Something on my mind

Like many of my generation I was an avid Smash Hits reader. Especially for me, as a Swede in my early teens, the tone of the writing was just about right: not as impenetrable as something like the NME, yet really good and informative interviews and reports. I bought the first issue in 1978 and then began subscribing in the summer of 1979.

But! Nothing's so good that it can't be improved, as I saw fit to point out in a letter that was published in the first Smash Hits issue of 1980. It's about the charts, you see, something that interested me a great deal back then.

The letter and the reply:

Their reply made quite a lot of sense, I have to admit, and there were in fact a number of very generous people who began sending me the charts. I didn't quite know how to handle that, I'm afraid, so the lack of responses in kind eventually put an end to all that. But at least I was published in Smash Hits!

P.S. As every Swede will know, the spelling of my address is a bit off. I got that from my dad who, when he was out on trips in the early Seventies, changed all the "ä" characters to "e". Naturally, the young and naïve me thought you had to do that so that foreign postal workers wouldn't be confused, when in fact they will only look at "SWEDEN" and not bother about the spelling of the rest of the address. I later asked him why he wrote it like that, and he said he wasn't aware that he'd done that. Thanks for making me look a fool in Smash Hits, dad!