Caught in a trap: the male obsession with music

In my last post I mused about the (almost exclusively) male obsession with music, and how those of us of a certain age and disposition spent their formative years preoccupied with the artwork that enveloped album covers back in the day when vinyl was the actual predominant format, as opposed to its more recent revivalist hipster accessory.

Earlier this year, when I interviewed Mark Blake about his excellent Us & Them book about the Hipgnosis design studio, we concluded that another sub-branch of this obsession was the habit of Biro doodling on school bags (and the undersides of many a school desk lid…) the artistically designed logos of bands like Genesis or AC/DC. To the adolescent us, it was A Thing. 

It’s why our middle aged contemporaries still queue outside record shops at five in the morning on Record Store Day to buy the “limited edition” coloured reissue of an album we already own, probably on several formats. Simply because we have to have it.

One of the greatest portrayals of this umbilical relationship with buying, owning and curating music is High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s readily identifiable 1995 novel about the emotionally stunted 35-year-old owner of an Islington record shop, who processes the trauma of yet another break-up through the weed-depth compilation of a mix tape. 

Hornby’s chief protagonist, Rob Fleming, engages in a seemingly never-ending series of pedantic arguments with his employees, Dick and Barry, on topics such as whether to store albums alphabetically, generically or chronologically.. “The thing that interested me about people like the characters in the book,” Hornby has explained, “is that what they listen to all the time is incredibly emotive and yet they’re very anal about stuff.”

In Stephen Frears’ masterful screen adaptation of the book, Rob is transported to Chicago (and renamed Rob Gordon) with John Cusack in the lead role. In one of many fourth wall-breaking narratives, he establishes the premise of why he owns the record shop, and who it sells to: “I own this store called Championship Vinyl. It’s located in a neighbourhood that attracts the bare minimum of window shoppers. I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not re-released - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I’d feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn’t...well…kinda one of them.” 

Conversations between Gordon and the awkwardly shy Dick and the acerbic counterweight Barry (memorably played by Jack Black in his first major screen role), faithfully appropriate the level of fanaticism chaps will sink into (sample argument: after Rob has included Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit in one of his top five lists, Barry sarcastically counters: “Oh, that's not obvious enough Rob. How about The Beatles? Or fucking Beethoven? Side One, Track One of the Fifth Symphony! How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?”.

The undisputed companion to High Fidelity’s exploration of masculine musical neuroses is Giles Smith’s 1987 memoir Lost In Music, which is being republished today. It’s an autobiographical account of Smith’s own journey through music, from growing up in Colchester (the same London satellite town that begat Blur), to having somewhat unrequited musical ambitions of his own. It is riotously funny in recalling that journey, and the mania Smith - and I suspect plenty of others - become consumed by.

“This book is the story of that voyage - one man’s journey into the world of rock and then back to his mum’s,” Smith explained in the book. “And at the same time it’s a book about what gets into people when pop gets hold of them. And boy, can pop get a hold. It’s pushy like that. You’ve really got to watch it. You invite pop into your house on a fairly casual basis and the next thing you know it’s telling you what to wear and picking your friends.”

A case in point: I was 17 on 13 July 1985, the date of one of the greatest events in musical history: Live Aid. It was an impressionable time. I had no ambition (well, relatively little…) of becoming a pop star myself, but I was easily influenced. I obsessively bought a pair of white dance shoes from the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden because Bryan Ferry wore the exact same pair at Live Aid. Ditto, the 12-pleat blue-grey trousers Bowie wore during his set. Likewise the bright yellow shirt George Michael wore during the Wembley finale.

But for ridiculous fanboy obsession, it was Sting who left the most lasting memory on me of that day - wearing a baggy white grandad-collar shirt, untucked, with one arm of a pair of sunglasses casually adorning the outside of the breast pocket. Sting also played an all-black Stratocaster (with a 1970s headstock) that day. I wanted to be him, and hunted high and low for, at least, the shirt and accompanying loose-fit linen trousers. I even bought a bottle of Sun-in to get my hair like Sting’s. Of course, it turned orange.

