Time Out at 40

See all Time Out's 40th birthday London heroes

What’s your personal favourite moment in London? Where were you, and what was happening?
‘It was very significant moment when I heard that Brian Jones was dead. We had been in a van all year with Portable Theatre and we were all setting off for Greece together at three o’clock in the morning and we got a Daily Mirror. It said Brian Jones was dead in a swimming pool and that the concert the Stones were going to give on Saturday was going to be a memorial for him in Hyde Park. At the age of 22, it was a very, very striking moment. It was very shocking because I think we all were incredibly self-absorbed and death was not on the agenda and the reality of him dying did seem very salutary.’ Feature continues

What does Time Out mean to you?
‘When we started Portable Theatre in 1968, this willowy young man came to our door and said he was starting a magazine and he asked what performances we were giving and he wrote it all down in a reporter’s notebook. This was Tony Elliott and it appeared he was compiling Time Out by knocking on people’s doors. I remember saying to him, "Would it help you at all if we sent you a letter in which we told you what we were going to do so you didn’t have to come to our door?" Tony thought that would be very helpful.

It was quite startling him coming. At the time it was plainly on the side of those people who wanted to do new and interesting things in the art forms I was interested in. But it came to reflect the arguments that were going on within those forms and as the arguments got more rancorous with the passage of the years through the ’70s and ’80s so the magazine reflected that and became a more divided magazine. It did start very idealistically, drawing the public’s attention to the events it thought were good. But the cinema department went seriously tonto. It was the school of "If I were making films they wouldn’t be like that" sort of criticism. It’s not like that any more.’

See all Time Out's 40th birthday London heroes