James Brown, erstwhile founding editor of a magazine that revolutionised the marketplace back when the magazine marketplace was a force to be reckoned with, looks like a shadow of his former enfant terrible self. He moves gingerly, speaks softly, is on steroids, he tells us, and feels ill. The double hearing aids he wears are visible now that the famous mop of curls is shorn. The cockiness that helped make his name is far less apparent. As a presence, he seems much more engaging than he did in his heyday. You suspect this is no comfort.
Still, he is the reason we’re watching Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem, a 90-minute documentary telling the story of how he and a group of other hedonists with a gonzo gift “committed”, as Brown puts it at the start of the show, “the heinous crime of getting men to read magazines en masse”.
Brown grew up in Leeds at the tail end of Thatcherism and left school for a world of few job opportunities. “The country was rotten,” he says. “So it was like – pick a fantasy!” It’s a glimpse of the optimism that must surely (alongside his innate talent and that cockiness) have helped to make him such a success.
He wanted to work in magazines. By 22 he was the features editor of NME and at 26 was given the chance to start his own magazine. There was nothing catering to him and his mates – the sleek, moneyed likes of GQ and Esquire didn’t speak to them – so he gathered a team around him and invented one. “For men who should know better,” the tagline famously ran. It covered football, music, films and filled its feature pages with stunts such as sending the writer Martin Deeson to Cannes without a press pass and Deeson beginning a fine tradition of writing up catastrophes for a readership that within a few years had reached nearly half a million.
“You don’t know you’re in a cultural moment when it’s happening,” Deeson says now. Theirs was a reaction against the “new man” era (one so brief I had almost forgotten this officially monikered attempt at sexual equality had ever been attempted) but resonated with the sense of hope that New Labour offered when Blair swept to power in 1997. Staff and contributors talk of the fun it all was in tones of bewildered awe and you understand why. The archive footage of the news, the TV shows and the magazine’s pages make you feel as if you have lived several centuries since then, each bleaker than the last.
Naturally the good times couldn’t last. Drink, drugs (Brown once persuaded the team to drop acid on the way to a prestigious press awards night, sure that they wouldn’t win two years in a row. They did, of course) and non-stop partying took their toll on all the staff and things started to fall apart. There was literal blood on the carpet – Brown’s, which he coughed up after benders.
The decline was hastened by the introduction of competitors to the market. Loaded was hardly free of sexism or the objectification of women (contributor Miranda Sawyer remembers pulling Brown up on this aspect from early on) but when FHM and Maxim repositioned themselves to take on the upstart, they went big on nudity and were rewarded by climbing sales. From there, more than one of the Loaded old guard note, it was just a race to the bottom. When Nuts and Zoo were launched, the race only got swifter. The winners? Men.
What gives the documentary poignancy is Brown’s acknowledgment now that he was the kind of man and the kind of boss he was back then because he hadn’t come close to processing the recent death of his mother – let alone the previous years of trauma her mental health problems and resultant spells in hospital had caused him. For those especially who haven’t read Brown’s account of those years in his 2022 book Animal House, it casts a different slant of light on a history that has otherwise been lit exactly the same way too many times.
• Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now
