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Nineties culture in Britain. Remember how it was? Blur vs Oasis. The Spice Girls.
New Labour and Cool Britannia. The ghastly English football anthem Three Lions, with its “football’s coming home” refrain. The Big Breakfast, The Word and TFI Friday on the telly.
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels at the pictures. Noel Gallagher, a champagne flute instead of a can of lager in hand, hanging out with Tony Blair at No10. Right at the heart of it all, influencing as well as embodying all that was good and bad about the decade, sat lad magazine Loaded, which exploded on to the scene in 1994.
The story of the meteoric rise and fall of the magazine in a haze of booze, drugs and hubris, as well as its role in fostering the culture of toxic masculinity we see today, is told in the documentary Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem (BBC2, Friday, November 22). It’s unruly, uneven and overlong, yet very watchable nonetheless. It opens with an archive clip of Irish journalist Eilis Brennan asking Loaded ’s creator and first editor James Brown: “Are you just a bunch of drunken louts who got together to set up a magazine and somehow quite accidentally cracked it?” “Yeah,” drawls Brown, brushing a tumbling mass of floppy black curls back from his face, “but no more drunk than anyone else”.
In Loaded ’s heyday, Brown often came across as cocky and obnoxious. Mind you, he had some cause to be. Feature writer Michael Holden’s intake led to him being sectioned on New Year’s Eve, 1995.
He’d been awake for two weeks and was having hallucinations From the first issue, which sold out (an unprecedented feat in the highly competitive magazine market of the time), Loaded was a huge success. In its first year on the shelves, Brown was named Editor of the Year by the British Society of Magazine Editors. Brown is almost 60 now, sober and, he says here, not in the best of health (we see him sucking on a ventilator before the interview starts).
Given the ferocious quantities of drink and drugs he put away back in the day, this is hardly surprising. Read more He launched Loaded, he says, because there were no magazines catering to young men like him. GQ was aimed at rich, posh yuppies who wore five-grand suits and drank champagne in trendy wine bars.
“They were like the enemy,” says Brown. Loaded – tagline: “For men who should know better” – was aimed at young guys who were “dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters”. Author and journalist Miranda Sawyer, TV presenter Katie Puckrik and singer Miki Berenyi, all interviewed here, were among the many women who orbited Loaded in those early years and have nothing but positive things to say about their experiences.
Berenyi describes Brown as: “Cocky, but a decent bloke. There was nothing sexualising about him.” At least not at that stage.
She recalls him asking her, at a much later stage, to get her clothes off for a photoshoot. There’s no question that rapid success went to the heads of Brown and his team, who began to behave like rock stars. They were all ingesting vast quantities of drugs, from cocaine to acid.
Feature writer Michael Holden’s intake led to him being sectioned on New Year’s Eve, 1995. He’d been awake for two weeks and was having hallucinations. Brown wasn’t in a much better state.
Everything sweet eventually turns sour. Brown left Loaded in 1997, ironically, for a better-paid position at GQ. By then, rival lad mag FHM had stolen Loaded’s clothes and stripped more and more clothes off its own cover models.
Loaded, falling behind in sales, followed its example by heading for the gutter alongside soft-porn rags like Nuts and Zoo. The Brown of today hasn’t entirely lost the aura of self-regard. He’s also acquired a prickly defensiveness.
He angrily refuses to engage with the interviewer when she suggests to him that the “ironic sexism” Loaded pioneered – and which its rivals copied, but without the “ironic” part – ultimately led indirectly to the manosphere, incels, revenge porn and the rise of misogynist scum like Andrew Tate. Loaded and the other lads’ mags were dead in the water by 2015. It would be nice to think it was because the culture had become more enlightened.
It wasn’t. It was free internet porn that ultimately slayed the beast. Rating: Three stars Read more.