I wasn’t alone. “I really fancied Sting’s job. Great pay: the best pay,” Smith wrote. “Superb hours too (because what does Sting actually do in the long months between albums and tours? He mucks about, I reckon). Homes in Hampstead and New York and Miami and Los Angeles (Barbra Streisand’s old place, in fact). Not that I wanted to make records that sounded like his, but I was certainly on for the lifestyle. Concerts, fans. Pop music. Pop stardom.“

Smith did eventually break out of his suburban Essex confines in the pursuit of pop stardom, as a keyboard player, the result of concluding that he couldn’t play guitar and would therefore be denied the preening glory that all axemen indulge. “Keyboard players seemed to be people like Tony Banks of Genesis, perhaps the least expressive man in rock, whose idea of a crowd pleasing freak-out is to nod gently to himself,” Smith concludes. He also acknowledges that playing one of those keyboards that you wear like a guitar - Herbie Hancock comes to mind - is no substitute, either. “…it made you look like a keyboard player with a bad case of career envy.”

Eventually he experienced some fame with Cleaners From Venus. “For every Simple Minds there are dozens, even hundreds, of Cleaners From Venuses,” wrote the late John Peel in his review for The Guardian of Lost In Music, “bands which, according to the accountants and promo hit squads, have failed. I know about these failures and I respect them. Some of the best music I have heard has been made by failures. This book could equally well have been, say, the Skip Bifferty Story, the Stackwaddy Story or the Bogshed Story, but these bands had no Giles Smith to record the handful of games with the reserves they played before their free transfer to oblivion.”

John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity
© Touchstone Pictures

Lost In Music describes in glorious detail the foundations of his relationship with music, from the High Fidelity-esque arguments over which ranked higher out of T.Rex or Slade, to standing in vain on a Colchester street corner hoping that Marc Bolan might happen to drive past en route to a music festival in Clacton. We’ve all probably done it. But it is precisely this lack of logical thinking that underpins the male obsession with music, and is the frankly hilarious - if worryingly resonant - thread coursing throughout Lost In Music. It is balanced perfectly between anecdotes of being that fan, to being that fan who wants to really be on stage. “You really want to be a rock star, but then you discover that you’re really just a fan,” Smith recently told David Hepworth and Mark Ellen on their Word In Your Ear podcast. 

In the years since Lost In Music first came out, much has changed. Smith, who has written for Q and Mojo, went on to become a brilliant sports columnist in The Times. The vinyl record has been, gone, and come back again. The album sleeve has lost its great significance as it has been reduced to a thumbnail on a streaming app. That said, Smith told Hepworth and Ellen:  “It’s a golden age to be a fan and a listener. When the book came out [in 1987] it was possible to get excited by the fact you could listen to music on a Walkman. And then not long after the book came out you had the iPod which could contain 40,000 songs. Suddenly you have streaming, which brings you everything all the time. In terms of the hardware you use to consume this stuff, that’s changed but we haven’t. People of our generation still cling to the physical format, but I look at my kids and they own nothing - it’s all on their phones. the fetishism has gone. I envy them, as they travel light!”

Yours truly, in front of his alphabetically ordered record collection

Me too. I still want records on the day they are first released. I will still buy albums I’ve owned several times before. I’ve transitioned from owning vinyl and cassettes to CDs, before buying them all again on vinyl, probably for the tactile excitement that still comes from unsheathing a record for the first time and placing a needle on the intro groove.

Years ago I went through a purge of my CD collection, mainly to accommodate a girlfriend’s request to make my then-home a little less of a man cave. Of the roughly 1200 discs I had at that moment in time (fuelled largely by visits to Tower Records branches in the US in the good times when a pound bought you two dollars or so), I had half professionally ripped onto a hard drive before selling them to a second hand dealer in Amsterdam. 

