Doing justice to smash hits

For pop fans of a certain age, one of the most poignant moments in the recent Robbie Williams biography Feel comes when Robbie finds an old Smash Hits yearbook from 1985 and starts leafing through. “God, pop stars used to be brilliant then!” he exclaims. “I keep expecting to see myself in here.”

Of course, it wasn’t just the pop stars who were better in those days. The pop press, too, was an infinitely superior beast to the model we have now, and it had reached its apogee in Smash Hits. Golden-era Smash Hits had a persona that was both blithe and clever, like Katharine Hepburn when she gets drunk in The Philadelphia Story. It amused itself by recasting the whole music industry as a medieval feudal aristocracy (“Sir Cliff of Richard! Dame David Bowie!”), pioneered the postmodern use of quote-marks (“Quite literally wobbly with ‘bevvies’ ”) and introduced bands with sentences such as: “Never before in the history of the lush tartan blanket that is popular music has a group ever been so deserving of the supreme accolade ‘quite good’.”

Smash Hits in the 1980s had found a way to approach pop music and pop culture which still hasn’t been bettered today. And it was to treat pop as if it were simultaneously the most important and most ridiculous thing in the world.

Alas, that Smash Hits ethos evaporated around the time of Britpop — an era when the music press fatally convinced itself that pop music was important and almost never ridiculous — and hasn’t been seen since. Not in print, anyway. But on the internet it lives on, at popjustice.co.uk, a website that is as silly as it is wise. Popjustice believes in the pop single in the same way that Annie Lennox said she believed in “ Elvis Presley singing psalms on a Sunday”. It believes that you “shouldn’t grow out of pop music when you hit puberty, or feel stupid going back to it when you’re 25”.

To this end, it monitors great pop singles from around the world. Current favourites are Nervo, an unsigned sister act from Australia who have a single with the winning couplet “Okay everybody I’ve got an idea/ Let’s piss off early, it’s Friday”, although Popjustice also has a soft spot for the French chanteuse Mylène Farmer, whose new single it describes as having the chorus “F*** them all!/ Then something in French/ F*** them all!/ Then something in French”. But of course, the important/ridiculous paradigm is paramount.

Popjustice goes on to refer to the individual members of G4 as “G4.1, G4.2, G4.3 and G4.4”, claims that Lee from Steps straightening his hair ranks above Dylan going electric in terms of controversy, and asks: “Out of deejaying, trains, disco, oxygen and Christmas cakes, which is the best Pete Waterman invention?” As a website it can “respond” to events immediately, like a crash team of instant pop analysis. Duran Duran ’s awkward live appearance on the Brits in 2004 was covered in a second-by-second war report that was posted the same night, and included the explanation to bemused younger readers that, in the Eighties, Duran Duran had been like Phixx, “but good”.

Meanwhile, Popjustice’s wholehearted attempts to come to terms with the new, odd-sounding Robbie Williams single Radio (“Is it the best Robbie single since No Regrets? The worst Robbie single since Let Love Be Your Energy?) ended with the plaintive: “Stop pissing about. I haven’t got time for this. What on earth have I just heard?”

While it was once a secret, it’s now pretty much common knowledge that Popjustice is written by the music journalist Peter Robinson, who works for NME and The Guardian. It’s sadly indicative of how poor the pop press has become. After all, journalists writing about their specialist subject without charging a fee is one of the signs of the End of Days.

Robinson himself is far too polite to slag off the pop press, but some of his insights into the industry indicate how much things have changed in the past ten years or so.

“The first thing is that there is no such thing as a loyal readership any more,” he says. “Fifteen years ago readers used to buy their favourite magazine every week, regardless of who was on the cover. Now the readership moves, wholesale, from one magazine to another in the space of a week if one magazine has something better on the cover.” The old understanding of what “on the cover” means seems to have changed as well. It used to mean pop stars. Now it means the free gifts Sellotaped to the front.

“And you’ll notice that the gifts are never anything to do with music,” Robinson points out. “It will be a bag or sunglasses or nail varnish. Not a CD, because 12-year-olds don’t want a free CD. Mind you, it’s not 12-year-olds who buy pop magazines any more. With the Spice Girls, the readership dropped from 12-year-olds to 8-year-olds overnight.” Robinson estimates that around half of Popjustice’s readership are teenage or younger.

Now he’s about to bring his ethos to an even bigger audience, as Popjustice — in partnership with the scurrilous gossip website holymoly.co.uk — has just won the tender for Channel 4’s music website.

“The great thing about pop music, over any other genre,” Robinson says, “is that even when it’s awful it’s still interesting, or at the very least hilarious. At the moment, pop music is marginalised — you only have to look at the Radio 1 playlist to see that.”

Of course there’s one very good way of unmarginalising it — to treat it with that winning combination of reverence and ridicule.