I feel quite ashamed to admit that a pop magazine has become my favourite magazine. I'm 28 and I'm sure that X Factor magazine is meant to be aimed at teenagers. However, it's actually really good! When I was a teenager, there were loads of music magazines with Smash Hits being the undisputed king of them all. Every week i'd buy Smash Hits, read it from cover to cover, learn the songs on the song lyrics pages and carefully remove the staples from a poster of Mark Owen to blue-tac him to my bedroom wall. It was a ritual that had to be carried out and nobody dared intervene. It was the same in millions of households up and down the country... Then I ...  Read the complete review

Back when I was a 14, in the year of our Lord 1978, a magazine entitled "Smash Hits" was launched on unsuspecting adolescents. The magazine was the brainchild of publisher Nick Logan, who was also responsible for "The Face" a magazine that was integral part of any stylish youngster in the 1980s, and using a roster of staff which included David Hepworth, Mark Ellen and Neil Tennant the existing "song sheet" pop magazines found themselves on stony ground. "Smash Hits" took the song lyrics found in these "song sheets" such as "Disco 45" (I can hear the younger generation asking what a 45 would ...  Read the complete review