There was a brief moment towards the end of Q’s long history, just after Andrew Harrison became editor in 2012, when the written word was all that mattered in the magazine.
His focus was only on the page, how the words fit together, how they could be improved after delivery. Nothing else measured up. Words strung together in sentences to deliver a story was all he really cared about and you either bought into that or you were sidelined. We learned more about editing copy, about shining the work of others each day under him than any of us had understood in many years. It felt like a gift. He was determined to make us readable after a long intermission, to become more like his previous, now defunct magazine. He was going to turn us into The Word, but we’d be successful.
It was a beautiful red-ink moment that lasted a handful of issues, then our paymasters put a stop to all that nonsense.
Andrew was cramming as many good words into the magazine as he possibly could, commissioning expensive illustrations to run in small spaces alongside them. The magazine was singing a beautiful song, tickling new tunes from its expanded writing workforce, music the like of which Q hadn’t performed in decades, but Bauer was deaf to it. They could not absorb the wonderful melodies we were delivering. They could only hear the alarm bells sounding as every page budget was busted over and over again.
The magazine wasn’t selling significantly better than before, but it was much more expensive to produce. That’s the kind of equation that trips code red in twenty-first-century publishing houses. Surprisingly, the way our publishers went about tackling this overspend was by hurling an enormous amount of money at us. We didn’t know this at the time, but it was their final roll of the dice. Soon enough, we were sitting on one side of a two-way mirror gnawing on biscuits as readers and non-readers alike discussed Q in focus groups.
Alarmingly for our bosses, most of those questioned said they really liked the recent issues of Q. Great writing. Good stories. Nice design. Some of the artists we covered were a bit off, they felt; it was a shame we didn’t feature more modern acts that they were into, but otherwise it was a really decent magazine. The subscribers present actually said that this new version had restored their faith in Q. It had gone mad for a while before, hadn’t it?
We took a few more days out of the office to sit in hired external meeting rooms with our bosses listening to more professional opinion about music magazines generally, Q specifically. Journalists, editors from other publications, record label people rolled in to chat about us, to us. Mostly, they wondered why our Internet presence was so terrible. Site under construction, we lied, hoping they’d be able to read from our coded eyelid blinks that it was really because investment in it had been axed. You should sort that, they advised. It might save you in the end.
Yeah, whatever.
BBC 6 Music came by to explain how they’d escaped their own likely extinction at the last moment, instead becoming a ratings smash hit. They did it, they said, by harnessing the goodwill of their core loyal listeners, hearing what they told them about the station and giving them more of what they liked.
That sounded like really sensible advice. We ignored it, of course. It wasn’t the radical change that was expected. The old staffers sensed from all this external consultation that ill winds were on their way again, removing choices about the direction of editorial travel from us. Andrew was being told to sort out his word costs and he was telling us not to worry about that. Keep commissioning.
Our recent experience told us this was a political miscalculation.
The new wave of radical change soon arrived in the shape of two very friendly former tabloid and celebrity mag editors. They joined as brand consultants at the behest of our overlords to finesse Q’s work, hone our commerciality. They were very sympathetic, often funny women who nevertheless were completely ruthless in temperament, as you must be when rising high in Murdoch’s red-top empire. They were joined by the guy from Heat for a while, the one who’d been floating around randomly dicking up our cover lines at the end of Paul Rees’s time. The tabloid hacks brought a couple of other younger tabloid freelancers to help them, and they all sat around in a shuttered meeting room brainstorming together about big-picture Q – a magazine none of them had apparently read before – while we continued the day-to-day work of producing the publication.
Their task was to imagine how to make Q more commercially viable, all the while being paid day rates that must have dwarfed the editorial budget. It appeared jarring to us, logically, that while we were being told to rein in costs at one end of the floor, we also had this bonfire of cash taking place in our name down the other. We kept our heads focused on daily work.
Their brainstorming went on for weeks and weeks. So long that I managed to have a child born, to have my mother die and to attend her funeral in the US, and when I returned a fortnight later they were still debating the same regular feature line-up conundrum I’d left them discussing.
Occasionally, we’d be called in to talk through some of their ideas. One day we entered the lair where the consultants were tossing ideas back and forth. Andrew was in a swivel chair by the window, arms crossed, face thunderous.
The guy from Heat revealed his favourite idea.
‘Why don’t we ask David Cameron to interview Morrissey? The Prime Minister’s a huge Smiths fan. Could be fun! We’d get loads of press.’
