Discovery at the disco: Smash Hits and the art of guerilla research 7 February, 2006
PM interviewed Smash Hits co-founder Sir David Arculus on Thursday as the magazine announced its closure. Regularly selling 500,000 copies a fortnight in the Eighties, Arculus’ reminiscences about the unlikely birth of the periodical demonstrate the power of just a little guerilla field work.
Working as a newspaper publisher in Peterborough he met Nick Logan of the NME, and over a drink they discussed a number of Logan’s ideas for new publications. Taken with Logan’s parting suggestion, a magazine that printed the words from pop songs, Arculus decided to do a little investigation of his own:
‘I went along to a couple of discos where I found these circles of girls mouthing the words of these songs and not knowing what the words were.’
Four weeks later Smash Hits had shifted all of it’s initial 10,000 print run and by the end of the year sales peaked at a million.