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Offending Ringo and probing Thatcher: Tom Hibbert, the man who ‘brought the bonkers’ to Smash Hits

As a new collection of his work, Phew, Eh Readers?, is published, former colleagues including Neil Tennant recall the irreverent music journalist’s phrasemaking genius

He grills him on whether his heroes ate meat and what he feeds his cat, and concludes by asking, “If you died tomorrow, went up to heaven and met Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, what would you say to him?” Morrissey suggests a knee in the groin. Photograph: Smash HitsA new book, Phew, Eh Readers?, collects Hibbert’s writings, from early essays about his love of the Byrds to the letters he made up at New Music News, a short-lived magazine that emerged when NME and Melody Maker were on strike in 1980, through the pop periodicals and into his cod-curmudgeonly broadsheet columns. “He really brought the bonkers to Smash Hits, in a kind of baroque way.” Past-it pop stars went to “the dumper”, booze was “sauce” or “rock’n’roll mouthwash”; inverted commas equalled irony and the letters page was run by a Hibbert-ghosted entity known as Black Type, who “came down at night when everyone had left”, says Ellen.

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