Time Out was, as for many adoptive Londoners, my bible. I told the careers adviser at university that I wanted to move to London and be a film critic for the now defunct City Limits or for Time Out. “Have you ever thought about accountancy?” he replied, dubiously. I eventually spent 13 years at Time Out, starting as sub-editor and ending as editor, and sent the adviser a postcard when I’d worked my way in. It was everything I had expected of a fiercely independent publication and more. The news editor had just nearly been killed doing a photo-shoot on the roof, in which he was re-creating a heist – balaclavas, fake guns and all – that resulted in three helicopter-loads of Special Branch with machine-guns responding to 999 calls from neighbouring offices. The receptionist doubled up as the gay editor, and if anyone phoned asking for the latter, he would trill: “One minute, I’ll transfer you,” drum his fingernails, and then put on his very butch voice: “Yes? Gay editor Michael Griffiths here.”

The wildest of the lot was the editor. Don Atyeo was a blunt Australian of scabrous good humour who could out-Kelvin MacKenzie. In my second week I saw him break the ice in a lift full of lawyers from the firm on the upper floor: “Excuse me, miss,” he said, tapping one poor girl on the shoulder and flashing her an apologetic smile, “but I think you’re standing on my dick.” Even Jerry Sadowitz, to this day the most contrary, foul-mouthed destroyer of PC shibboleths in alternative comedy, met his master in Don. Waiting to discuss a series of columns, Sadowitz’s wise-cracking to his minders stopped when Don strode in brandishing a sword, which he brought down directly on to Sadowitz’s polystyrene cup, slicing it in two and splashing coffee everywhere. “Right,” said Don, sitting down as though nothing had happened. “Where were you?”

To look at Time Out now, you wouldn’t think it had ever witnessed such behaviour. Even during my time it had acquired a whole building to itself on Tottenham Court Road, with a neon Time Out sign, and swirly carpets by Piers Gough. Since then it has acquired other offices in Manhattan and Chicago and, by proxy, 13 other Time Outs around the world. Yes, Time Out – the left-wing, left-field, experimental, sometimes simply mental magazine – has spawned a highly-polished global empire. How on earth did it happen? And what does it mean for the local magazine for local people that used to save the bacon of every lazy Fleet Street features editor flicking through the latest issue for ideas?

Compared unfavourably

One-track minded he may be, but he’s hitched quite a number of carriages on to the original train in the past 40 years. After launching a sister magazine in New York, which defied all media pundits to become a commercial triumph, he has since added Chicago, and licensed the Time Out name and know-how to listings guides in 13 cities and counting, from St Petersburg (in Russian) to Tel Aviv (in Hebrew), from Shanghai (in Chinese) to Bucharest (in Romanian), from Mumbai to, until recently, Beirut – closed down in August after dodging as well as keeping up with the news – both in English. New licensed launches are currently being planned for Kiev, Delhi and Barcelona.

More bravely still, he has just taken that final leap into cyberspace, putting all Time Out London’s listings and reviews online for the first time. Free. From a magazine that usually costs £2.50. And, it has to be said, it’s awesomely well done, quite the best of its kind, which in a way should make Tony even more nervous. For this is a move he has long resisted, in case it dents sales of the magazine. But then again, he’s also resisted selling on his cherished listings to other publications, and must resent seeing the Press Association (which supplies listings to all the major newspapers) build a successful business from that instead. A business analogy with Apple computers is instructive here. Apple famously has always had the best operating software, and in the 80s IBM and others asked to license it for use in their computers. Apple refused, not wanting to hurt sales of their own machines. The man who stepped into the gap was Bill Gates.

So Tony Elliott could have been the Bill Gates of listings, but instead chose to remain Steve Jobs. A choice, you suspect, he’s not that unhappy with. But the internet debate is something else, one that cuts to the very heart of his business. Basically, paper is expensive. Listings take up an awful lot of paper. The more successful you are, the more paper you have to print. This is an equation that, when I launched the latest incarnation of The Times’s arts and entertainment magazine last year, we squared by eradicating listings altogether.

Instead, The Knowledge gives critics’ choices, which market research shows is what time-pressed readers need of a Saturday, and we put all the listings online – where they never need cutting because of lack of space, and can be searched by title, date or venue. The London Evening Standard followed our lead a few months later, axing their troubled listings supplement, Hot Tickets, and promoting the web pages instead. How long, I wonder, before Time Out’s new online listings graduate from being a wagging tail to the dog itself?

