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The Rev Prebendary Bill Scott
Page 54Tony Elliott
Visionary founder of Time Out magazine who built a global media empire from a listings pamphlet that he started as a student
STAN MEAGHER/GETTY IMAGES
them. The sacked workers launched the
rival City Limits with a grant from Ken
Livingstone’s Greater London Council.
Elliott was particularly bitter that the
dispute scuppered his move to buy the
bankrupt music magazine ZigZag. His
plan involved expanding the maga-
zine’s coverage to include “fashion,
clubs, sport and anything of interest to
the younger stylish generation”. Once
again he had smartly identified a gap in
the market and he remained convinced
that a revamped ZigZag could have ri-
valled The Face as the most significant
style magazine of the 1980s.
When Time Out re-emerged after the
strike to go head-to-head with the nas-
cent City Limits, it easily won the circu-
lation war but lost most of its political
radicalism. Elliott characterised the
magazine’s shift towards the main-
stream as simply a reflection of the
yuppified times.
He might have built Time Out into an
even more formidable global enterprise
but for being a self-confessed control
freak. “I’d always hoped I’d never, ever
end up selling the business,” he said.
“Control was always going to be a diffi-
cult issue with me because I’d never
worked for anyone else in my life.”
Yet he came to regret twice turning
down a partnership with Condé Nast,
first in the 1970s when the publishers of
Vogue, Vanity Fair and Tatler offered to
invest in return for 30 per cent equity
and again three decades later when
talks with Jonathan Newhouse, the
Condé Nast chairman, foundered on
the company’s insistence on taking
control. “I told him that he had ‘crossed
the line’ and I was quite cross,” Elliott
said. “With hindsight, the partnership
would have been a good fit.”
He was forced to sell a 50 per cent
stake in 2010 when Time Out found it-
self heavily indebted in the aftermath of
the recession. Ceding control for the
first time in more than 40 years, Elliott
appointed David King, a former BBC
finance director, to run the day-to-day
operations. King brought in the private
investment company Oakley Capital,
which bought a controlling stake.
“I’m a practical person and I accepted
that because of the downturn and our
debt position, something
had to happen,” Elliott
said. His prediction that
the share he retained
would become “worth
hugely more than if I
held on to 100 per cent”
proved right. Six years
later the Time Out
Group was
floated on the
stock ex-
change with
a valuation
of £200 mil-
lion and a
global reach
of 116 mil-
lion users
across print
and digital
platforms.
Elliott re-
mained closely
involved with
the business,
even after a dia-
gnosis of lungcancer. “Tony kept sending emails and
calling until the last minute, about every
aspect of our content, the design, the
typeface, our social channels, our
market, our purpose,” said Julio Bruno,
chief executive of the Time Out Group.
Elliott, a reformed drinker turned
teetotaller, was a shy man who kept a
low profile. His early flames included
Anna Wintour, now the editor-in-chief
of US Vogue. In 1975 he married Janet
Street-Porter, the broadcaster and jour-
nalist; they divorced two years later but
remained friends. In 1989 he married
Janey (née Coke), with whom he shared
a six-bedroom house in St John’s Wood,
London. She survives him along with
their sons, Rufus, a producer in the me-
dia industry, and twins, Bruce, a teacher,
and Lawrence, a singer-songwriter.
Anthony Michael Manton Elliott
was born in London in 1947, the son of
Alan Elliott, the managing director of a
food wholesaling company, and Kath-erine Elliott, a doctor. After attending a
private infant school in Knightsbridge
run by the mother of the actress Susan
Hampshire, he boarded at prep schools
in Surrey and Sussex, an experience he
enjoyed as an opportunity to escape
from home life and a father whom he
admitted he found “intimidating”.
At 11 he was sent to Stowe, where the
highlight of his five years was the Beat-
les playing a concert at the school in- “John Lennon got out of the car
and said: ‘My God, it’s all boys!’,” he re-
called. As a student Elliott claimed he
was “definitely Division Two”. He
transferred to Westminster College for
his A levels and discovered a love of
Godard films; at Keele he edited a
magazine called Unit, for which he
interviewed John Peel and Jimi
Hendrix, making invaluable contacts
in London’s counterculture.
He prided himself on having his
finger on the cultural pulse, al-
though his judgment was not
infallible. He recalled inter-
viewing the little-known
David Bowie for an early
issue of Time Out after a
sparsely attended gig in
Beckenham. “He was
very quiet and
hard to involve
in conversa-
tion,” Elliott
said.
