The battle remains the same

I don’t mind saying that we’ve been enjoying the buzz around the 30th Anniversary issue of hotpress. One of the most encouraging and rewarding aspects of it all is that we have been inundated with messages of goodwill, support and friendship from staff who served in the good ship hotpress over the years.
There has also been an unprecedented influx of emails, texts, cards and messages from people in the music business all over the world, as well as in Ireland. To everyone who has been in touch, and especially to staff past and present, thanks a million – it is much appreciated.
The same goes for all the media that have accommodated us so thoughtfully over the past two to three weeks. It’s easy to be cynical, but when you are met with such a positive wave of enthusiasm and generosity of spirit, as we have over the past few weeks, any tendency towards that kind of thinking goes out the window.
In truth, our 30th celebrations are just beginning, with a schedule of events currently being hammered into shape that will take us through until June of next year. We can’t say a whole lot now about what’s on the agenda except that there’ll be a series of special issues, as well as books, CDs and unique events – all of which will hopefully serve to brighten up the year for hotpress readers and for the rest of the public alike, in a plethora of different ways. Fingers crossed…
The first of our planned special issues is already in your hands. It contains a number of features that reflect on different aspects of life in Ireland since 1977, including a fine piece by Craig Fitzsimons on the 30 Greatest Irish Sporting Memories – and which includes an interview with Ray Houghton about that goal, scored against England in Stuttgart in 1988, which lit the fuse for Irish soccer and launched us into a brave new era in genuine style.
However, what we’ve been slaving over most this fortnight is the special copy of hotpress 1977-style that comes free with this issue. There’s a few inevitable technical joins in there, but that’s okay – they’re in the spirit of the era!
Looking back, the late ‘70s was a dreadfully difficult time to get anything off the ground here – even airplanes had it tough at times – and a rock magazine wasn’t likely to get the nod easily from either business or government. The country was in an economic mess. The level of unemployment was catastrophically high. Interest rates were in the mid-teens, far higher again if you were finding it hard to keep within your overdraft. And that was just the start of it…
Printing technology was primitive. Computers effectively didn’t exist. There was no one – or virtually no one – doing full colour reproduction on a web machine. Spot colour was as good as it got, and even that – like petrol at the beginning of the ‘70s and condoms at the end – was carefully rationed. Our first issue, then, was produced in the face of so many hostile circumstances that it was black and white all the way, and not just metaphorically speaking.
Bearing that in mind, we thought we’d evoke the era’s extraordinary combination of poverty and austerity – not to mention our own utter lack of sophistication – more accurately by sticking with the monochrome look, for this special free edition. Our debut was high on aspiration and it had its moments – but, overall, it was woefully short on finesse. But we hit our stride after a few issues, at least in terms of the ground we were covering. It was a hugely exciting time in music and we got stuck into it, bringing readers the good news as well as the bad.
The 1977 reprint gathers together a selection of pieces from the first six months – between June and December 1977 – and should hopefully give readers in 2007 a sense of what it was like back then, in days that were far darker in many ways, but also more gloriously innocent. Retracing your steps can be awkward and embarrassing, and to a large extent that was what I was feeling, examining those first 13 issues with a view to choosing what to include. The lay-out was ropey. The number of mistakes was irritating. And the editorial voice was, well, not the kind that you’d use 30 years on, that’s for sure.
But then I came across a letter to the editor in the 13th issue, published at the end of November. It was from Charlie Gillett, author of the seminal 1970 book about pop music, Sound Of The City. The founder of Oval Records, Charlie is a writer and broadcaster of great insight and enormous influence, who over the years has worked with the BBC and Capital Radio, as well as writing for Rolling Stone, NME and The Observer. In 2006, Gillett was awarded The John Peel Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music Radio by the Radio Academy. Anyway, I felt a whole lot better about the old issues I was ploughing through when I read the letter – because this is what he said:
“Just a line to say thanks for sending us hotpress, which I would recommend to a visitor from Outer Space as the best insight into what the music scene in Britain feels like right now. It’s reassuring for this more or less retired journalist to read pieces and think, yeah, that’s what I would have liked to say.”
In so many ways hotpress has changed and improved over the years, but for the Team Of 2007 the battle remains essentially the same. The ambition has always been to produce a world-class magazine that can stand proudly alongside anything comparable elsewhere – whether it’s Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender or Vanity Fair in the US, Q, Uncut or Mojo in the UK – and so on. But also – most importantly – the ambition has always been to be distinctively ourselves. From the start, we saw hotpress as being not just about the music but rather about what the music is about – life, death, love, sex, romance, celebration, introspection, war, politics, pleasure, pain, the environment, the apocalypse, and indeed anything and everything else that either makes the world go around or threatens it – that is, I guess, the whole gamut of human experience.
We fail sometimes, of course we do. But the ambition itself is the prize. Now, let’s see if we can keep Ireland safe for rock’n’roll, one more time with feeling, eh? 2037, here we come…