Mike Soutar: I'm not a lad

He has a no-nonsense reputation and was responsible for driving the lads'-mag revolution ? and closing Melody Maker. Now, he has seen off Tyler Brûlé, the founding editor of Wallpaper*. He talks to Louise Jury

Wallpaper*

Tyler went, and his style went with him

When the style guru Tyler Brûlé walked out of the glamorous design magazine Wallpaper* last week, the industry gossip mill immediately blamed months of wrangling with management. The news was all the more exciting because his boss at IPC publishing was Mike Soutar, the high-flying journalist-turned-executive, whose career highs have been built on laddism, not the finer points of interior design.

After starting as a copy boy for a romantic-fiction magazine in his native Dundee in the dying days of hot-metal presses, Soutar went on to become the youngest editor of Smash Hits and the editor of FHM at the height of the lads'-mag explosion. He was poached by IPC's chief executive, Sly Bailey, two years ago to join the board and head her men's entertainment magazines division after transforming the fortunes of Maxim in America with a 126 per cent year-on-year rise in circulation.

He was not, the gossips said, a man whose sensibility was attuned to the esoteric publication founded by Tyler Brûlé in 1996. Wallpaper* fell within Soutar's ambit only last autumn, after IPC was bought by AOL Time Warner, which had already acquired Wallpaper* from Brûlé several years before. There were rumours of a clash of cultures and personalities, with Brûlé, 33, painted as a brat, and Soutar, 35, as a philistine.

Soutar is, understandably, concerned about that perception, not least because he thinks that magazines are damaged when personalities take precedence. And the "philistine" tag seems unfair. He would admit to being an "enthusiastic amateur" – not a Brûlé-style fanatic – when it comes to design, but he does have his own style. In an elegant dark suit and Cartier watch, he cuts a dash, and colleagues at IPC regard him as charming, witty and "cool in a good way".

Even on the major charge of laddism, he prefers the more gentle-Joe description of "bloke". If lads are supposed to bed their women then leave them, with a carefree sense of irresponsibility, he has a point. Soutar was 21 when he met his wife, and even when he was editing FHM in the mid-Nineties, he would leave early on Mondays so that she could go to yoga classes – much to the amusement of his colleagues. He is clearly besotted with his children, a stepson of 15 and another boy of nearly 11.

He may now be in charge of IPC's "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" division, IPC Ignite, and he may say he likes to have a good time, but supporting Arsenal is as laddish as he gets. There is no evidence that he ever shared the lifestyle of, say, the former Loaded editor James Brown at its hedonistic peak.

Asked to define what FHM, Maxim and the men's market is about, he says it has never been "women parading around with their breasts hanging out". It was humour that drove the market, he says, because "men are not very capable of taking things seriously". He thinks the market has stopped growing simply because men's magazines are not as witty as they should be.

His portfolio at IPC consists of Loaded; NME and nme.com; Muzik, a dance music magazine; and Uncut, the rock magazine for the slightly older male. It is a portfolio that plays to his strengths and the part of him that Bailey describes as being "very close to what is going on in pop culture".

But he was delighted to be offered the chance to oversee Wallpaper*. "The magazine is an incredibly famous brand. It's a terrific magazine with lots of potential," he says.

His internal critics are concerned that his approach to it was at odds with its ethos (see below). But Soutar points out that Wallpaper* and its sister fashion title Spruce kept their own management, editorial and publishing teams, and that only subscriptions, distribution and other "back-room" functions were shared with the other parts of his empire.

Leaving the Wallpaper* saga to one side, the titles under Soutar's control are looking perkier since he took over. Uncut, for example, has virtually doubled its circulation since he took charge.

He credits "great teams" for such successes and says it all follows from having the right editors in place. He regards himself as "the ultimate enthusiast" and, while he says he "cannot write for toffee", is good at making ideas become reality. He has taken some difficult decisions, such as closing the ailing Melody Maker. And it is widely perceived that he expects others to be as hard-working and driven as he is.

Though he himself will not say it, that may well be where Tyler Brûlé was thought lacking. Brûlé was often absent, dealing with other interests, such as his creative agency, Wink. Some suspect that the effect was to leave decisions at Wallpaper* dangling. That would not be Soutar's style.

Bailey is such a Soutar fan that she telephoned him every day for a month to persuade him to become part of her team. "The problem I had was that he was happy in New York doing amazing things editing Maxim," she says. But eventually he agreed to become managing director of her music-and-sport publishing division.

"From a media perspective, he just absolutely gets it," she says. "He's completely tuned in to what's going on. He has that very rare combination of editorial and commercial skills. Editorially, he is a genius. He is really good at working with creative people and bringing the best out of them. But he's also done a lot of sorting out of the business. He has very much put us on the footing we want to be on."

Those at Wallpaper* who suspect that its idiosyncrasies under Brûlé were too much for a big corporation may have a point. The hard commercial edge emerges when Bailey discusses the closure of Melody Maker. "Mike knows we're not in the business of vanity publishing," she says.

But with Wallpaper*, Soutar says it is not necessarily a question of making more profits. "It's not as if you would make lots more money if you turned it into a mainstream, frothy magazine. It wouldn't make commercial or creative sense," he says.

Soutar claims to have always been "spectacularly bad" at planning his career and insists that he has no idea how long he will stay at IPC. He would appear to have no need to worry. "I would ask people to watch what Mike's going to do," Bailey says. "He's going to go a long way."