Farewell to Mr What Hi-Fi
Death is never an easy thing to accept. It’s harder when it’s a person you greatly respect, or a person of no great age. If it’s both, it can seem frankly unfair.
Such is the case with Andy Clough, who has been taken from us at the age of 58. Many are the men (and fewer are the women) who are decreed to personify the media brand they serve, but surely few can be as indivisible from their work as Mr What Hi-Fi, who had served that title under six prime ministers, and with considerably more universal respect than any of them.
I worked for Cloughy for a year or so, back around the turn of the century, at an expanding Haymarket feeling the benefit of part-owner Michael Heseltine’s sudden surfeit of time and energy. My colleague Anth Moore and I had been parachuted in from the recently euthanised stablemate The Net; along with a couple of other relative newcomers to the grand old title, we were emissaries of a new younger world where people listened to Super Furry Animals in the office rather than Stravinsky in the listening rooms. Being young, we thought we knew everything, but we weren’t daft enough not to learn a lot from him. It was hard not to.
It was perhaps harder for him to handle the reaction of some longer-toothed staff members, who treated the change curve as a threatening roller-coaster without seatbelts or purpose. But under his almost faultlessly polite exterior, Cloughy was deceptively determined – a characteristic that came in handy as his sector changed massively from styluses to streaming. Every new technology was assessed and reviewed with rigorous fairness and honesty, including the various dead-ends that twist the path of progress. It’s never as linear as you think.
It helped that he knew his material and his market better than almost anyone in the world: in classic Haymarket style he was an enthusiast not an opportunist, a lifer not a career climber. As the hierarchy and structure changed around him, he was absolutely perfect for the new breed of Brand Editor or Brand Director, but he was never a boardroom stuffed shirt: always one of the troops rather than the officers, he would put in longer hours than anyone else.
No manager is ever universally and constantly popular; the most you can hope for is that people respect you and don’t mind working for you. Cloughy earned his respect, along with trust, admiration and a warmth of fellow feeling. As a human, he was liked and loved; what more can any of us ask?