Andrew exploded. He couldn’t suck it up any longer.
‘You have more chance of getting John Lennon to interview Jesus!’ he shouted.
Shortly after, Andrew stopped coming to the office. Like Paul Rees before him, he sent us an oblique email saying he was ‘working remotely’ and we were to carry on as normal.
We’d seen this film already.
After it was announced that Andrew was stepping down, the outside tabloid workforce also reduced to just the two principal leads. The duo retreated to their ideas cave with printouts of Q’s flatplan and remapped the magazine’s flow, page by page.
They emerged a few days later with a much-improved magazine page-plan that included several new regulars that the staff had come up with under duress. On one hand, the tabloid consultants had kept making us put embarrassing lines on the cover (for example, I reluctantly undertook weeks of negotiations to have Liam Gallagher dressed as an astronaut on the front just so we could accommodate their line: Liam’s on a mission!), but on the other they had definitely improved the pace of the mag. Score draw.
Presumably, either they thought their work was now done or the money dried up, as they decamped soon after, leaving us to clear up both figuratively and literally after them. They then tore through some of the celebrity weeklies upstairs in the building, from where we’d hear tales of senior editors also mysteriously leaving in the months to come.
While clearing the Heat guy’s desk we found his notepad of ‘ideas for Q features’ open. He’d left it, but we couldn’t. We read them out aloud. Once we’d have had to handle these unfiltered thoughts with extreme care, lest one of them landed in the magazine and killed dozens of readers. But stripped from their author, we could enjoy them. They were defused. They no longer carried any hazard to us. There were some beauties, mostly based around daytime TV shows. Ready Steady Q: pop stars cook us their favourite dish; Through the Q-Hole: pop stars let us into their homes and readers have to guess who would live in a house like this; Who Are You: Pete Townshend fires twenty questions at a different pop star every month; Q’s Style Challenge: we ask pop stars to make-over their rivals in a brand-new stage outfit!
That kind of thing, but also just some buzzwords like ‘Bats’, ‘Milkshakes! Mmm’, ‘Moyles’, or oblique catchphrases such as ‘Little Britain, but NOW’ and ‘Pop star Archers’.
In the middle of the pad, ringed and underlined in red, were the words WHY AM I SO TIRED?
We never found out if that was a confession or a feature idea.
We waited for a new editor.
Nobody turned up.
We asked when a new editor might be appointed.
Don’t you worry about that, just carry on with the magazine now that’s been reorganised for you.
We drifted along like this for a while. It might have been a long time. It was definitely a few months. It’s hard to be certain of the passing of time during this era, the linear calendar became elastic. What is it that Massive Attack sang about inertia creeping?
One day, a rumour swept into the office. They were about to announce a new editor.
We gathered in a meeting room with the publisher. She was pleased to announce that after a long search they’d found the perfect candidate to edit Q. The answer had been under their noses all along. We thought that meant that Matt Mason, the senior editor, was going to be promoted.
No.
The new editor of Q is Phil Alexander, the editor of Mojo.
Yes, Phil Alexander is going to be the new editor of Q. He’ll remain the editor of Mojo though. He’s going to edit both magazines.
This was unprecedented. A whole new ball game. Never been attempted before. The guy who edited one of our rivals was also going to edit us. Two magazines at once. How would this work, practically?
‘Well,’ said Phil, tucking his chair in after he joined the meeting. ‘This is all a bit odd, isn’t it?’
A tall, thick-set rocker who looks somewhat like his childhood idol Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Francophile Phil had edited Kerrang! before Mojo and knew his music magazine craft. He was brilliant at meetings. He had good editorial ideas. His office politics were second to none – everyone thought he was batting for them. His only weakness, his Achilles heel, was that he thought that any blank space on a cover was begging to be filled with more words. His editing was otherwise exemplary. But would even he be able to edit two magazines at once?
We didn’t have to wait long to find out.
In truth, he wouldn’t be editing in the traditional sense. He’d keep an eye on us from his desk in the Mojo office down the corridor, making sure we weren’t entering Mojo’s editorial lane as we had done increasingly over recent time. He’d come to meetings. We could run ideas by him. He’d keep a close eye on our budget. That was about the extent of it.
