Why a book? Why now?

This is the second ‘greatest hits’ book we’ve published. This new one reflects the last six years and concentrates on the English-generated content.

Surely all this talk of ‘cool’ must get irritating? Is Vice ever trying to be cool?

As a ‘media entity’ we worked out very quickly that if you restricted yourself to only print magazines then you’d have a hard time surviving. So we branched out into a bar, tours, festivals, books, films and a record label. The motivations behind these differ but they’re bound together by the glue of us being hyper-active people who want to achieve as many things as possible.

Do you think that youth culture is always about kicking against something? 

There’s so many different kinds of youth culture these days that it’s impossible to say. Are the people who queue up outside Justin Bieber’s hotel room kicking against something? How about the Twitter and Facebook addicts who spend all their time telling you what they had for breakfast? Those kinds of ‘youth culture’ are more conservative and establishment-ass-kissing than going to church on Sunday. Personally I like to kick against things as much as possible because I’m an objectionable grumpy old fuck.

A lot of your cultural reference points – I’m thinking of skateboarding specifically – could be seen as throwbacks to the 1990s. Do you think that culture is still alive in the twenty first century?

I skated until I was about 22. A kid called Geoff Rowley started hanging out with the gang and after skating with him for a year I just thought,"there’s no point in me even trying any more." What I gained from skating and punk rock was a good set of aesthetics and DIY values. Vice was formed by people with those self-same aesthetics and values.

Your investigations often look at the gritty underbelly of societies: is that because you feel no one else is recording these things? 

I think everybody should take an interest in the gritty underbelly because it’s such a large part of the society we live in. To ignore them is to ignore life itself, but yes, often the gritty underbellies are too dangerous for the mainstream media to want to dig into.

A lot of Vice photography relates to a very specific kind of existence. Does someone need to get themselves a cool life before they can start taking good photographs?

They need to get an interesting life with boundless enthusiasm for discovering new things. Cool doesn’t really come into it. When I think of ‘cool’ I think of a cat wearing shades.

The inside of the magazine is an intoxicating cocktail of drugs, nakedness and the absurd; are the offices as organised and corporate as other magazines?

You could name almost every act of deprivation known to man and I could tell you it happened at the old offices in Leonard Street. These days we’ve moved to a much nicer, less parasite-ridden office across the road and, as far as I know, nothing awful has happened there yet.

What are your thoughts and preconceptions about an institution like The University of Cambridge?

I would have loved to have studied somewhere like Cambridge but at that time of my life I was much more interested in punk rock, skateboarding and sniffing glue in the art room cupboard. 

The World According to Vice, edited by Andy Capper and published by Canongate, is out now priced £20