In his book Smith describes this as a form of purification, but also part and parcel of the awkward selectivity and margin calls that come with owning and listening to records. “When I went to the shelf and took down, say, [Stevie Wonder’s] Innervisions, I was just as importantly electing not to play Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy or Venus And Mars by Wings, or any of those albums that had seemed like a good idea at the time, but whose appeal had dwindled with age or the dawning of good sense. I was able to prize the wheat, because of its contrast with the enormous, patiently accrued pile of old chaff.”

All music fans, to varying degrees, apply this arch subjectivity. At its extreme, exhaustingly so. “Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Rob Gordon informs his estranged girlfriend Laura in High Fidelity. “No, it’s really not,“ she replies. “You know why? Because Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel make pop records.” “Made,” he retorts. “Made. Marvin Gaye is dead. His father shot him.” Mansplaining, as much as that comes across (Cusack has acknowledged the masculine toxicity that his character exudes), it does also faithfully capture the inanity that Smith also delves into in Lost In Music, the “emotional librarian” that lies in most men, to quote a Guardian review of the book.

“The book did want to be quite proudly wrong about things, which isn’t often really a strength about rock writing,” Smith said on Word In Your Ear. “I think people like to feel they’re championing a right cause and getting behind the stuff that matters.” Actually, he did. 

Lost In Music is an extraordinary, personal and resonant exploration of the transformative power of music, but also what drives the obsession. For some, that obsession shapes their lives. For others it provides context. Some simply can’t function without music, while others will go to extreme lengths to consume it. That’ll be me, then, someone who once drove for 12 hours on a 900-mile round trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album. You had to be there. You had to be me.

Have a Word

Thanks to Zoom and its ilk, we have, over these last 14 lurgy-infected months, been given greater insight into people’s home decor than the combination of reading every interiors magazine ever produced, along with a channel showing Through The Keyhole 24 hours a day. Not a news bulletin or daytime TV show goes to air without guests coming “down the line” from home offices, kitchens, spare rooms, garden sheds and so on. Which is why there’s an uncanny familiarity to the screen in front of me: David Hepworth sat before his enviously assembled vinyl collection, Mark Ellen in his study - as they have been, seemingly constantly, over this mostly locked-down year or so, industrially pumping out their highly infectious music and culture conversations under the umbrella of their Word ‘brand’.

David and Mark have, of course, been something of a double act for the better part of 40 years, not only as mid-80s custodians of TV’s Whistle Test, but more significantly, as two of British music journalism’s most influential figures (even if they modestly don’t recognise it). While legendary scribes like Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons still command notoriety for the ‘golden age’ of music writing, it was Hepworth and Ellen who took the pop poster magazine format and made Smash Hits a publication that, at one point, sold more than half a million copies every fortnight, largely because it didn’t take itself too seriously, or the people it wrote about. More about that, and this writer’s brief stint writing for it, later.

We are here on Zoom to talk about how they’ve kept alive the flame of The Word, the monthly magazine they launched in 2003, having previously been responsible for Q, Empire, Mojo and Heat, as well as the Hits’ sister title, Just Seventeen. The Word ran for 114 issues, closing in 2012, but before it fell victim to the creeping erosion of quality periodical-based music journalism, they had enterprisingly branched out into the podosphere. Post-print, the Word ‘brand’ continues as Word In Your Ear and Word In Your Attic (and the forthcoming outdoor fest Word In The Park) - essential listening and viewing online, if nothing else, for the steamingly good time the duo serve up with their symbiotic pub chatter (sample: challenging each other to identify obscure members of hoary old bands based on their names, and distinguish them from other walks of life, such as driving for the Krays).

Anyone who has ever spent time in editorial offices such as those David and Mark have populated (and before Smash Hits, they were at the NME and Sounds in Hepworth’s case, the NME and Record Mirror in Ellen’s) will know that such banter is par for the highly amusing course. “Conversation unites!” declares David. “Word In Your Ear started as a music thing: we’d have live music and then we might have the occasional author, some of the spoken word. And what you found was that spoken words are more popular than music. Music divides people, whereas speech brings people together.” 

