Groove Is In The Heart

If you ever made or received a mixtape, you will love this wonderful short play.

Back in October 1984, Morrissey did a feature with British music magazine Smash Hits where he reviewed some popular singles at the time. It was unearthed today (30 years to the day after the issue’s publication date) by Brian McCloskey, a collector of the magazines who has been uploading his archives digitally on his blog Like Punk Never Happened. It’s all pretty great.

"The kind of stealthy eroticism which makes a life of religion madly attractive"

The one we've all been waiting for: Morrissey reviews the new singles!

In 2009, Smash Hits superfan Brian McCloskey, an 80’s kid who had hung on to his copies of Smash Hits since youth, decided to rescue his collection from his parents’ attic at his childhood home in Derry, Ireland.

I never thought it would happen....

One Thursday afternoon in June of 1979, shortly after my tenth birthday, my Mum and I went to Coleraine with some aunts and cousins. In Gardiner's bookshop - I think it was next to Crazy Prices - I found a magazine which had lyrics to a bunch of songs, including Up The Junction, by Squeeze. Music was on its way to replacing football as my passion in life and from the start I had been intrigued by the words of songs, so this was an invaluable resource....and would prove to be so for the next six years....

In June 2009, on a visit to Derry from California, I boxed up my collection of Smash Hits and mailed it to myself in Santa Monica.

In June 2014, thirty-five years after first reading Smash Hits, I finished the (rather time-consuming) task of scanning every issue in my collection, uploading those scans to Flickr and preparing the blog posts that have allowed me to share my collection in this online archive.

"a modest sort of transvestite"

It has nothing to do with Smash Hits or music from the 1980s, but if you want to know a bit more about the person responsible for this archive, you can read this interview in the latest LA Weekly.