Hot Press, the fortnightly publication produced from a set of small offices on Drury Street, Dublin, is a curious beast. In fact, it would be difficult to find a comparable publication in Britain or Ireland: a newspaper-magazine that combines music, film and entertainment with a strong sense of social justice and an abiding interest in exploring the motivations of the great, the good and the not-so-good of Irish society.
Founded in 1977 by a group led by Niall Stokes, a musician and journalist who is still editing the publication 20 years later, it now sells about 21,000 copies of each issue to a readership which falls broadly into the 16-30 year old category, with an average age of 22 or 23. It has a full-time staff of 13, with four outside people responsible for its advertising, and a core of six to eight key writers, supplemented by up to 20 more. Stokes has broadened his activities: he now chairs the Independent Radio and Television Commission, responsible for issuing licences to independent radio stations, yet he still looks, well, a little offbeat. Seated in his modest office at the top of Hot Press HQ, the cord of a pair of earphones dangles around his neck and his dark shirt is decorated with - and let's not beat about the bush here - large white musical notes.
"I had a strong sense that there was stuff happening here that was not being covered adequately or at all by other national press or by any other music-driven media or by national radio and television," he says of Hot Press's beginnings. "There was no publication that represented the changes in perception that might have come about as a result of listening to rock and roll and looking at the world through those kinds of lenses."
The new publication was always intended to be about more than music. There was a strong political and social element to the writing and the music was placed in the context of issues which were of interest to its young readership, from the political and cultural - including Northern Ireland and the leading political and artistic figures of the day - to the social.
"That's something we identified in relation to Ireland as opposed to papers like Melody Maker in Britain," Stokes says. "We could actually play a role in the national scheme of things and we had an influence on that level which would be quite unique for publications of this type. In many ways, it changed the way things were being approached in the media generally as a result of what we did in Hot Press."
Hot Press has taken a strong line on what Stokes terms the magazine's "religious interest", particularly in relation to the Catholic church. He denies that the approach was hostile, pointing to an in-depth and revealing interview with the Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, six years before it was revealed that he had fathered a son, but there is little doubt that Hot Press and the church frequently found themselves on opposing sides on certain matters.
"I wouldn't make any apology for stating the fact that the Catholic church in particular - although it is not alone among churches - has had a very negative impact in terms of Irish people's perceptions of their sexuality, their perception of their bodies, their relationships between one another and that whole area," says Stokes. "Ireland, I think, has grown and matured and changed enormously over the past 20 or 30 years and it's because the Church's influence on what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms has diminished enormously."
Hot Press campaigned for the legalisation of homosexuality and a change in the laws relating to contraception. Stokes says he is glad that Hot Press took the stand if it contributed to changes in the climate in Ireland in relation to those issues. "If we were seen as being hostile to the church it would have been born out of a sense that the church's influence in these areas was very definitely a damaging one in terms of the Irish psyche and in terms of a core aspect of people's lives and their being."