More importantly, though, it’s the light-hearted nature of pop that drives their podcasts. “A lot of what we do is just listening to chat, and people talking about their lives, and funny jokes and games,” David says. “If you suddenly came to it and there was somebody sitting down with an acoustic guitar, playing four songs off their new album, people would turn off very quickly. It wouldn't matter how good or bad or indifferent that act was because music divides. Conversation unites. And that's what we deliver.”

Since The Word as a print enterprise folded, and the online products have proliferated, both Ellen and Hepworth have applied their encyclopaedic histories as music journalists authoring various books: Mark produced the hugely entertaining memoir Rock Stars Stole My Life!, while David has been busy with an equally engaging series of tomes examining different aspects of rock music. These include 1971: Never A Dull Moment, an extended thesis on what made that year (as opposed to others, such as my own birth year, 1967) pivotal in rock’s evolution. It has just been adapted into an eight-episode documentary series for Apple TV+. Between them, their books apply the same wry brand of conversation that has made the podcasts such essential listening, diversifying into different flavours, and monetised over the Patreon platform (subscribers of one level of patronage can even receive a dedicated Word-branded Zoom intervention on their birthday). To date, they have produced 392 editions of Word In Your Ear, 115 Word In Your Attic sessions for YouTube (in which guests trawl through their lofts to discuss the records and ephemera collected therein), and have also staged some 60 Friday night Zoom quizzes.

“Good Lord,” exclaims Mark, bashfully, “Is there really a Word ‘brand’? It probably is, oddly enough, stronger now than at any stage. It’s a bit of everything really. When the magazine closed there was no particular thought of continuing to do this kind of thing, but it was Alex [Gold, their erstwhile producer] who said, ‘No, you should keep doing it.” 

I attended my first Word In Your Ear recording on a whim in 2016 whilst visiting London from Paris at the start of my process to move back to the UK. It was a double-bill featuring books about Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, and I became hooked, to the extent that getting WIYE tickets became an obsession once I was permanently in London. Tickets sold out the minute they were announced on Twitter (and, I’ve noticed, snapped up by largely the same suspects each time). Punters crammed into the function room of an Islington pub to hear authors ranging from hard-core music writers to obscure record collectors discussing their interests. They’ve even had the odd musician, such as Kenney Jones of the Small Faces and The Who, Level 42’s Mark King, and the late Neil Innes.

“Because we love doing it,” says David, “it made sense because we wanted to talk to people. We were interested in their books. And actually, if you were given a room in a pub and you could charge a little bit on the door, pay for all the equipment and the website, and it breaks even, we are absolutely thrilled that it could support itself. We could just carry on doing it, which is a lot of fun to be honest.”

When lockdown occurred, The Word machine had to change tack. “We just thought, everybody’s in the same boat,” explains Mark. “Everybody’s sitting at home surrounded by their stuff. Nobody can claim that they haven’t got time or anything like that. Wouldn't that be kind of amusing [to get people on Zoom]. We started with writer Mark Billingham and carried on from there. And, you know, it just kind of all worked as a format.”

Picture: Twitter/Word In Your Ear

For the most part, Word In Your Ear has focused on music-themed topics and authors, as my bookshelf serves testament. Rarely has an in-person recording concluded without me buying from the trestle table at the main entrance. In the main, they’ve covered the bottomless mine that is rock and pop, but have even ventured into conversations about classical music. 

“Frankly, what we want are good talkers,” says David. “If you get good talkers, they talk about anything, and so that we’re always fishing for good talkers on all kinds of subjects really.” Mark picks up on this:“A lot of what we do is quite niche,” he says. “You know, really obscure books about certain aspects of music. What you need is an author who can make that book full of colourful characters, universally appealing, just a great big, you know, rollicking tale from start to finish. So even if you’re not wildly interested in artists they’ve written about, you still get something out of it, it’s what you want.”

