"To come across Gavin in person or in anecdote was always a pleasure. He was an inspiration and.. a true journalist"
- James Brown Gavin Hills wrote about football and nightclubs, computer games and drugs. He reported on wars and famine, child soldiers in Africa, guerillas in South America and his own struggles with mental health at home. And also about football casuals, parties in Eurodisney and the Berlin Love Parade. He won an Amnesty International Award for his reporting. He got marriage proposals from his readers. He was loved by everyone who met him, and by quite a few others who had only read his words. His writing could be hilarious and heart-breaking, sometimes even in the same sentence. He wrote for
The Face
and
The Idler,
for national newspapers and skateboard magazines. He founded
Phat,
the short-lived but innovative lads mag that inspired
Loaded
. He edited the official Manchester United and England football magazines. Selected by his long-time editor at
magazine, Sheryl Garratt, with a new foreword by Miranda Sawyer,
Bliss to be Alive
is a unique journey through the late eighties and nineties with this brilliant and much-missed writer. One of the most original journalists of his generation, he died tragically in May 1997.
"An inspirational catalyst, Hills' writing lights up the page"
- Robert Newman
"Big, beautiful, bonkers, a little balding, bold and brave like a lion, a true crusader. Nothing I write about Gavin is good enough: not funny enough, not wild enough or tender enough, and it doesn't do what In want to, which is make him alive again."
- Miranda Sawyer