Face '83: Nile Rodgers

Another full-album, this time from Nile Rodgers. This was the first outing he made under his own name, and you can see why the Face wanted to be impressed by Adventures In The Land Of The Good Groove.

Here's the title track:



Hmmm. Smash Hits gave it ten out of ten, and David Bowie was enthusiastic. But it was called Adventures In The Land Of The Good Groove.

In order to weigh up this one, let's call an expert witness. Niles himself talks about the record in his autobiography, and... well, he doesn't endorse the Smash Hits ten stars:

"I knew it was a flop right away. I'd been so afraid of being labelled a disco musician that I was too tentative about the album's direction. And the songs weren't hooky enough. Over all, I wasn't clear philosophically or sure what I was trying to say."

If it's not good enough for Niles, it's not good enough for us.

The Face 15; History 10

[Part of The Face's best recordings of 1983]

Bookmarks: John Taylor

Splendid work by BBC News, which invites John Taylor to re-answer questions he first took from Number One and Smash Hits back when he was the most famous cheekbones on the planet:

Q: Why are you a tax exile? (Smash Hits Book of Personal Files, November 1986)

JT: "I didn't know I was. The only time we took a year out was '83 and I don't remember planning it in advance. It was just served up for us - this is what we're going to do. We were recording the difficult third album. We did it in the south of France, the Caribbean and finished it off in Sydney. These days I go backwards and forwards between the States and here and it's all the same tax wise."

In the Smash Hits grilling, he was quoted as saying he did not see why, "with a career that may at best last five years", he should give 70% of his earnings to the government. He says now: "I don't have a problem with tax."

Dry your dishes the "pop columnist" way

How much money do you have? Good news - unless you said 'none' - as you can turn some of that money into an officially-endorsed luxurious "recreation" of the original Black Type tea towel. For years writers of "letters" to the nation's premier pop periodical Smash Hits would hope to be judged the best, in order to win a record token and tea towel.

The "record token" has vanished into the haze of memories - something to do with buying Frisbees in shops, I think - but at least we can all enjoy our very own tea towel. And, because this is now, you don't even have to write an amusing letter about Kate Bush, as Swingorilliant is actually selling them. For cash. That's why I asked how much money you had.

Jason says: "That'll do"

Magazineobit: Tom "Tom" Hibbert

Terribly sad to read the obituary of Tom Hibbert, Smash Hits and Q writer from both magazines' Imperial Phases. You wonder what the home improvement magazines he wrote for before moving, first to New Music News, and then onto Smash Hits, made of his dry wit. At the Hits, and then in Q's Who The Hell... column, Hibbert softly punctured the pompous and puffed-up by gently measuring out the rope they'd need, and effortlessly passing it over. Besides helping with shaping the voice of the two magazines, Hibbert also had a hand in creating the quiet, raised-eyebrow style of journalism today performed by the likes of Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux. On a personal note, he gave me many happy mealtimes - on Q day, tea would always be scoffed with that opening interview propped against the sauce bottles. He'd been unable to work through illness for the last fourteen years, a terrible loss to the world of writing; his death on Sunday an even crueller loss to the world. [Thanks to HungryHatter]

Smash Hits revived for GaGa

It's about a year too late, of course, but Smash Hits is being disinterred again for a Lady GaGa special:

Stuart Williams, managing director of Bauer Media's Music & Film Brands, called Lady GaGa the "perfect personality" to justify another print issue and said there would be more special issues in the future.

He said: "The special print edition issue is kind of like a pop-up shop for us now. We want to pick and choose and publish when the time is right, rather than just a shameless cash-in."

This isn't a shameless cash-in. It must be, therefore, a shamed-faced cash-in, right?

"Lady GaGa is the perfect pop icon, with great pop tunes and an outrageous, larger than life personality. It's fitting, therefore, that such an iconic pop magazine as Smash Hits should pay tribute to her."

I suppose you can take some comfort that Stuart won't actually be writing the magazine, as the observation "she has a larger than life personality" is the sort of bland squidge you'd have expected from Number One rather than Smash Hits, surely?

Quick radio listening figure round-up

That 6Music closure? The gift that keeps on giving for the network - it's had a year-on-year doubling of audience in this morning's RAJAR figures.

Can I just point out the Guardian's coverage of digital radio figures seems to have been written in a bit of a rush - it says 6 is up, Asian Network is up, 1Xtra and 5Live Sports Extra are down, and then that Radio 7 "bucked the corporation's digital trend" because its figures were up. Eh?

Also might have been worth mentioning alongside this:

NME Radio rose 17.7% on a year ago and was up 11.9% on the previous quarter to 253,000 listeners.

... that the station was canned during the period.

What's clear from these figures is that the digital audience appears to be volatile, which you have to suspect is down to the methodology of counting rather than the actual audiences:

Smash Hits was up 16.1% on the previous quarter, although down 14.3% year on year, to 990,000 listeners.

