Animal House

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I would like to have read more about his work post-GQ and I found the sections about his recovery from drug addiction thoughtful and sensitive and I felt that they gave a careful balance to the many anecdotes of drug fuelled behaviour that preceded it. Under the mentorship of IPC’s Alan Lewis, he brought together a small team to create a rough sketch of the mag.

He had the Midas touch, but it sometimes came with a smack around the chops or two raised fingers, Kes-style. Since the turn of the century, his only notable vices, as far as I can see, have been Red Bull, Chocolate Hob Nobs and Leeds Utd. While Loaded’s sales boomed and he was supposedly enjoying his imperial phase, the truth was that Brown was also self-destructing, blotting out his inner pain with absurd amounts of booze and cocaine. There seems to have been a lot of love about in his childhood, despite there being mental health issues and divorce.I’ve never brushed shoulders with royalty and I’d prefer it if the Royal Family invested a lot of their wealth in helping our schools and health service, so no, I don’t think my political outlook has changed since I was down the front of the Redskins or New Town Neurotics at the Hull Trades and Labour club. Whilst there was debauchery a plenty around Brown’s life being an editor and creator of 2 of the most popular publications of the period, it’s understandable now that Brown has taken the time to look back and describe some of the patterns of his personal life that many probably knew nothing about, no doubt influencing his outlandish behaviour of the time. None that I can remember as a teenager, he was more influential in the books he gave me, like The Great Shark Hunt and Hells Angels by Hunter S Thompson, and The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test by Tim Wolfe. They just had girls in bras and bikinis on the covers … then you got Nuts and Zoo – these were so far away from what we were doing. Being told that when you know you’ve got no control over yourself was a real wake-up moment,” he says.

The magazine itself was packed full of the irreverent, half-drunk nonsense that provided many a lunchtime session down the pub, along with some genuinely funny insights. and the way it made them feel like they were part of an exclusive gang (even if said gang ran to 300,000-odd readers each month).

Today, though, Brown sees it more clearly: “There was not much fun in media before we came along,” he says.

About the Author: James Brown worked on the NME, founded loaded, Jack and Leeds, Leeds, Leeds magazines, and was Editor-in-Chief of British GQ. It was the biggest noise in the golden generation of magazine publishing, rocketing from zero to half a million sales in a matter of months. In a very short space of time Loaded went from being a magazine that the industry thought was a joke, to selling half a million copies an issue.I was going to say no, but I did have two strange experiences in Filey around both my mum and granny who had both passed away, one of which was utterly unexplainable. This might be true, but they couldn’t truly tame the impulsive and occasionally reckless editor they hired. For a teen-come-twentysomething, Loaded magazine was the bible of all things music/sport/fashion/film and gonzo journalism right at the centre of what would be known as 'Cool Britannia'.