At its peak in the late '80s, UK music magazine Smash Hits was selling north of one million copies per issue. Although it was, at its core, a publication celebrating the most commercial pop music, with Wham!, Bros, Kylie Minogue, Culture Club and Duran Duran among its regular cover stars, rock bands too would feature within its pages, with Iron Maiden, Motorhead, Whitesnake, Killing Joke, Stiff Little Fingers, Public Image Ltd., Dead Kennedys and The Ruts among the artists popping up from the early '80 onwards.
The potential to reach over a million music-obsessed teenagers every fortnight was obviously hugely appealing to record companies, musicians and their managers and publicists, which was presumably why, in the early summer of 1986, an invitation was extended to the magazine to send a writer and photographer to Tokyo to catch the closing shows of Ozzy Osbourne's The Ultimate Sin Tour in Japan.
At the time, Osbourne was enjoying both commercial success and critical acclaim. His fourth studio album, 1986's The Ultimate Sin, had crashed into the Top 10 in both the UK and the US, where it was classified Platinum, for one million sales, within four months of its release. The singer's seven-date Japanese tour was sandwiched in between two legs of a huge US 'sheds' tour (with Metallica in support), with the former Black Sabbath frontman also booked to headline the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park in mid-August.
