Despite only half the people buying it see the interactive part, the unique format has attracted advertisers; agencies representing the kinds of brands that feel very comfortable in the space between edgy club culture and cutting edge technology.

When we put out the first one (the CD / audio / magazine format), we had more agency meetings in the first three weeks than we’d had in the nine months of the previous year. A lot of people were saying “Well we really like it but what do we do on a CD-ROM?” For the most part we end up using VHS footage on as they can’t prepare anything digital or interesting. It’s just ridiculously expensive at the moment to engage an agency and get them to prepare it for you. But as it gets more populist surely the prices will come down.

Apart from the format, there is a deep commitment to the importance of what the journal deals with and is inspired by.

I came out of fashion college, I went to do fashion journalism. About a year into it I started to think ” this is so stale and it’s such a closed industry. I started to get more interested in music. I did a work placement at the ministry of sound about four years ago when it was good. I was really fascinated by what you could do with a club and on how many levels you could touch people in a club and through music.

It became apparent that a shift was going on and as the superclub had peaked something else was going to happen.

By the time we started the magazine the superclubs had peaked and the whole industry and the whole country was flooded with cheese. Everyone was exploiting music and all the music was crap. No-one cared about quality.

The club industry is wide open, anyone can start a club which is a good thing and a bad thing. The more choice you have obviously, the more chance you have of finding something good.

The nineties are supposed to be the caring backlash to the eighties but in a way this is the decade when young people have really come into their own.

The nineties is a decade of expression and this is where my enthusiasm for what we do comes from. Everyone is going on about the cool Britannia being a reflection of the swinging sixties, but from my information the swinging sixties never really happened apart from in a very small cliquey area of Chelsea. What’s happening now is very different to that; it’s happening on all levels, it doesn’t matter who you know or where you come from, you can just do it. There aren’t the prejudices that previously restricted young people.

It seems to me that both the format and the attitude make it accessible and able to present a diversity of stuff in a way not previously possible. In a way the format alone makes it possible to bring together interests which were previously kept apart, more by the limitations of each medium than by the fact that these interests were not shared.

It’s easy to get hung up on format, especially when there’s something remarkable about it. At the end of the day content is king and if you’ve got fuck all to say then it doesn’t matter how you say it. The Guest List is definitely a quality journal first and a cutting edge media experiment second; that’s the way I like it.

Get it at Tower records in Tokyo.