Before they went the way of the coal miner, music journalists were a definable demographic and music journalism an actual occupation. The good ones boasted cachet and influence; the best could inspire a generation. Tom Hibbert was perhaps the music journalist nonpareil for at least a dozen years between the early 1980s and 90s, an idiosyncratic stylist whose work graced the pages of Smash Hits and Q, where he repeatedly refused to kowtow to celebrities, irrespective of their status.
Phew, Eh Readers? – whose title alone gives those new to him a flavour of the arched eyebrow manner in which he wrote – is a collection of his finest and funniest writing, alongside fond recollections from those who knew him best: his wife, musician friends, fellow writers.
“He would give his subjects the impression that, despite their obvious successes, they were still somehow shameful underachievers,” wrote the journalist and editor Mark Ellen in Hibbert’s obituary for the Guardian in 2011 (reprinted here). Often, Hibbert’s victims were mere naifs (Bros, Kylie Minogue), but his skewerings were less nasty than they were mischievous. “He was at heart a satirist,” suggests erstwhile colleague Paul Du Noyer. Consumed in one go, the pieces here illustrate just what an anomaly he was: older than his fellow scribes, far more well heeled, and ultimately closer in spirit to PG Wodehouse than any punk upstart.
Born in 1952, the son of noted historian Christopher Hibbert, he came of journalistic age in the midst of an 80s pop explosion that largely failed to impress him. He preferred late 60s/early 70s fare – Syd Barrett, the Byrds – and so to help cope with having to write about such throwaway fluff in Smash Hits, he developed a withering style, with plenty of in-jokes and endless parenthetical asides (to hammer home the snark for maximum effect). He was condescending towards Phil Collins and Jon Bon Jovi, and employed a sly interview technique – later adopted by Louis Theroux for TV – which comprised asking a provocative question, then allowing his subjects to fill the awkward gaps. “Tom was unafraid of silence,” as one former colleague notes. The approach was unfailingly fruitful, and prompted Margaret Thatcher, whom he interviewed in 1987 for Smash Hits, to ramble on thus: “Television tells you lots of things you wouldn’t otherwise know but it stops a lot of things because it’s too jolly easy to go home and do your homework and then sit down in front of the television and the family sitting down in front of the television and you’re not talking to one another.”
For Q’s infamous Who the Hell… slot, he was dispatched monthly to interview bloviating types in thrall to their own presumed importance, but who, in Hibbert’s foreboding company, says Ellen, “would go on to reveal some deeper truth about themselves beyond the usual promotional flannel”. Some of the best of these – Bernard Manning, Cliff Richard, Jimmy Savile – are not included here, but those that are tickle all the same. “I was really fed up with what I was writing about,” Hibbert said in 2001, “so I invented sarcasm as a way to deal with it.”
That’s one way to put it. He offended Ringo Starr by “talking shit”, did likewise with Roger Waters (“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that it is stupid”), and prompted this from Gary Numan: “I’m a great capitalist pig. So what?”
By the mid-1990s, increasingly Withnail-like in his disdain for all he surveyed, he briefly wrote for the Mail on Sunday, where, in his early 40s, he positioned himself as a grumpy old man pining over how things were better in his day. He found more comfortable ground on the Observer’s Pendennis column, writing about politics with the same vinegary smarts he once employed to review a new single by Kajagoogoo. In 1997, he stood in the general election for the Whig party, losing out to Michael Heseltine in Henley by 23,748 votes – this despite promising that he’d repeal the Corn Laws and grant votes for women over 30. By this point in his career, his eyebrow could lift weights.
But then later that same year, after decades of cigarettes and alcohol, he became ill with pancreatitis and pneumonia. He remained in an induced coma for four months. “When he was out,” writes his wife, Allyce, in Phew…, “he was never the same again.” Too ill to work, he spent the next 14 years mostly alone, and eventually died from complications brought about by diabetes in August 2011, a terribly sad fate for someone always so alive on the page.
This collection remembers Hibbert at his peerless best, the most inimitable of writers, and someone who could make pop music as fun to read about as it was to listen to.
Which, incidentally, isn’t easy to do.
• Phew, Eh Readers? The Life and Writing of Tom Hibbert is published by Nine Eight (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
