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.”
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| Also by me: a Smash Hits “live” review |
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.
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