But there is one thing the internet cannot easily supply, and that is presence. Here’s a test: had you heard that all Time Out’s listings were now online? Exactly. Tony always used to say that the best poster campaign the magazine could have was its own cover. It was his mantra, his justification for reducing the marketing director to despair in lean years as he slashed her budget again. Why pay for an ad campaign when the cover was staring at potential purchasers from every newsagent in London? My job, and that of the brilliant art directors and their stable of young photographers (Rankin, Perou, Barry Holmes), was to produce covers distinctive and appealing enough each week to make people buy it.

That was the most enjoyable, frustrating and challenging part of editing Time Out. I lasted seven years as editor, longer even than the aforementioned Don Atyeo (six). That’s seven Paris covers, seven Cheap Eats, seven Al Frescos, a dozen variations on Sex, and three Ewan McGregors. Plus a load of experiments, some of which didn’t work at all and some of which became annual staples themselves. The least successful was a misguided attempt to unite in one single “concept” cover a feature on the new film Wayne’s World, and a feature on a major Magritte exhibition. To do so, we commissioned a painting of an electric guitar floating in a bright blue Magritte-like sky, and underneath it the slogan, in cursive Magritte-like handwriting, “This is a guitar – NOT!”

Some readers may possibly raise a smile at this point. But at the time, there was very little intersection in the Venn diagram of readers who knew their “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” surrealism and those acquainted with Mike Myers’s heroic efforts to introduce American filmgoers at long last to the concept of irony. The cover sold just 86,000, by some considerable distance the worst sale under my watch, though in these less magazine-friendly times, that is, I understand, not far off Time Out’s average. Equally misguided was an attempt to explore homosexuality and camp in rock ’n’ roll by adding makeup, an earring and a tiara to a picture of Elvis Presley and calling it “King or queen? Why there’s nowt so queer as pop”.

Impressive hip-list

Parodying famous logos was a favourite device: the Ifs and Butts of Smoking, where the cover, logo and everything, was mocked up as a Marlboro packet; a summer drinking cover that looked like a Beck’s bottle; a budget restaurants cover done like a tin of Heinz baked beans headed, wait for it: “CHEAP EATZ”; Prague done as a Pepsi logo with the strap-line: “The destination for a new generation”. Sadly, our plan to shape a line of cocaine into the Coca-Cola logo, with the strapline, “Does coke add life?”, was nixed by the lawyers.

Another minor legal wrangle attended our cover feature on Kenneth Branagh’s underwhelming Frankenstein. We took a picture of Robert DeNiro, expanded his forehead and coloured it green under the heading of “DeNirostein” – with a handy outline of dots to cut around to make it into your own Halloween mask. We hoped the picture agency wouldn’t bother to sue for the unauthorised modification of the picture. It did: what we didn’t realise was that the photographer in question was DeNiro’s girlfriend. We compounded the insult a year later, by daring to suggest in an interview what has now become a self-evident truth, that in his attempts to become a restaurateur and club impresario, he had lost focus on his acting, and was spreading himself too thin with lacklustre performances in indifferent films. When quizzed about our article by a Guardian journalist, DeNiro did a Taxi Driver on the hapless hack: “Time Out? Time Out!” he exploded. “Don’t talk to me about that f***in’ a**hole magazine!” For a while we discussed replacing our cover slogan of “Time Out: London’s weekly guide” with “Time Out: that f***in’ a**hole magazine”.

The Time Out cover, in short, is not just a sales tool, but a statement of intent; not just an advertisement of the wares inside, but of its entire brand proposition. So when we dressed the trip-hop artist Tricky in a loin-cloth and crown of thorns, or presented Marilyn Manson as the Virgin Mary (an Easter tradition followed by later editor Laura Lee Davies when she crucified David Beckham, doubtless fulfilling Ferguson’s dream); when we put Weird Sex on the cover in four alternative versions, with a gallery of 100 images inside done specially, and free, by well-known artists; when we celebrated London Fashion Week with an anti-style cover featuring supermodel Erin O’Connor in a passport photo booth and the slogan “Britain says F**k Fashion: and the world buys it” – we were not just selling magazines, we were sending out a message: We do it because we enjoy it. And we do it because, almost uniquely, we can.

