End of the Q

On 8 September, 1986, I started my first proper, grown-up job after secondary school. It required moving from London to the quaint Shropshire town of Ludlow to join the staff of a soon-to-be-launched magazine, LM. Leaving home at 18, just as my school contemporaries were doing the same, but heading off to university instead, I became a staff writer on a publication aiming to tap into the so-called men’s lifestyle market, drawing on the apparent mid-80s young male obsession with music, fashion and culture.

The difference, however, between us and, say Face or i-D magazine - the-then big two - was that they were embedded in Soho, while we were trying to compete from a cattle market town in the middle of nowhere, backed by a publisher best known for computer games magazines for teenage boys. Worse was to come, however. A month after I arrived in Ludlow, EMAP - the stable responsible for the mighty Smash Hits - launched Q, the self-styled ‘Modern guide to music and more’. Founded by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who’d been responsible for turning ‘ver Hits’ and Just Seventeen into two of the best-selling magazines on Planet Earth (I’m not kidding - at one point Smash Hits was shipping more than four million copies a fortnight), Q instantly established itself as the magazine to aspire to.

For a start, it had advertising. Major advertising. The sort of advertising that publishers courted more than any other - lucrative, big-spending brands like Coca-Cola and TDK (this still being the nascent years of the Compact Disc). Secondly, Ellen and Hepworth - by now, stalwarts of British music journalism (they were the 'muso' Whistle Test presenters who anchored Bob Geldof’s sweary bit during Live Aid) - had credibility in the music industry. Not that my magazine didn’t: it had drawn writers from the pages of Melody Maker, She and My Guy, plus this former Boots the Chemist part-time shelf-filler and school magazine writer (i.e. 'inexpensive') and was aiming itself at a 17-plus demographic. We had plenty of music, from the Psychedelic Furs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Level 42 (my first big-name, Top 40 interview, y’all), but steered consciously into non-music topics, such as an entire issue focused on The Big Scary Thing of its day, HIV/AIDS.

Q, on the other hand, had a different brief. For a start, it was an out-and-out music magazine aimed at the older consumer (CD-buying types in - gasp! - their 30s who, yes, may have been into Dire Straits, but because of the CD, were repurchasing their record collections to experience them with pristine digital sound™). For many of Q's readers, it was about reconnecting with the artists of their teenage years. Hence Q’s first issue featuring Paul McCartney on its cover and an interview with Bob Dylan, with Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John and Genesis following on the fronts of the next two issues. We might look back upon this now as the emergence of Dad Rock, but as Hepworth himself pointed out in a recent eulogy in the New Statesman to the child he co-parented, Q was as much a reflection of the growing acceptance that the classic rock era was, in fact OK. Not that Q - which publishes its final edition today - was ever going to be a shrine to the hoary and the old. Over 414 issues and 34 years, it evolved into something more than a platform for wistful nostalgia, pushing into a more eclectic reflection of contemporary music, whatever labels that might draw.

Wrapped up in our own launch over at LM, we were, perhaps, somewhat market-ignorant as to what was going on in the very music press we’d all grown up on. Melody Maker, the NME et al had become, at times, a little outré for their own good, like bolshy students from ultra-middle class backgrounds just trying to be edgy. Q did it differently. If it interviewed Mick Jagger - an achievement in itself - it would do so with both reverence but also the gentle, impish fun Ellen and Hepworth had honed at Smash Hits. The writers they drew on - also EMAP regulars - bought into the philosophy. One of the magazine’s greatest features became the monthly Who The Hell Does XXX Think He/She Is? interview written by the genius that was Tom Hibbert. With each issue he’d meet - and ever-so gently rib - contemporary cultural figures of the '80s and early '90s such as Jeffrey Archer, Samantha Fox, Jeremy Beadle or Kate Bush (whom, along with Ringo Starr and Boy George wouldn’t take too fondly to Hibbert’s profiling). He even got Ronnie Biggs and Jimmy Savile, the latter clearly before the world knew better.

Ultimately, though, Q readers wanted to read about music. They were musically literate and, unlike the readership of Q’s junior sibling/forebear Smash Hits, looking for more than what colour a pop star’s socks were (though don’t mock it - such ephemera, alongside song lyrics, was absolutely core to the Hits’ phenomenal success). The core Q audience wanted to read about new albums from The Who or Ray Davies as much as hear them wax on about Won’t Get Fooled Again or Waterloo Sunset. They wanted to read about Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but also about Hüsker Dü and the Beastie Boys. Pink Floyd going out on tour again mattered as much to them as some whipper-snappers from Ireland coming along with an album called The Joshua Tree. Yeah, whatever did happen to U2?

Humour was one of the key ingredients Ellen and Hepworth imported from Smash Hits. As someone who has, in recent years, spent an inordinate amount of time in their company at recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcast (itself salvaged from the now-defunct magazine The Word), I know what gentle fun they are responsible for. Pop music and pop culture in general is, to them, a thing of bemusement more than intense Guardian-style navel gazing. Thus, the Hits' comedy tagging that bestowed David Bowie with ‘The Dame’ moniker and McCartney as ‘Mr Fab Macca Whacky Thumbs Aloft’ found its way into Q. Such japery very often served to let the air out of the pomposity that rock music often attaches itself to. In his New Statesman piece, Hepworth recalled the unbridled joy at some of Q’s caption writing: “The picture of Led Zeppelin in full flight with Robert Plant howling into the microphone was headlined ‘The Hoarse Foreman Of The Apocalypse’. Of course it was. The one celebrating the unlikely pairing of Toyah [Wilcox] and Robert Fripp, ‘Mr Chalk Loves Mrs Cheese’. Couldn't be anything else.” Plant, for one, would have liked that. The Fripp/Wilcox view possibly less so.