This was the signal that Bauer had done their best to bring peace and stability to Q, but they were now gathering all but the most essential troops and pulling out. They’d poured their money into Q to try and grow the brand; now that plug was pulled. No more expensive consultants or fancy away days. No more showy redesigns. No more radical change. Phil’s job was to make sure we remained in profit, kept ticking over, didn’t embarrass anyone. They certainly wouldn’t be blowing any wedge on hiring a new editor.
All of that sounded fine to me, except magazines need editors. Football teams need managers. Policemen need sergeants. Pilots need air traffic control. Pubs need landlords. We can all muddle along for a while in a form of democratic anarchy, but every team needs to be told what to do, where to go, how. Policy, philosophy, tactics, authority must be designed by someone.
Bauer disagreed. No, you don’t need an editor, they insisted. Then they decided that not only do you not need an editor, but you don’t need an online editor, a senior editor, a chief designer, a picture researcher, a picture editor or a senior sub either.
One brutal morning, we were all called into a meeting room one by one. Only half the team left with their jobs. The rest were made redundant.
I was taken into the room for my chat with Phil and our new publisher. You’re staying, they said. You’re the most senior, experienced journalist now. We’ll need you to be the link between Phil and the team. Run the magazine as you see fit and Phil will keep his eye on your work, giving you any advice you may need.
‘So,’ I replied, ‘I’ll be like the editor?’
‘Well, sort of. Acting editor, unofficially. Phil will still do the cover and cover lines with you all, take a weekly editorial meeting.’
I didn’t mind. I was relieved to have survived the cull. I was glad of the extra responsibility: as I was commissioning the features and negotiating covers I liked to have an overview of the magazine anyway. The dirtier I could get my hands, the more job satisfaction I enjoyed. I also felt that Phil was the best candidate to be remote controlling us from a rival magazine, as he was just about the only person who’d ever had a good idea for the magazine in the whole company.
During that first introductory meeting with us, Phil Alexander had said something profound to the Q staff, something that nobody in authority had ever suggested before. It blew our minds.
‘Have you ever thought,’ he wondered, ‘of just covering good music that you like and ignoring the stuff you don’t?’
Of course, I had thought of this. But I’d never imagined that we’d be allowed to do it. My experience up to this point had been the opposite, it had been to second-guess the readership.
So in 2015 we started to base the magazine around good music that we liked. And since there was no longer any significant budget, we did most of the writing about the music that we liked as well. It was very enjoyable work.
After a couple of years of this weird autonomy, of putting out a magazine without an editor, I went to see Phil Alexander.
It was late 2016. That summer, I’d scored an exclusive interview with Liam Gallagher, who’d been silent for three years or so since Beady Eye had split up. The piece made a big noise with his fans and external media, and it sold really well, 28,000 on the news-stand alone, nearly twice as many copies as we normally shifted beyond subscriptions (which gives an indication of how few copies Q was selling on the news-stand by then). I felt my stock was high. The CEO of Bauer UK Publishing – like all British publisher bigwigs, a guy who smelt like a Range Rover and looked as if he sold country estates for Savills – had grabbed one of my colleagues when I was out for lunch and said, ‘Well done, Ted on that Liam Gallagher sale!’
‘Phil,’ I said, ‘do you think it’s time I was officially made editor? I’ve been editing the magazine in secret for two years now. I want the world to know. I’m tired of being our dirty secret. Put a ring on it, baby.’
Surprisingly, Phil agreed. He told me to compile a document answering some questions he’d fire my way, something he could take to the board to make my case for me.
I answered his questions as fully as I could. He thanked me for my input.
Q’s publisher took me into a room and also had a good chat with me, saying he was happy to make me the editor now. He asked me if there was anything at all about the job, knowing what I did about it, knowing all that Q was up against, that worried me.
I said I didn’t want to be Q’s last editor.
He laughed. ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘There are many other magazines that are much more vulnerable than Q. Keep doing what you’re doing.’
Phil took me back into his room and congratulated me. Were there any final thoughts on my mind, anything in particular that worried me, he wondered?
I said I didn’t want to be Q’s last editor.
He too laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Q’s a long, long way from folding now that we’ve stabilised costs.’
Shortly after, it was announced that after several decades working at EMAP and then Bauer, Phil Alexander would be leaving to join the start-up publisher who’d bought Mixmag and now Kerrang! from them.
My new role was also revealed externally.
I was to be Q’s new editor, its last as it turned out. Every day thereafter was a journey of ever-brightening enlightenment and joyful satisfaction, until suddenly the lights were switched off.