waning. The Smash Hits I grew up reading was a gaudy kids’ mag, and closed in 2006. Pop was becoming more manufactured and PR companies more controlling. Intentionally combative broadsheet interviews lacked Hibbert’s anticipation – although often defeated – of the world’s “wondrous potential”, as Heath puts it.
Peter Robinson’s irreverent pop website Popjustice, founded in 2000, was a rare exception, influenced, he says, “by a frustration that the pop press were saying all pop music was brilliant and the ‘serious’ music press said all pop music was rubbish, so each side lacked credibility.” It had a kindred spirit in the anarchic Stool Pigeon newspaper and in Channel 4’s Popworld – in which an interview might naturally be conducted with loudhailers across a car park – although that also ended in 2007, once its healthily disrespectful approach repelled star names.
Today, increasingly rare interviews with pop superstars are often so hagiographic that you wonder about the terms of engagement. Michael Cragg, author of Reach for the Stars, an oral history of British pop from 1996 to 2006, says that the balance of power has tipped in the stars’ favour, especially as social media mean that they can speak to fans directly. Plus, “people are asking much more serious questions now and pop stars are expected to say much more serious things about serious topics” – a curdling of the poptimist ideal that pop is as worthy of sincere admiration as rock.
And if the 80s were a time of relative innocence about the newly MTV-minted state of pop superstardom, today, awareness of mental health and industry abuse might make the mockery of some pop stars sit awkwardly. And where would anyone do it? The disappearance of pop magazines took with it the scope to fit irreverent supporting features alongside the beefy stuff, as well as the newsroom camaraderie that enticed readers. At a time when Condé Nast has fired Pitchfork’s long-serving features and editorial staff, “it feels pertinent to point out in 2024 that a really easy way to ensure a coherent tone of voice that’s specific to your publication is to pay full-time music journalists whose focus is on making this one publication as good as it can be,” says Robinson, who now works as a therapist and in media training.
Today, there remain Hibbert torchbearers: Heath edits the Pet Shop Boys’ annual, Annually (obviously), which brims with excellent trivia. One recent reader question asked whether Tennant and Chris Lowe have ever ridden a horse: Tennant: no; Lowe: one donkey, and not just any horse but Paul McCartney’s horse. The next issue, Heath teases, includes a bit on whether they don socks or pants first – fundamentally useless information that surely improves the gaiety of nations. Cragg’s Reach for the Stars revels in the minutiae of a shiny pop era that many wouldn’t consider worthy of close consideration. Shireen has sold two Ellen-authorised reproductions of the Black Type tea towel, the second to raise money for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing. Until I read a previous collection of Who the Hell? features 12 years ago, I hadn’t realised how much Hibbert-ese I had inherited through the chatter of older friends. And it is universally accepted that inverted commas equal irony.
Heath says he was pleased to hear of this new Hibbert collection, “because I think he is the kind of voice that gets much more easily forgotten – people who write very sober, analytical analyses of pop culture tend to get more easily celebrated. That era of Smash Hits is often celebrated as 80s nostalgia, but as a way of advancing a way to talk about culture, celebrity and the world, I think it was a landmark and influential.” He says how “privileged” he was to have started there, around “such switched-on, clever, brilliant people doing something so interesting, on the one hand in a scattershot and crazed way, but actually in a really careful, intelligent, thoughtful way.”
As Hibbert once wrote of his beloved Alex Chilton: “Heroes are growing thin on the ground.”
• Phew, Eh Readers? The Life and Writing of Tom Hibbert is published by Nine Eight (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