The reason that Q always did well, though, was that it hired the very best music writers. As an aspiring schoolboy hack in the early 1980s, I looked up to the clique of music journalists whose bylines appeared consistently in the NME, Melody Maker or Sounds. Many found their way into Q, like Danny Kelly (now a colossus of sports radio, but editor of the NME when it ran my first ever live review). Later on, Q added extraordinarily entertaining writers like Andrew Collins and Stewart Maconie. Their appointment coincided with that glorious Britpop period, when it became OK to like guitar music again, as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the like strode the world with a British swagger not seen in a generation. It would, though, still take a while before Q stalwarts like Eric Clapton, Sting, Springsteen and The Beatles disappeared from its covers to accommodate the new breed: The Stone Roses appeared on the front of Q46 in July 1990 (before subsequent editions falling back to the Stones, the Floyd and McCartney), with Suede the next cover stars of their time in February 1993. Q, though, has never since tried to be hipper than you, daddio. In latter years it has found space for Lady Gaga, Ed Sheehan and Jake Bugg, as much as maintaining a healthy recurrence of the Wellers and Gallaghers of this world. And while, under more recent editorship, it has sought to become less dependent on the tried and tested, and even delved into murkier waters than Q readers of my vintage might have found comfortable, it has never tried to be pretentious. As a good music magazine should be, it has always presented new acts and old equally as points of genuine editorial interest.

Strangely, though, it hasn’t been changing musical tastes and listening habits that has done for Q: it’s been - like half the economy - COVID-19. “The pandemic did for us and there was nothing more to it than that,” wrote Ted Kessler, the magazine’s final editor. German conglomerate Bauer, its latest owner, had evidently tried to sell the title, but in these times of waining interest in print media overall, Q has, from today’s final edition, gone the way of so many others. The long-term decline of print journalism is one thing, but so, too, is the future of music journalism. British music journalism came of age in the 1970s, when the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and others moved the rock era on, embraced punk and New Wave, and then espoused the varieties of pop in the '80s. Sure, it became politicised by the Thatcher era, but then pop became politicised in the Cool Britannia era when Tony Blair hosted Noel G at No.10. Politics was, however, never core to the music press, even when movements like Red Wedge were trying to engage a disaffected youth. The fact remains that the youth today have found other things to obsess over, and it's not quite what direction the 1975 will take with their next album.

Gratuitous plug for a mate of mine who finally made it into Q in 2018

The demise of Q is, then, also a reflection of the demise of music journalism as a must-have in people’s lives. This is where the relevance of a monthly print magazine like Q is questioned. Even though it has, for some time, been readily available as an iPad edition, digital consumption is dropping off. Sadly, the traditions of print journalism - certainly the traditions that inspired me to sit down at a typewriter at the age of 15 - are ebbing away. The attrition is slow, but it is there.

Q, however, appears to have fallen victim to the accountants’ scourge, as publishers continue to find ways to offload venerable, traditional properties that might still have an audience, but not the kind of paying audience they once had (Q sold more than 200,000 copies a month at its peak, it’s circulation in more recent times just above 40,000). "Frankly, [Q] was never really built for the tappety-tappety world of digital," wrote Hepworth in his New Statesman piece. "When somebody put on a record by Aphex Twin, chief proof reader and leading Dylan scholar John Bauldie would look over his glasses and shout, ‘Will somebody get that fax?’ in gleeful emulation of a disapproving adult. That was the magazine’s secret sauce. Nobody was trying to be hipper than thou or younger than they were, and nobody was trying to pretend they liked things that they didn’t." And that was, indeed its charm. It was written for me by people like me. They knew what they liked, but weren’t afraid of reading about something they didn’t know they would like.

It’s here I should mention the reviews section of Q. As entertaining as the features always were, the reviews - actually, the thing that got me interested in music journalism as a career in the first place - were always well considered, evenly scored and mostly respectful. A ’three’, while clearly not a ‘five’, was still not a bad result. But while that remained Q’s constant, over 414 editions, other tides were shifting. The bottom line, then, is that its original brief could never be adapted to changing tastes.

Even after the McCartneys and Claptons had been swapped for the U2s and the Radioheads, and then the latter for increasingly more contemporary names, contemporary sources of information about music had changed, too. The sad aspect of this is that under its last editor, Ted Kessler, Q had moved so far away from its ‘old fart’ origins, that it was providing - for those who were interested - a still indispensable digest of what was on-the-money-sharp in music land. This wasn’t what Q was launched for, but it had evolved over 34 years into something that still represented the very best of music journalism. To quote Joni Mitchell - once as core Q demographic-interest as you could find - “Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got ’til it's gone.”