This does, inevitably, raise the question about where the rollicking tales will come from in the future. Not wishing to get all middle-aged dad, the sort of rambunctious stories that began in the 60s and continued, to a point, up until the 90s, seem unlikely to emanate from the current crop of mainstream musicians. “Pop stars are extraordinarily well-behaved now,” David says. “They’re in terrible fear of doing anything that might be remotely considered ill-advised because it might cancel their career overnight. I’ve actually got a lot of sympathy for them.”

All of which brings us to Smash Hits. A week before our Zoom encounter, the duo devoted a tremendous hour to, specifically, the magazine’s 1981 Poll Winners edition, revealing such nuggets as Paul Weller’s favourite TV show that year (Minder), and that the first album Simon Le Bon bought was The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis (also the subject of his very first gig). During my own, brief, spell in 1987 writing for “Ver Hits”, it had a well established, unique style. It was serious music journalism, but also required musicians to be less up themselves and not just interested in only talking about what brand of flanger pedal they’ve used on their latest album.

“Smash Hits was perfect for the dawning of the video age,” reflects Mark. “Before, you’d just go on stage and ‘be’ The Stranglers. Now the success of your single depended on a video, which meant an incredible pressure to look as flamboyant and fabulous, and exotic and bizarre as possible. And that just led to a lot of fun with Smash Hits.”

“One of the thinks Mark and I often say is that nowadays you couldn’t do Smash Hits, in this climate, regardless of the decline of print [magazines] and so forth,” adds David. “Smash Hits dealt with everybody as ‘Oh God, Boy George - he’s a funny lad, isn’t he?’ and then ‘Here’s Lou Reed or whoever - they’re a funny lot also.’ Well, nobody’s allowed to be funny any more, because we have identity pop music, like we have identity politics.” “You’d be corrupting the nation’s morals if you are [Depeche Mode’s] Martin Gore in 2021 going on national television in a rubber dress,” quips Mark.

This isn’t an issue of political correctness, either, but for all the variety that still exists amongst today’s pop - not to mention good music - there has been a blandification of the creed. Perhaps that’s because it’s all been done before. Perhaps, also, it’s because there’s fewer people around to report on it, even to gently take the piss. “David and I desperately miss the music press,” declares Mark. “We miss its contribution, we miss the way it coloured people’s view of pop stars. Without the music press there’s no kind of context. [Pop stars] aren’t quite as three dimensional. They’re not as funny.” 

By me: Then Jericho make their Hits debut

Smash Hits, he says, turned pop stars into cartoon characters. “We made them a lot more interesting than they were in real life, you know?”. David picks up on this theme, pointing out that one of pop’s biggest stars at present is Ed Sheeran, but that there’s nothing really that interesting about him. “I know very little about him,” continues Mark, “and I have no great urge to discover any more. But if the music press was around, they’d be constantly trying to come up with some kind of explanation or dimension as to who he is, which could be interesting.”

Even when the Hits was ribbing stars, it was done in a gentle, almost loving way. The nicknames it came up with have stuck with me since: David Bowie was always ‘The Dame’ (a monicker afforded him by Neil Tennant, pre-Pet Shop Boys, when he was an assistant editor); another was Paul McCartney’s ‘Sir Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft’. Many were the work of the now sadly departed Tom Hibbert. “Tom took over the ‘Black Type’ letters page from me,” recalls Mark, “and I think he just started to give everyone a name. He came up with ‘Lord Lucan of Mercury’ [for Freddie Mercury], which I thought was really brilliant. And that really took off.” 

The Smash Hits’ ‘Sir’ prefix found its way into other arenas: “I remember going to see Queens Park Rangers in 1991, and Les Ferdinand was the big striker at the time. Hearing 27,000 people shouting ‘Leslie Ferdinand, Sir Leslie Ferdinand’, I thought ‘that came from Smash Hits, that’s amazing!’” Bowie, on the other hand, is one of the few stars to have eluded the Hits’ pages as an interviewee. “I think he considered himself a little bit above it,” says Mark, ruefully. “It’s a little disappointing, actually, because he would have been really funny. But, I suppose, he took himself seriously, or at least gave the impression he did.” 

