What a book!!
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If you were young in the 80s, loved the music and were a Smash Hits reader, you will almost certainly enjoy this book and spend ages reading it. But it will also appeal to the younger generations as well and make them see what a great decade it was and experience the glossiest, greatest and cheekiest pop magazine of those ten years.
This book really does capture the 80s through the eyes of Britain's once greatest pop mag and all those memories will come folding back to you, I can guarantee it.
Highly recommened!
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Relive the joy of 'real' pop stars
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There is no way that a magazine could get away with the irreverence of Smash Hits now, which is probably why it closed recently.
It's great to be reminded of a time when journalists could take the piss out of pop stars who would often join in the joke. Yes, there were manufactured bands back then such as Bucks Fizz but there was some humour and none of the tiresome staged fuss of Pop Idol.
Buy it, enjoy the laughs and think wistfully back to a simpler time.
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We "heart" the S/Hits
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Do you grow weary of the world and its mistress (quaffing quails eggs and waftin' around in strokesome velvet probably) droning on about the "eighties"? How it was really great in the "eighties"?? That music/bubble perms/nuclear paranoia aren't as good as they were back in the "eighties" ???
Well gerrova it there's nowt else to do these days.
In the faraway, neon lit, snow-washed days of said 80s, Smash Hits was a twice-monthly, 23 carat birrova larf, making the most of a decade of magnificently ludicrous pop stars by putting inverted commas around everything and not taking itself "too" "seriously". Where the swanky rotating door of its cover was as likely to welcome the likes of The Cure and Jesus & Mary Chain (imagine!) as it was Pepsi & Shirlie or Five Star and their industrial-strength shoulder implants. Since the mag cheerfully took the mick out of everyone, including itself, it was a level playing field, and managed to be irreverent and subversive in a way the inkies couldn't. By the end of the decade, however, when Pop had gone from being all-encompassing to meaning purely bubblegum, the magazine inevitably went down the editorial dumper (bah), though sales-wise it peaked with Take That. But from its inception to around 86/87 it provided the nation's mis-spent youth with songwords, posters and battling bands along with a welcome dose of peculiarly British eccentricity.
So take a letter Miss Pringle cos now it's back, back! in a hardback stylee for us all to thrill and thrill again to. Prepare to recall uncle disgusting, Morten Horten Forten Harket, Dames Bowie and Richard and a great big pair of wacky thumbs aloft and feel yourself transported back to a rainy Saturday morning in BHS cafe with a bag of Burger Bites and a raspberry Slush Puppie. Best of all is barmy letters page "Black Type" which once memorably (not to anyone born after 1978 - Ed.) listed among its Top 100 Albums of all-time "Surprisingly Cilla" by Dexys Midnight Runners, "Let's Have a Right Old Knees Up Dahn at the Old Bull and Bush Why Don't We?" by The Velvet Underground with Marvin Gaye and The Best of Lionel Richie (by The Clash).
A generation of thirtysomething toffs owes its sense of humour to Smash Hits.
You were missed. Sniff.
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If you grew up in the 80s........
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Then this book is definately for you! As a 12 year avid Smash Hits reader I would search the length and breadth of town to find Ver Hits if my local newsagent was sold out. This book remembers the classic, and not so classic bands of the 80s, the full Live Aid and Band Aid stories and many interviews with the cream of the 80s, all written in the inimitable style all Smash Hits fans will instantly remember. Most bizarrely, there is a joint interview between 'best friends' Pete Burns and Morrissey - wonder how that friendship worked out?! I grinned all the way through reading the whole book!
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Amazing!
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For anyone who lived through the eighties this is a must!..It has some excellant memories for me and some great pics!...All I can say if this isn't in the christmas stocking of every 35 year old and over then you are missing out!
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