Does Time Out still have that sense of playful mischief, the sort of anarchic tradition that traces its lineage back to an editor prepared to put a comedian’s coffee cup to the sword? Aside from some witty picture captions, and Michael Hodges brilliantly continuing a tradition of acerbic columnists that has included Julie Burchill, Jerry Sadowitz, Victor Lewis-Smith, Miranda Sawyer, Patrick Marber and Jon Ronson, not really. It has grown up. That’s not always a bad thing. After the 7/7 bombings in London, the editor pulled Time Out’s planned cover, which had already gone to press, and substituted a stark white front page with the simple message of solidarity, in bold capital letters: “OUR CITY”. It caught the mood perfectly. A previous London tragedy, the King’s Cross underground fire which killed 31 people, was rather less tastefully commemorated under editor Don Atyeo: Jerry Sadowitz wrote that commuters should have been warned by the signs at King’s Cross station that read “Passengers alight here”, and by the busker at the bottom of the fatal escalator playing Stairway to Heaven.

Yet, in the process, the magazine has lost something, I feel. When we celebrated Time Out’s 30th birthday with a special issue, a couple of months before I left to become editorial director of AOL, younger readers wrote in to express their amazement at discovering that the magazine was even older than they were – it seemed to them so irreverent and fresh. Would they say that now? To avoid the fate of The Face or Smash Hits, Time Out must keep reinventing itself for successive generations of Londoners. That is hard to do when the theatre, dance, art, around town, comedy, classical and TV editors have remained in their same positions for 20 years or more. Amazingly, even the clubs editor, the indefatigable Dave Swindells, who I remember recording the M25-orbiting, police-dodging rave scene back in the smiley-faced Acid House days of the late 80s, is still going strong.

Experienced old hands

Art editor Sarah Kent, a former painter, is still one of the most insightful commentators around on modern British art, as well as on female artists from all eras. TV editor Alkarim Jivani has become such a natural on television arts programmes himself, it’s a wonder no national paper or indeed television channel has yet snapped him up. Yet it is true that the old-timers could rarely be relied upon to come up with fresh and original approaches to old subjects, and they would ferociously resist change of any kind – star ratings for reviews, say. So it’s important that the core editorial team – editor, deputy, features – remains fresh. There has been a slimming down of senior noneditorial staff recently, and a recent edict to retire staffers of pensionable age will remove many more old hands before long. But the appointment of Gordon Thomson can be adjudged a great success – the first outside appointment as editor in at least two decades to be so. Despite my reservations at the downgrading of arts features, he has acted boldly and decisively in making the magazine more London-focused, giving it a real direction and USP; the upfront section has never been better; and the writing throughout is tight and intelligent. But now that he’s made his mark and arrested a decline in circulation, one longs for the magazine to step back out on a limb, to go a little crazy, to become the talk of the town. It’s rare, as I’ve said, for a major publication to be owned by a single individual, and with that can come a rare degree of freedom. There’s only one person to convince.

Back in the 80s, the then owners of a cinema chain threatened to withdraw their advertising (worth about half a million pounds a year) if they did not receive a retraction of a film column excoriating them. Tony never wavered. When I determined to devote an entire issue to the subject of drugs, including getting journalists to keep diaries while under the influence, and running a SellOut consumer guide to prices, effects and after-effects, Tony just wanted to know that I was serious. For me, it was a campaigning issue: people were mixing any old drugs with Es; horse tranquillisers were big on the clubs scene. There was no point in repeating “just say no” when so many people were saying yes – what they needed was information. It got me on Frost and my first BSME award; it even won the Observer’s Life supplement (which basically rehashed the issue) an award; and sympathetic education has now finally become part of government policy.

That said, I was always one to chase circulation. An editor stands or falls on sales. I certainly did my fair share of sex and shopping covers, and this at a time when Britain’s first men’s magazine, Esquire, was still putting chaps such as Steve McQueen on the cover. And in these competitive times, an editor has to look to whatever he thinks will shift magazines – in Thomson’s case, clearly, London consumer guides. Yet it’s possible to take risks and sell copies too. Wanting to do an issue for World Aids Day, I promised to find a treatment that wouldn’t just be worthy, but would sell. The National Lottery had just started, so we tied a red ribbon to those famous crossed fingers, and ran the line: “London’s Aids lottery – could it be you?” It did very well. If it’s possible to sell Aids, it’s possible to sell anything.

Postscript: As if in answer to the above, the week after I wrote this article, out came just the sort of smart yet saleable issue I have been missing: a dating special with four alternative covers, each with a different Lonely Heart Londoner that the reader could go out with. More, please...