So What Hi-Fi? is 50 years old, and the current crew of the ship has been delving back into the archives to uncover key moments. Nice.
I was there, way back when, joining as assistant editor under Simon Davies in 1988. Things were different. There were no computers. There were no listening rooms. We charged extended lunchtime pub tabs to expenses, because they were “essential meetings”. (I’ve checked with my accountant, and should this be challenged, they can’t reclaim old expenses, and besides, I’ve left the country.)
I was only around for a decade, and abandoned it all to go backpacking for more than three of those years, rather unexpectedly becoming editor on my return, then swanning off to Australia four years later.
Yet along the way I witnessed scandals, got us sued over the new recordable CDs, and began to realise I was part of a team that revolutionised how What Hi-Fi? moved ahead into the following decades. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.
No computers, no listening rooms
I arrived on my first day at What Hi-Fi? to find a manual typewriter on my desk. This turned out to be a group chuckle at my expense; I was soon assured I could have an electric one.
Instead, I started off using my own little standalone word processor, which could keep 32 characters in its 4kB memory before sending it to a dot-matrix printer. But before long I was given an impressive electronic typewriter, which could store a whole line of type before chattering it out.
Equally existentially, there were no listening rooms either. The What Hi-Fi? house staff were neither reviewers nor technical specialists, but rather talented journalists and editors, writing news (Saul David, now a huge history author, and Dan Houston, now messing about in boats), getting music interviews (Hazel Southam’s contact book was second to none), and compiling the all-essential Buying Guide.
This last task was unthinkably complicated prior to computers – a mystery of arcane compilation – yet it was always complete, accurate, and on deadline for every issue thanks to the magnificent Caroline Osborn, a true bringer of office joy.
Only our technical editor, Andrew Everard, could be relied upon to actually know stuff about hi-fi.
I was a partial exception, having snuck in from an electronics magazine with a strong musical background, and with parents who had worked in BBC Radio. But the rest of the staff were simply magazine makers who might suddenly be reallocated from Gardeners' Chronicle or Practical Caravan. My second editor, Mark Payton, came from the latter, which was a bit of a bugbear for him among certain people in the hi-fi industry until he proved himself extremely capable in his new sphere.
Under his leadership, we rejigged and expanded the annual What Hi-Fi? Awards, introducing price categories for the first time, thereby greatly expanding the number of possible winners, and making them far more useful to readers of all budgets.
Making the magazine
The actual reviews, meanwhile, were written mainly by external freelancers working in their own homes. Their reviews would arrive on the fax machine as long, continuous sheets of thermal fax paper; we would make edits by cutting them up and rearranging the pages while scribbling corrections on them with proper traditional proofing marks, before sending them away to the typing pool, whose inhabitants were equipped with cool IBM ‘golf-ball’ typewriters.
Their output would go off to distant typesetters, to return as long lengths of justified ‘bromide’ columns. Art editors (Marty and Frank) would cut these up and stick them onto a tracing-paper page layout with lovely-smelling Spray Mount adhesive, adding spaces for pictures. These were sized up by viewing photographic slides through a vast optical machine called a visualiser, which projected the slide upwards onto the layout, enlarged by physically lifting the lenses up and down.
Back then, What Hi-Fi? took its own pictures, original slides from in-house (actually in-garage) photographer Steve Waters, the best black-box photographer in the business. These would be sent to the printers for scanning and insertion into the final offset printing plates – all monochrome in those days, though sometimes with a section or two which lavishly overprinted a single ‘spot’ colour. These brave splashes of colour routinely drifted a good few millimetres off target.
The only way to check the accuracy of those plates was to go down to the printers for a ‘press pass’, either in Whitstable, where we drank in pubs which had buckets of oysters behind the bar, or in Cornwall, which demanded an overnighter. Any corrections at press stage were nightmarish, requiring you to scalpel off bits of text and carefully re-space them before an expensive replating.
On more than one occasion I would return home to find, with mild panic, that a word or a paragraph was stuck to my elbow with Spray Mount and had probably failed to make it into the magazine. Any final issue deemed completely free of any errors would be great cause for celebration, certainly justifying a full pub afternoon on expenses.