A crash in listeners you can believe. A rally in listeners you can believe. But this rushing up and down by such large amounts each quarter kind of undermines the credibility of the numbers.

In the battle between Chris Evans and Chris Moyles, Evans is winning the who can shed the most listeners race - Evans has misplaced a million in three months, Moyles just 200,000.

Radio figures

A couple of things from yesterday's RAJAR figures - first, Smash Hits and The Hits, for long the leading light of commercial national DAB stations, seem to be imploding. Can't help that the magazine title and the TV station the brands are based on are both now defunct.

Second, NME Radio has picked up 3,000 new listeners (or "a margin of error" as statisticians call it) to arrive at 218,000. It's hard to imagine that those are the figures they were hoping for at launch - even in a good advertising environment, you'd be struggling. You wonder if maybe the audience is being held back by a too-mainstream programming policy? The competition is surely Last FM and Spotify, so why battle Absolute Xtreme and XFM?

Also doing well from Jackson's death

Something called WONMP pushes a press release us at:

This last week www.wonmp.us set new all-time records for web traffic. Our article on What Really Killed Michael Jackson was picked-up by several major news stations, resulting in massive website visits. It is our hope that the article will help "steer" those that suffer from unmanaged stress to seek safe, natural help.

A massive website visit? Is that one where the screen resolution is 5000 x 5000? "Yeah, it did less well on the small mobile screens, but on massive website visits, it was brilliant."

Still, good of WONMP to pat themselves on the back for having jumped so quickly on the corpse.

By the way, WONMP have pre-empted your objection that they can't possibly know what really killed Michael Jackson by waving away such objections as unimportant:

The toxicology report is not yet in because Michael's autopsy is only now being scheduled, but that matters not. What matters is the knowledge that a human heart is designed to operate much longer than 50 years unless impeded in some way.

Yes, yes, let's not detain ourselves waiting for facts.

Also turning a few quid is Bauer Magazines, who are resurrecting Smash Hits. How better to homage a dead man than a dead magazine?

Normally, we'd be excited by the idea of a classic-era Smash Hits revival - even if it was only going to be about Michael Jackson, but as far as I can see there's nobody from the glory days of Smash Hits involved, so this is less a revival than some sort of freaky reanimation of a stolen corpse. And I bet it's not going to be sarky and fun and like Smash Hits was when Jackson was alive.

Update: Popjustice have more on the Smash Hits revival, and apparently Barry McIlheney is editing the Smash Hits. So it's decline-of-empire phase SH then. [Thanks to anonymous commenter for the tip]

Pop will save the childrens

Sugababes have worries about our nation's soft-headed children. They grow up too fast, because pop doesn't save them:

Keisha told the Daily Star: "What I really want is to see more pop bands. I want it to go back to the days of Smash Hits, when we’d tour with Blazin’ Squad and Girls Aloud and have a blast.

"Even the Saturday shows where we dressed up and got gunked don’t exist.

"I know I’m sounding like a granny, but kids today are growing up way too fast because they don’t have those things to keep them young anymore."

Ah, yes. If we don't have the Sugababes singing about their sexy assess, and Girls Aloud making fetish videos singing "sexy no no no" and Blazin' Squad trilling "I just like tight butts on ladies who play rough 4 ages and nuff love comes in stages", children might just grow up way too fast.

The past's future: 1981

So, this weekend we've been reliving the 1981 Smash Hits Readers Poll "brightest hopes", with YouTube illustrations. The chart in full:

1. Altered Images
2. Soft Cell
3. Haircut 100
4. The Fun Boy Three
5. U2
6. Heaven 17
7. Modern Romance
8. 8. Bow Wow Wow
9. 9. ABC
10. 10. Orange Juice

The past's future: 1981 - 1. Altered Images

The brightest hope for 1982, accoridng to Smash Hits readers: Altered Images. Or the Bluebells and a woman who once had sex with Ian Beale.

Clare Grogan dragged herself off her sick bed to thank the readers:

It's great. I must congratulate Smash hits readers on their good taste. It's things like this that boost your ego and make you want to keep going.

She also revealed that America was going to get a version of Gregory's Girl with the voices redubbed "but Bill Forsyth says it's alright."

Dead Pop Stars, at the 1980 Futurama Festival:



[Buy: Pinky Blue+]
More Clare Grogan YouTube loveliness

The past's future: 1981 - 2. Soft Cell

"Just edged out" from the Top Spot, Soft Cell. It's kind of wonderful that Smash Hits was such a broad church, it's readers in 1981 were excited by the knitwear-clad Haircut 100s and the Fetish-strewn Soft Cell. And now, the kids are given McFly. And it were all fields round here.