Smash Hits was certainly an antidote to the somewhat ‘worthy’, ponderous music journalism that the likes of Melody Maker and the NME purveyed, along with their sometimes violent aversion to mainstream pop. To the teenage me, typing up ‘pretend’ reviews of records I’d just bought, initially just for the fun of it, my aspirations veered more towards the Hits brand of writing than the NME’s. After a while, I decided that writing about music was where I wanted to be, and my bedroom-typed reviews started to build a portfolio of writing samples. 

Ironically, it was the NME where I earned my first paid gig, contributing the first (and, possibly the last) Phil Collins live review to the paper, all thanks to having a bit of enterprise about me, and asking DJ Gary Crowley for an interview to add to my portfolio of writing samples. Gary, then at London’s Capital Radio, had been at the NME himself, replacing Danny Baker on its front desk. He gave me the contacts, and my career began, even though I’d not yet sat my A-levels. The portfolio worked, and I landed a staff job at a short-lived magazine called LM, joining the month that David and Mark’s better resourced Q launched. LM lasted just a handful of issues, and my stint, nine months, but it was enough to get me into the business - and freelance work at the very magazine I’d been consuming since my early teens. I’d be lying if I said it was easy adapting to the magazine’s distinct style...much to the frustration of the deputy editor I worked with. But, then, I was still just 19.

Also by me: a Smash Hits “live” review

Mark agrees that Smash Hits changed the slightly po-faced approach to music journalism that had been the nature of the broadsheets he and David had come from. “They took everything terribly seriously,” he says. “Part of the absolute joy of Smash Hits was not having to feel that way. We could look at everyone with a combination of affection and a kind of curiosity. There was a kind of quizzical air to it. You know, you love them all [pop stars] but you very fondly sent them all up.”

It makes ua all wistful: “You know, it used to be the best part of a million people in the UK bought a music publication of some kind over the course of a month,” states David. “That simply doesn’t exist anymore - the great engines that drove them, reviews, news and information.” Times have changed, he adds: “That whole world was based around the idea that you had to feel a certain way at a certain time. You were in a constant rush to go out and find out about the big new thing, and to buy the record. It just doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no pressure on you to be first in the queue to discover something.”

The same could be said for music journalism itself. When David and Mark started it wasn’t something you could train for, even at journalism schools. The irony, says Mark, is that today, when there’s no work, there are tons of university courses. “I regularly get people saying, ‘I’m looking for advice on how I get into it’, and I say the same thing, because all of my advice would be ten or fifteen years out of date - go and talk to somebody who’s doing it now, and they’ll tell you it’s a very different thing. I’m simply not qualified.” He takes me back to my own origins in the trade: “You know, to encourage some 16-year-old to think they’re going to write a 3,000-word piece about whoever they particular admire and get paid for it, is deceiving themselves.”

David agrees. “I’ve got a very old fashioned view of all that, which is that you couldn’t - as we did - now just read the music papers and think ‘I can do that’. I can teach myself to write a 400-word review, I can teach myself to write a feature, I can teach myself to write a news story, but if you then have to go and spend three years at college doing a media studies course, then it’s likely you haven’t got the basic tool required to be able to do it in the first place.” And he adds: “I don’t think you need to be taught that kind of stuff - you either intuitively do it or don’t bother.” 

“If you’ve got the kind of nouse, the energy and the enthusiasm,” says Mark, “write your own magazine. If you’ve got a sensational blog, people find out about it.”  David says that the online world is where energy and enthusiasm for music permeates today. “The only difference is that you used to have to work with people who bought ink by the barrel, who had a fleet of lorries and a distribution network in order to express yourself, or get your opinion out there. Nowadays you don’t have to. You can go on Twitter, you can go on Facebook. You can write your own blog.” Now, there’s a thought.

All things Word-related can be found at wiyelondon.com, including tickets for the splendid Word In The Park extravaganza in July.

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.”