All this to and fro of proof bags required a constant stream of motorcycle couriers at fixed times of the day. The biggest disaster which could befall a magazine was a motorcycle crash in which layouts were damaged, or original photographic slides lost en route to the printers, requiring alternative frames to be rapidly sourced, resized and re-despatched.
Moving magazines
We had three hi-fi magazines back then. The others were New Hi-Fi Sound, which became High Fidelity under the wonderful Rahiel Nasir and then pivoted to home cinema as V.TV under the great Andy Clough, and Hi-Fi Answers under Keith Howard. Keith was a genuine legend of hi-fi authorship, and one of only three in-house editorial staff who also undertook reviews, along with Jonathan Kettle and Andrew Everard.
The other legendary writers were external: Malcolm Steward, Alvin Gold, Jimmy Hughes, Paul Miller. I don’t recall ever meeting them until 1990, by which time I had risen from assistant editor to deputy editor after the departure of Liz Porter, wife to later BBC director-general George Entwhistle (who had himself been an editor of New Hi-Fi Sound until just after I joined What Hi-Fi?).
Then, as now, a rise in job title did not necessarily come with a rise in salary, but I was offered quite the boost to take over the editorship of Hi-Fi Answers, just as it was transforming into a new title with full-colour sections: Audiophile, initially called Audiophile with Hi-Fi Answers.
I initially refused it, I think; I knew absolutely nothing about the high-end audio on which the magazine would focus. With Keith’s departure the job should have gone to Jonathan Kettle, which it later did. But I was cajoled and bribed into it, and my first task was to go on a tour of the homes of all those legendary contributors. They were rightly wary of this relative youngster rejigging their magazine; one of them particularly shocked to find I didn’t know what a KT88 was. But they generously gave their time to assist in my hi-fi education.
In fact, I must thank them for changing my whole hi-fi life. I had grown up in BBC studios; we had Spendor BBC speakers at home (I’ve still got ’em); I knew what good sound was. But Malcolm Steward had me sit on the floor in front of his Linn/Naim system and, knowing me to be a fellow Zeppelin fan, dropped the needle of his LP12 on Zep II’s Moby Dick.
People often talk of their first hi-fi revelation; this was mine. Bonham, then only a decade lost to the world, was there in front of me. I never looked back.
Alvin Gold favoured MartinLogan electrostatics and demonstrated those to me – another revelation. With Jimmy Hughes the revelation was his vast music collection; a pleasing confirmation that these guys were really music fans first and foremost, with hi-fi being a means to the end.
While I made some cracking issues of Audiophile with Jonathan and sub-editor Gary Cockburn in support, the ways of the high-end were just too esoteric for me (30 years on, I’m still very much a midrange guy). After a year of Audiophile, I quit and went travelling for the next three-and-a-half years on a budget of US$50 a week. (I took with me one of the new Aiwa portable DAT recorders, with the odd idea of recording silences around the world.)
In my last paycheck I received the NUJ-negotiated ‘new technology bonus’, but I missed the typewriters being swept away to be replaced by the computers which had been in storage for 18 months while the NUJ dispute dragged on. I remember marching on the street with the NUJ back in the day, though that was primarily to hang out with an attractive activist I’d met on one of the many training courses that were compulsory back then.
As a new arrival at What Hi-Fi? I had been signed up immediately for at least 20 compulsory courses run by the company or externally: headline writing and subbing, interviewing, legal instruction on how to avoid malicious falsehood in a bad review.
I soaked it all up, though I still managed to get the magazine sued after my return from travelling. But at that point I was ego-free and non-materialist after a year in India, and far better suited to the editorship of What Hi-Fi?, which I was surprised to be offered on my return by a very brave Bruce Black, then Group Editor.
We were sued in 1998, I think, not for a careless bad review (heaven forbid) but by lawyers for the band The Verve. Their album Urban Hymns was at that point our favourite office CD, and we regularly praised it in print, contrasting its sound with the hideously crushed production of Be Here Now by those noisy Manchester upstarts Oasis.
