Bliss To Be Alive… The collected works of The Face journalist Gavin Hills has been reissued

Few scribes were able to capture the pulse of life in the 90s like Gavin Hills, the former The Face journalist, who died tragically in May 1997, just days after his 31st birthday.

From football casuals and Berlin tekkno, to losing the plot in Eurodisney and Ethiopia, Hills wrote about clubs, drugs, trainers and Teletubbies, street gangs in El Salvador and snipers in Sarajevo.… as well as winning an Amnesty International award for his report on the war in Angola.

Hills also had a darkly comic ability to place global, often tragic events in a context that the casual reader could identify with (while all the time maintaining the seriousness of the subject matter) – intertwining references to The Smiths and New Kids On The Block into an article on war in Africa, or Only Fools and Horses and ‘Allo ‘Allo into a piece on Bosnia.

To mark what would have been his 54th birthday, Hills friend and former The Face editor Sheryl Garratt has re-released a collection of Hills’ writing, entitled Bliss To Be Alive – The Collected Writings of Gavin Hills, a tome that was first released in 2000 (and now sells second-hand for silly money).

It’s available for £5.99 on Kindle, and is a must-read for those looking for the real story of the 90s. Click here, or on the image above, to purchase.