Andrew Harrison

He was a genius.

But they didn't have, Cure had basically booked up all the good writers.

So they were stuck having to put an advert in the media guardian, say, can you write?

Can you spell?

Do you like rock and roll?

Do you want a job?

So that was me.

So that got me through the door.

Listeners will not believe it, but every Monday there used to be a pullout in the Guardian about the media full of jobs.

Full of jobs with actually quite good money.

weird but I think they'd done a deal with one label I think it was Fontana or whatever and actually that tape's quite good I've still got it lying around somewhere it's almost like the kind of home tape you'd make for your mates but I think the problem with Early Select was it was definitely trying to be a Q me too because all the publishers who had weekly inkies like the NME and Sounds and Melody Maker they were getting spanked by Q which was a perfect bound high quality magazine all based off the CD boom as well

Yeah, well, it was for an older audience.

The CD boom had, by the way, these were in the days when the older audience was 36 years old.

I know, imagine.

But it's like people rebuying their collections on CD at a vast, vast uptick.

It was flooding the music business with money.

And they were flooding that money back into Q Magazine for full-page adverts to get your latest remastered Dire Straits CD, mate.

So everybody else wanted in on the action, understandably, because the weeklies were kind of going to, they were already starting to show signs of fading away.

The original Select Mob, they were a great bunch of people, but it was not different.

It was a bit Pepsi and they were doing their utmost to try and do a really good magazine.