Animal House

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He genuinely means that last bit: a life in magazines might have left Brown feeling like a “beaten up old car”, but he seems to be doing pretty great at the moment. There are people I wish I’d seen rather than interviewed, so the Small Faces and The Clash and The Faces in their prime, for instance. Following a few anecdotes and a brief overview of James' early years, James begins by talking about his publishing career and the creation of his Fanzine. On one occasion, Brown says, the references to narcotics became so overt that the publisher at IPC became worried the drug squad might be about to turn up. Bright, loud, funny, provocative, ambitious and careless, loaded was read from the barracks of Afghanistan to the England dressing room at Euro ’96.

And I think the Loaded staff might be quite surprised to read this, because my mood swings back then were like a sail in a squall.

Loaded's unexpected success legitimised (and paid for) James's lifestyle, and it wasn't until he crashed and burned at GQ, and went through rehab, that any sense of perspective kicked in. Animal House (2021) is the creator and editor James Brown's story of his humble beginnings in Leeds, to becoming become features editor at NME, his three years at the helm of Loaded, his tenure at GQ and his battle with the alcohol and drug addiction that very nearly consumed him.

You can't go home again" is an old saying that simply means that fondly remembered events from the past are impossible to recapture. Which leads me to my next point that I don't think as a reader you really get to know James, he only briefly lets the reader in to his emotions when he talks of his Mum's struggles with her mental health and her death, the rest of the time it feels like he's putting on a front. 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. Today, though, Brown sees it more clearly: “There was not much fun in media before we came along,” he says.Quite often that was because something else had happened in my life in between and, instead of being able to understand how to process that, I would take it out on the next person.

The strapline, “For men who should know better”, reflected the sex, booze and drug-fuelled lives of the editorial team, and their debauched lifestyle spilt gleefully on to the pages. I had demos at my fanzine and record labels would give us tapes at NME, but mainly we got white labels or advance tapes. We get anecdotes about hanging out with the KLF in Sweden, the Beastie Boys in America and the Happy Mondays in Brazil. His stay with GQ is cut short, through no fault of his own as it happens, but as a friend of his said at the time, “Tarantino was never going to last very long in Disneyland”.I can’t hear anything from all the gigs, my eyes have gone from screens, my teeth are fucked, I’ve got arthritis in my hands, I’m overweight, my knees are knackered, the X-rays of my legs look like a broken bottle … ” He trails off for a second, then smiles. James travelled up and down the country with bands like The Redskins and The Three Johns, hopped up on cheap cider and raw enthusiasm, making connections and flexing his writing wings. Brown left after a couple of years following a murky incident in which Erwin Rommel and the Nazis were included in a feature about the most stylish men of the 20th century.

No matter the obstacles in his way, whether that’s dinosaurs at the IPC, colleagues who said he’d never own a fancy sports car, or critics who looked down on his ‘laddish’ approach to magazine publishing, Brown did whatever it is he wanted to do. Tantalisingly he does hint that there might be another book of rock and roll tales from back in the day because, although there is a lot jammed into this book, he only skims the surface. When I arrive, his girlfriend and youngest son are just off for a spot of blackberry picking – what could be more idyllic? Loaded did not so much revolutionise magazine publishing as send it rocketing into outer space, strapped to a Champagne Supernova fuelled on high-octane audacity. 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.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'.