So when the first affordable consumer CD recorders arrived, we ran a coverline saying ‘Make your own CDs’, with a picture of the Verve CD on one side, and a blank CD-R on the other, with Urban Hymns written on it with a Sharpie.
I had been anticipating trouble here, potentially being seen to encourage illegal copying, so it all went through the company lawyers before publication, and they signed it off as fine. Which it was. The Verve’s people instead sued us for unauthorised use of the image of the band, which was on the CD itself.
We prepared a defence – the CD was provided by the record company’s PR for use in the magazine – but sadly the amount they wanted was slightly less than the cost of defending the case, so the claim was paid. Still rankles.
Bringing it in-house
When I rejoined the magazine, computers were not the only change; the decision had been made to build a listening room, and to bring all reviewing in-house. This was a huge and expensive call which entirely reshaped many aspects of the magazine, and I doubt it could ever have happened were it not for the unusual board structure of Haymarket, the original publishers of What Hi-Fi?. This board had to include one director who had come up through the advertising ranks, one member from editorial, and one member from design.
It was a brilliant mechanism for informed and bold decision-making, and I’m sure it was our Australian editorial director Mel Nichols, ex-editor of Car magazine, and the unpredictable but brilliant design director Paul Harpin upstairs that got it pushed through, along with publisher Kevin Whitchurch. I thank them all.
The whole idea was surely spearheaded by the technical editor Andrew Everard, who must take much of the credit for both the concept and the listening room (which later became three listening rooms and a stock cupboard taking up an entire wing of the Hampton Road offices).
I came in at the end of the process. The external writers were being offered in-house positions but didn’t take them up; they could still write for the other two mags, but they clearly weren’t happy. I saw Paul Miller recently and he reminded me that the first move had been to remove names from reviews, in order to create a magazine ‘voice’, something to which I still adhere with my current magazine in Australia, Sound+Image.
“But then you brought the kiddies in,” Paul continued ruefully, referring to the new recruits who were hired and trained up, technically under Andrew and editorially under myself and the Haymarket training programme.
These kiddies grew up quickly: Tim Bowern, now in PR, was a long-haired energy ball whose good looks we roundly abused in daft pictures for magazine side-panels; Andy Kerr was master of the new AV room when it was built and is now audio guru for Bowers & Wilkins; Ketan Bharadia needs no introduction as he is now What Hi-Fi?’s technical editor – he claims I interviewed him for the job, but I really can’t remember. (I also can’t remember working on either article about the test rooms, as reproduced in a recent piece; perhaps this is all due to various new habits adopted during my travels.)
But key to the magazine ‘voice’ idea was that everything would be heard by more than one reviewer, a cross-check system to ensure we could all speak for the veracity of opinions and accuracy of reviews. Working in-house also saved a fortune on couriering kit back and forth for review and photography; it also hugely simplified the later selection of Awards, as everyone was more or less on the same page.
In 1998 I presented my final Awards night, accompanied by a lovely Canadian girl I had met in Hong Kong while visiting Cambridge factories with James Johnson-Flint (on a trip which could make a whole separate article). With her I then absconded to Australia, a continent across which she had just walked, and eventually we were married by Elvis in Las Vegas, as you do, with a honeymoon on Route 66 before attending CES 2007.
Finally, a defence of the magazine. People talk a lot of rubbish about What Hi-Fi?, primarily because it is so successful. I can 100% assure readers that there was never any bias or industry influence when I was there; the advertising sales team never even knew what products were going in each issue until it landed on their desks.
Knowing Ketan and some of the current team, I’m sure that hasn’t changed, just as the core methods put in place in the 1990s remain. It is now streamlined for joint publication online and in the print magazine, which I’m thrilled is in the ultra-safe hands of Jonathan Evans, my former production whizz when I was briefly recalled in 1999 to relaunch Stuff magazine, with a fantastic team and an editorial budget so astronomical it would make any magazine editor today simply weep.
We spent a lot of that in the pub, of course.
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