Barry McIlheney obituary

The Guardian

06-06-2025

Barry McIlheney, who has died aged 67, presided over many late 20th-century media success stories. In 1989 he launched the monthly film magazine Empire as editor, and in 1999 the celebrity weekly Heat as publisher. In his first job as editor, at the pop music fortnightly Smash Hits, he had more than doubled the magazine's sales in just over two years (it sold 400,000 copies when he took the job in October 1986; in November 1988, its Poll Winners' Party special sold over a million).
As editor, he honed Smash Hits' quirky style and headlines ('Corky O'Riley, It's Kylie!' ran the cover line for a 1988 interview with Kylie Minogue) and led a team of writers that included the future Observer columnist Miranda Sawyer, biographer Chris Heath and novelist William Shaw. He also commissioned memorable features, including Tom Hibbert's 1987 interview with Margaret Thatcher, in which she was asked if she watched Spitting Image, and when she was going to knight Cliff Richard.
McIlheney's personality was welcoming and irreverent, and he was referred to by various nicknames by his staff. These included Big Man, Barry Mac and Barney Tabasco, a name by which he was once announced by an American receptionist (in the 2000s, he adopted it as a writing pseudonym for Word magazine).
While editing Empire, from 1989 to 1993, he also reviewed films, in an unpretentious, lively style. 'Nothing really happens except for a lot of guys sitting around talking shite,' he wrote of 1992 drama Glengarry Glen Ross. 'But what wonderful guys, what memorable shite.' Made managing editor of Empire and its sister title Premiere in 1992, he ran the entirety of the Emap Metro publishing group from 1995, then the merged company Emap Elan from 2000 to 2007, with Q, Mojo, Elle, Red, the Face, FHM and Zoo all in his roster.
The younger son of Muriel (nee Wilson), an office administrator at the Kennedy and Morrison steel company, and David McIlheney, a production manager in the shirt-making and textiles industries, Barry was born in Belfast and grew up in the north of the city near what became the Oldpark Road and Cliftonville peace line.
A pupil at the Belfast Royal Academy, he became a fan of the NME at 14. 'I'm sure a therapist would have a field day on the escape that this new world offered me from the very grim reality of everyday life in north Belfast,' he said in a 2013 interview with the MagCulture website. At 18, he went to Trinity College Dublin to read history, often returning home to sing and write lyrics for the North Belfast Boogie Band, who in 1978 changed their style to punk, and their name to Shock Treatment.
They were played on the John Peel Show, supported the Skids and U2, and released three tracks before McIlheney's departure in 1982: the first of these, Belfast Telegraph, about local news, appeared on the 1980 Room To Move EP, and a double A-side single, Big Check Shirts/Mr Mystery Man, was released in 1981.
His father had died in 1979 and, living with his mother after leaving university, McIlheney worked behind the counter at the Kennedy and Morrison steelyard, then as a library assistant at Skegoneill Library. He found work in local newspapers and freelanced as Belfast correspondent for the Irish music magazine Hot Press. Around 1983, he moved to London for postgraduate study at City University Journalism School and freelanced for Melody Maker, becoming a staff writer then the magazine's reviews editor. His report of Live Aid in 1985 won him the Periodical Publishers Association (PPA)'s Young Journalist award. Recommended to Smash Hits by a colleague, he was hired soon afterwards as its new editor.
McIlheney left magazines in 2008 to become Sport Media Group's editor-in-chief, a position he held for a year. In 2010, he became chief executive of the PPA; he described the role to MagCulture as 'the perfect chance to have a meaningful and useful second act'.
After semi-retiring in 2020, he became a part-time board member of the press regulator Ipso, ran events for the Integrated Education Fund, a charitable foundation supporting integrated schooling in Northern Ireland, and spent more time at his home in Spain. In 2020 he wrote about his punk past for the Northern Irish culture fanzine Dig With It ('Everybody looks so young, everybody looks so thin'), and in 2024 he returned to sing vocals with the reunited Shock Treatment, including on three tracks for the album Exclusive Photos. He was due to perform with them again in Belfast this month.
He married his Smash Hits colleague Lola Borg, now a writer and psychotherapist, in 1991. She survives him, as do their son, Francis, and daughter, Mary, and his older brother, Colin.
Barry Wilson McIlheney, journalist, born 13 May 1958; died 25 May 2025