To celebrate their victory from 25 years go, here's Soft Cell joined by Jim Foetus on a Suicide cover:



[Buy: The bedsit tapes, a glorious collection of early stuff put together in a studio at Leeds Poly]

The past's future: 1981 - 3. Haircut 100

Third most-promising act of 1981, according to Smash Hits readers, was Haircut 100. The magazine was surprised they'd managed to do so well despite "only starting to break as we published the forms" and were confident enough to predict:

Expect knitting to become very fashionable during 1982

.
That future turned out to mean a lot of work soundtracking fun on the inflatables during Cheggers Plays Pop, a comic strip in Look-In, a slow slide down the dumper and a not-entirely successful resurrection of Nick Heyward on Creation during their 'rich off Oasis' years.

But what remains, of course, is the knitwear:




[Buy: A mightily-expanded Pelican West]

The past's future: 1981 - 4. The Fun Boy Three

When Smash Hits readers described them as "promising", did any of them think that future might be getting wheeled on as trophy collaborators by the daughter of a light comedian? The magazine used their ennoblement to call for "another single". Jerry Dammers, meanwhile, sobbed slightly and wondered if anyone would ever listen to him again.

Their Top of the Pops performance of The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum marked some sort of high water mark for mainstream TV directors using technology in a desperate bid to inject teatime-friendly life into something a little difficult and downbeat - although you can see the same effect on ITV News these days:



[Buy: 1997's Fun Boy Three best of]

The chart rundown will conclude later today

The past's future: 1981 - 5. U2

You can tell that Smash Hits were distinctly unimpressed with that bunch of mulletted punks turning up in the Brightest Hope again:

U2 occupy exactly the same position as they did last year; isn't it about time they came up with a really hot single and fulfilled some of that potential?

Yeah. Isn't it just? Sadly, though, it wasn't to be, and now Paul Hewson - who fronted the band - is something large in property and stocks.

U2 were actually quite good back then - but already slightly conceited - as their Pinkpop appearance shows:



[Buy: Achtung, Bono by Half Man Half Biscuit]

The past's future: 1981 - 6. Heaven 17

Smash Hits were sure that H17 would thrive as

"their Human League connections can't have done them any harm at all."

Although, in retrospect, they probably did - cast by their spin-off status into a perpetual battle they could never win.

The band were together for the Billy MacKenzie Memorial in March, from which this Temptation is sourced:



[Buy: Last year's remasterage of Penthouse and Pavement]

The past's future: 1981 - 7. Modern Romance

Even Smash hits couldn't quite muster up any enthusiasm for their reader's decision to predict a glorious future for this bunch of David Hamilton-friendly smoothies, managing just a "funky outfit" to describe them.

Here, take Ay Ay Ay Moosey - note the sort-of-rappy but at the front, a clanging attempt to inject something modern into a song which could otherwise have been playing when Glen Miller crashed into the sea:



[Buy - or don't: The Platinum Collection. I'm not sure they ever actually achieved platinum status. Platignum, perhaps.]

The countdown will continue across the weekend

The past's future: 1981 - 8. Bow Wow Wow

Smash Hits points out that Bow Wow Wow actally been 1980's 10th most promising act, pointing out tartly that going up one place is

not much recompense for the all the fuss that's been made about them over the last year.

Still, they did better than the blokes' subsequent incarnation as Chiefs Of Relief; Annabelle Lwin is still recording, although nowadays with a Buddhist sensibility rather than the original Ants and the Sex Pistols manager.

C30 C60 C90 Go is on YouTube, but unembeddable, so here's the video for Louis Quatroze instead:



[Buy: Aphrodisiac, which somehow manages to not include Sexy Eiffel Towers

The past's future: 1981 9 - ABC

Continuing our countup of Smash Hit's Brightest Hopes for 1982, Martin Fry's then-still-bright-eyed ABC. Described by SH as "scintilating", nobody knew the future held a brief period channelling the ghosts of the Archies before returning to hoofage on the 80s revival circuit.

A slightly blocky recording of a festive reworking of The Look Of Love:



[Buy: This year's ABC compilation Never More Than Now

The past's future: 1981 10 - Orange Juice

This weekend, we're revisiting the Smash Hits Reader's Poll 1981 "Most Promising New Act for 1982" results, counting down from 10 to 1. We're still debating if we should skip over number 5.

What's really interesting is that, with probably just one or two exceptions, the ten bands chosen by Smash Hits readers to shine in 1982 all feature band members who are still doing quite nicely for themselves in 2007, which might be a warming thought as to the wisdom of crowds (or Smash Hits readers, at least) or perhaps unsettling that bands tipped 25 years ago are still hanging around now.

So, without further ado: Number 10 - Orange Juice. This is Simply Thrilled Honey, from the 1986 Dada With Juice video. Which they're doing in an Orange Juice factory:



[Buy The Glasgow School, 23-track Orange Juice best-of]