Mark Ellen: a big bad love affair with music mags

Mark Ellen changed the face of music magazines with Smash Hits, Q, Select, Mojo and finally The Word. His memoir is as “hectic, self-deprecating, quietly perceptive” as the man himself.

By Andrew Harrison

(Photo By Feed the world: Live Aid 1985, which Mark Ellen helped present. Photo: Getty)

Rock Stars Stole My Life!
Mark Ellen
Hodder & Stoughton, 320pp, £18.99

Music magazines may be dying out but at least they’re getting a defiant funeral oration in this energetic and highly entertaining memoir by Mark Ellen, who co-founded Q, Mojo and The Word, edited Smash Hits, presented The Old Grey Whistle Test and, in a surely unrepeatable moment of can-do amateurism at the BBC, co-hosted Live Aid.