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Tom Hibbert

1952-2011

- Tom Hibbert, journalist, born 28 May 1952; died 28 August 2011. - Former Observer columnist and mainstay of both Smash Hits and Q magazines. His cavalier humour and softly ruthless interview technique earned him a wide following in the pop-culture publications of the 1980s and 90s - Son of the historian Christopher Hibbert, Tom was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, and went to Leighton Park Quaker school in Reading and then the local grammar, but dropped out of Leeds University after a term to play in various uncelebrated rock bands and chance his arm as a journalist. - At Smash Hits in the mid-80s, he helped invent a cartoon fantasy world in which everyone interviewed seemed to exhibit the same slapstick characteristics. All his subjects – Paul McCartney, David Bowie, Bucks Fizz, John Lydon – were delightfully over-exaggerated, as mischievous and eccentric as their interrogator. The magazine was so successful that even the prime minister, seeking re-election in 1987, believed she could speak to the entire nation's teenage youth by allowing Hibbert and his ancient tape-recorder through the door at Downing Street. - Hibbert was transferred in 1986 to the new rock monthly Q, where a long-running feature known as Who the Hell … was devised especially for his withering humour and his extraordinary ability to get pompous public figures to make buffoons of themselves. - The Observer hired Tom to write its Pendennis column in the mid-90s – witty and bone-dry conceits from the perspective of a smoke-fugged bar-stool – but in 1997 he developed pneumonia and acute pancreatitis, and spent three months in the intensive care unit of his local hospital in Hammersmith, west London. In his characteristic resigned and shrugging manner, he spent the last 14 years of his life unable to work and living with the after-effects of an illness from which he never fully recovered.

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