EARLIER this year, when publishers Emap finally pulled the plug on Smash Hits, many saw it as a mercy killing. Like that other great British pop institution, Top of the Pops, the magazine had seen better days. Successive editors seemed to get younger and dumber as the readership dwindled, squandering its pocket money on Cheese String and Crazy Frog ringtones.

But if you were a teenager in the 1980s, and you had even a passing interest in pop, Smash Hits was your bible. Unlike its inky predecessors, the NME and Sounds, Smash Hits was in colour, which made it the perfect medium for the riot of post-punk posturing known as the New Romantics. First came Adam Ant, followed by Steve Strange and Soft Cell. Once boys in make-up were an accepted part of the pop mainstream, it wasn't long before Boy George came skipping into view in his ribbons and bows.

Smash Hits documented all this and more, and if your capacity for retaining pop trivia isn't too highly developed, there's The Best of Smash Hits to help jog your memory. And what a handsome volume it is, too: 200 pages of classic features, lovingly recreated with some sample song lyrics and pullout posters thrown in for good measure. Edited by Mark Frith, with a foreword by onetime assistant editor Neil Tennant, it's a reminder of how great the magazine was in its day and how far its influence stretched (all the way to Heat, which Frith now edits).

The secret of Smash Hits' success was that it never talked down its readers, even if they were 14 and thought Kajagoogoo were worth getting het up about. As demonstrated by the readers' letters (addressed to the infamous "Black Type"), it always treated them as equals, fellow conspirators in a plot to deflate pop stars' egos with silly names ("Dame David Bowie", "Lord Clifford of Richard") and even sillier questions (to Wayne Hussey of the Mission: "What colour is January?").

Writers at Smash Hits didn't quote Derrida like the NME's Paul Morley, but that didn't mean they were any less intelligent. The magazine produced some first-rate journalists, among them Mark Ellen, Chris Heath, Miranda Sawyer.

Reproduced here you have lengthy interviews with Adam Ant, Culture Club, Duran Duran, Madonna, Morrissey and Margaret Thatcher.

Finally we have the covers, all 262 of them from January 1980 to December 1989. The first thing that strikes you is how varied they are . . . everyone from Debbie Harry to Neneh Cherry, John Lydon to Jason Donovan.

Just one thing to ponder. The full title of this book is The Best of Smash Hits . . . The '80s.

Please don't say they're planning another volume. The best of Smash Hits was the '80s.

End of.

Paul Burston's novel 'Star People' is published by Time Warner at £10.99. His next novel, 'Lovers and Losers', is published in April 2007