Word magazine: A bunch of friends and a record player

Rare is the editor who confesses in his magazine that it has been so badly conceived and so shunned by potential readers that "metric tonnes of unsold copies were recycled to make confetti, the rest bulldozed into giant landfills all over Kent and Suffolk".

Yet this was Mark Ellen's verdict of the September 2003 edition of The Word, which featured Dido as its cover star and remained, in Ellen's words, "both nailed and glued to the shelves".

Ellen engages in this self-flagellation as part of a refreshingly honest retrospective of previous issues, written in this month's 50th edition of the music and culture magazine. The Prince cover (August 2004) was equally disastrous, he admits. "British citizens emigrated to avoid it. The issue was bought only by Prince's mum and two of her neighbours, which must make it an eBay jackpot," was his verdict on a disappointing sale.

Ellen is his own harshest critic, probably because there isn't much in the world of music magazines that he hasn't seen before. He cut his teeth on Record Mirror and the NME before editing Smash Hits into an icon of early Eighties culture, then launching Q in 1986 as the magazine for music fans discovering the delights of the CD. Of the 58 editions of Smash Hits he produced, he rated only four. Of the 52 issues of Q under his editorship, just three passed muster.

Not that he is a tortured soul; anything but. Rangy and slightly dishevelled, he brims over with good humour. His deep well of musical knowledge and genial nature mean that he enjoys immense goodwill from rock stars (for one feature in The Word he accompanied U2 as a police convoy whisked them from a Boston basketball arena to the airport in six minutes). And the most distinguished of those who have dedicated themselves to the difficult job of interpreting music into words fall over themselves to write for Ellen.

He hosted the BBC's Whistle Test and was one of the presenters of Live Aid in 1985. He didn't just witness Tony Blair's university band Ugly Rumours - he played bass in it. Ellen launched heavyweight music magazine Mojo in 1993 and rose to become a senior executive at publishers Emap before quitting to set up what he describes as "a sophisticated and beautifully polished fanzine", The Word, in 2003.

The magazine is produced from a fourth-floor office in Islington, which looks out on what resembles a Stone-age hill fort (actually a grassy north-London reservoir). The chatter generated in this room by Ellen, his publishing partner David Hepworth and the handful of magazine staff, inspires the content of one of Britain's smartest monthly publications (circulation is a bijou 33,593).

"I think the readers like the idea that we are independent. They're very used to buying products from giant publishing houses and they know this comes from a little lock-up in Islington where a number of people with a record player are trying to make each other laugh all day."

Humour and an inexhaustible knowledge of music trivia are hallmarks of The Word. The current edition features the 20 worst examples of pop sartorial faux pas, a list that includes Nik Kershaw's snood and Blackie Lawless's chainsaw codpiece (readers of the magazine are assumed to know Blackie is the lead singer of heavy metal act W.A.S.P.).

Not that Ellen really likes lists. "I think they've become a bit of a cliché. You can only do them if they have an original spin to them. The list I can stand the least is the 100 greatest albums of all time. It makes my blood boil, I know what they're going to be."

He rattles them off: Revolver by the Beatles, OK Computer by Radiohead, Nevermind by Nirvana.

"It's utterly meaningless. I'm not interested in orthodoxy and neither is The Word. There's a vast orthodoxy that has built up around rock music where there is a consensus view of what is officially recognised as being classic."

Ellen seems infuriated by what he sees as the willingness of younger rock journalists to adopt unquestioningly the tablets of stones produced by their predecessors. "It's always 'Beatles plus Acid equals Genius, the story of Sergeant Pepper Revisited'... for the 900th time. Or it's 'On the road with The Byrds', or 'The Kinks - the Wilderness Years'. They are mostly written by people who weren't there at the time. It's rock folklore handed down in book form and Wikipedia."

Ellen prefers to assign veteran writers such as Mick Brown describing his 30-year search for "The Soul of Tom Waits" or Paul Du Noyer on a similar obsession with David Bowie.

"There are no better-qualified people in the world to write those articles and I'd much rather have that than some 32-year-old who was scarcely even alive at the time."

Such a stance might put The Word at the risk of existing in a bubble for baby boomers - if you weren't around in the Sixties and Seventies you haven't lived. Certainly Ellen talks of his own disappointment at the paucity of musical icons that has emerged since the Seventies. He cites only Bono, Sting and, "to some extent", the Gallaghers and Damon Albarn.

Nevertheless, though he jokingly refers to his team as "silver-haired old rock bores" Ellen is adamant that The Word is rooted in the here and now. "It's not just pouring petrol over the dying embers..."

So in the current issue, a piece by Andrew Harrison weighs the relative merits of the past and the present, recognising modern Britain's advances in the fields of music radio, pubs, bookshops and salad. Ellen himself recently penned a piece on music festivals - "no one knows more about them than me" - and concluded that the much-celebrated events of yore were not a patch on the "great tented cities" of today. "The deprivation we had to endure to hear the Groundhogs playing a drum solo at 3am in a muddy field in Essex," he moans.

Ellen was out the other night watching cutting edge Nu Rave band Klaxons. Hepworth has, the previous evening, been to a gig by The Feeling and been deeply impressed by the band's decision to screen YouTube footage of their fans singing their songs, prior to coming on stage. At 6.30am that morning he had e-mailed Ellen to demand that they produce a podcast for The Word's website, discussing great openings to gigs.

Ellen loves podcasting. Another recent example featured his and Hepworth's respective views on the talents of Russell Brand as a host for the Brit Awards. "He thought Russell Brand was an absolutely poisonous, talentless popinjay and I thought he was a comic wizard who cast the old guard into utter darkness."

Hepworth and Ellen argue a lot but they are a good team. Their company, Development Hell, has grown to incorporate the former Emap dance magazine Mixmag, which occupies an adjoining room to The Word.

Ellen notes that the success of small publishers mirrors trends in the music business, where indie labels are thriving in spite of the wider industry demise. The Word's digital offering has grown organically and quickly.

A podcast on Pink Floyd, promoted through the band's fan sites, produced 4,000 downloads. "It's like having a hit single." When Ellen posted on The Word's website a photo of a dilapidated roadside burger van named "Breakfast at Timothy's", readers responded with their own pictures, including one of a record shop in a Sydney attic, "Stairway to Kevin's". There was enough material for a two-page spread in the magazine.

Ellen is very hands-on. When John Peel died, he sat down and wrote a 9,000-word piece in 48 hours about his good friend. In it he revealed that when he had been asked by BBC radio to provide cover for Peel in 1982, the DJ - who was supposed to be on holiday - came into the studio to observe him. "He nodded towards the microphone and said, 'It's like lending someone your toothbrush, or possibly worse, letting them sleep with your wife,'" says Ellen, giving a more than passable impression of the broadcaster. "That's how he felt about the show and maybe they were training somebody up to be the new John Peel in his absence."

Though Ellen admits he "thought twice about explaining how paranoid and unconfident he was", he decided that readers of The Word would want him to tell it like it was.

The same philosophy runs through the magazine. Hence the 50th edition being a celebration of the succession of certain issues (Tom Waits cover: "extra forests were felled to sustain monumental sales boost") as well as the failures of others.

"Why should we sit here and pretend everything was brilliant when in fact all magazines have ups and downs," says Ellen. "I've been very straight about it. I think the readers respond to our honesty."