“I remem-
ber think-
ing, ‘Oh, just
another
hippy folk
singer’, so
his later
emergence
was a sur-
prise.”
Tony Elliott,
publisher, was
born on January
7, 1947. He died of
lung cancer on July
17, 2020, aged 73A self-confessed control
freak, he turned down
offers of partnerships
crimination, police harassment and the
role of the state. “It was a very political
period,” Elliott later said. “We had the
disaster of Ted Heath and the miners’
strike through the Labour government
and then Thatcher coming in.”
The magazine backed initiatives such
as the Anti-Nazi League and Rock
Against Racism and risked prosecution
in 1976 by publishing the names of 60
alleged CIA agents stationed in Britain.
At first it operated on a collectivebasis in which all staff were paid the
same. In 1981 Elliott attempted to place
the magazine on a sounder commercial
footing by introducing pay scales and
asserting what he called “the manage-
ment’s right to manage”. The staff went
on strike, resulting in Elliott closing the
title for three months and firing most ofThe first issue was
put together on his
mother’s kitchen table
Elliott in his office in 1971, and with his wife Janey in 2011In 1968 Tony Elliott was a student read-
ing French and history at Keele Uni-
versity when a well-heeled aunt gave
him £75 (about £1,100 in today’s money)
for his 21st birthday.
He was due to spend the final year of
his course on an exchange programme
in France and the cash might have
funded a bacchanal in the clubs and
cafés of Paris’s Latin Quarter. Instead,
Elliott decided to abandon his studies
and use the money to start a magazine.
The first issue was put together on his
mother’s kitchen table and was going to
be called Where It’s At until a last-
minute change to Time Out, after a
classic jazz album by Dave Brubeck. It
was initially a one-sheet pamphlet that
folded out to give detailed information
on where to go and what to do in
London; the first issue had a print run of
5,000. With no distributor, Elliott and
his partner and co-editor Bob Harris —
who would later achieve fame as “Whis-
pering Bob” of The Old Grey Whistle Test
— delivered copies to record shops,
Kings Road fashion stores and other hip
outlets around the capital.
“It was an era of dope, sex and
rock’n’roll, heavily laced with serious
cultural and political intellect,” Elliott
recalled. “I was fully connected to the
cultural changes and the new wave,
whether that was music, theatre,
poetry, books. The only place where
you could find out about these things
was in what was called the under-
ground press, but none of them were
doing the information in a focused or
dedicated way.”
Time Out covered not only London’s
burgeoning counterculture but also the
mainstream arts, the listings laced with
editorial copy on the radical political
issues of the day. “We had the best of the
established and the best of the new,” he
said. “I think people took one look at
the clarity of what we were doing and
thought ‘why hasn’t anyone thought of
doing this before?’. It was really
plugging a need.”
He had taken the pre-
caution of asking Kee-
le whether he could
return to complete
his course if the
venture failed, but
he never went
back. Harris soon
departed for a
career as a radio DJ
but Time Out grew
rapidly to become a
touchstone of life in
London, expanding from
fortnightly to weekly publi-
cation and covering food, drink
and travel in addition to the arts and
street politics. By 1970 it had grown to
68 pages and was stocked in WH Smith.
At about the same time, Richard
Branson, a contemporary of Elliott at
Stowe School, was running another hip,
youth-orientated magazine called
Student and preparing to launch into
record retailing. Both went on to
feature prominently in The Sunday
Times Rich List, with Elliott’s wealth
peaking at an estimated £91 million.
Although he did not diversify with
the same profligacy as Branson, he built
Time Out into a global brand, licensing
the name until his empire comprised 40
magazines in cities around the world
from New York to
Cape Town, along
with dozens of
travel books and
city guides. Ener-
getic and imbued
with a boyish enthusi-
asm, he was a benevolent
if demanding boss whose
success was built on a hands-on
style. He involved himself in every as-
pect of editorial, design and marketing.
A Sunday Times interview in 1988 mark-
ing Time Out’s 20th birthday noted that
Elliott’s “Peter Pan exterior disguises an
astute businessman”.
Cyndi Stivers, the first editor of Time
Out’s New York edition, which Elliott
launched in 1995, recalled his forensic
attention to detail. “Once, someone ac-
cidentally opened up the file containing
the logo and shifted the text something
like 1/128th of an inch. None of us
noticed it, but he did, immediately.”
Throughout the 1970s Time Out posi-
tioned itself as an alternative publica-
tion covering issues such as racial dis-Et was reallypre-
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