Andrew Harrison

We loved a lot.

He was an absolute genius.

But it made us get good at doing magazines.

So when the main event, the two main events arrived, which were Nirvana and Britpop, we had kind of honed our skills and we could get our teeth into it.

Yeah.

For me, it was like, I'd read it as a student.

I used to read the NME every week, Smash Hits every two weeks and Q every month, right?

And I wanted this magazine to be as fun, colourful, exciting, funny and stupid as Smash Hits, as on the ball as the NME, but not as kind of up its own bum, really.

The NME was really very proud of itself.

And what I wanted to be as well-written as Q, because Q, what stunned me with Q was like, they're doing actual proper journalism here.

They're investigating, they're telling the story, they're backing it up.

They're not just sitting down and saying, hey, as what happened with the NME in the 80s, you'd sit down with Danny Minogue and ask her what she thought about Thatcher.

And the answer was...

Not a lot.

And Q Magazine turns up and says, we're not going to do ideological explorations and discuss situationism and deconstructivism with Danny Minogue.

We're going to tell the stories of these bands.

And I thought that was incredible.

And I devoured all these magazines.

So what I really wanted to do was a magazine that amalgamated all those things.

But basically what it boiled down to was it was a smash hits of indie pop and rave.