We wanna get LOADED GOOD TIME

Brown

The only time the police came into the offce was to buy the magazine,” insists former Loaded editor James Brown. “I remember two offcers walking in and saying: ‘Hide your dope! We’ve come to buy a copy.’”

It was the mid-Nineties and the Loaded offces “stank of skunk”. The magazine’s young and controversial editor had deliberately created a subculture in which prep for an editorial meeting meant racking up lines of cocaine or rolling a blunt. But the illicit habits of Loaded’s staff weren’t just fodder for the gossip columns – they were the secret behind their success. The publication’s outrageous, gonzo-style journalism allowed readers to vicariously experience their debauched lifestyle. It proved so wildly popular that even the local coppers were willing to turn a blind eye. showed young men as they really were –even when “they should know better,” as the magazine’s strapline once claimed. “It was showing men as they hadn’t been represented in a publication before,” says Brown. Drinking, clubbing, smoking – and occasionally snorting.

“The reason we were able to get away with it was because we were hugely successful,” says Brown. The frst issue sold nearly 60,000 copies, and by the third, the publication was already turning a proft.

Brown attributes Loaded’s popularity to its honest and authentic representation of male youth culture. While other magazines suggested a squeaky clean image, Loaded

“People of my generation looked at life like something to be grabbed and messed around with. You didn’t take the safe road,” adds Piers Hernu, former editor of rival publication Front magazine. “We were more concerned with having fun and being hedonistic and doing what we liked rather than what was legal.” This is not surprising from a man once arrested for smuggling gold into Nepal, in an incident so infamous it was later documented in an episode of Banged up

Abroad they shamelessly documented their drugfueled escapades for entertainment. Thinlyveiled attempts to code these anecdotes with street slang were mediocre at best, and gossip columns were rampant with rumours of staff moving drugs around the city via bike service. which had a knock-on effect for the music, nightlife, and magazines of the era. Modern day youth culture publications like VICE and Dazed are still trying to replicate the provocative personality of publications like Loaded and Front through frst person anecdotes of sex, drugs, and club toilet encounters . But it was a zeitgeist that cannot be recreated – and perhaps for the best.

Of course, Loaded was not the only magazine where illicit behaviour was rife. In his early days as a staff writer at NME, Brown recalls that amphetamines were quite prevalent (he was once “so f***ed on speed” that he was forced to dictate an article to a colleague, who then wrote it for him).

“They were [dealing],” he says. “Though I had no knowledge or interest in whether they were using the bike service – it certainly wasn’t allowed.” However, it was one story in particular about Brown and another writer “chopping up cocaine” in the middle of a river that prompted intervention from their publisher. “That’s when they panicked,” he says. “The next day we removed all the drugs from the offce.”

Publications such as The Guardian have criticised Loaded’s editorial practices, and while the magazine’s overt sexism would be called out today, Brown’s tenure represented a different time – where ladism was a winning formula. “My era of Loaded was like being in the Mondays or the Stones,” he says. “The only difference is we weren’t going on stage and playing music. We were going into an offce and creating a magazine.”

After making his start in the industry as a music writer, Brown sought to emulate the excessive lifestyle of Nineties bands, many of whom were as glorifed for their misbehaviour as their sound. “I felt that if we had a lot of drugs around us too, it would be good fun,” he says. “So I deliberately appointed somebody to the staff who I knew was a small-time drug dealer. We just had coke in the offce every day.”

But while their antics were entertaining for the masses (and proftable for their publisher), it was simply not sustainable. It was in 1997, when Brown left Loaded to become editor of GQ, that the severity of his substance abuse became impossible to conceal. “There were incidents that happened that made it clear that I had a big problem,” he admits. One such moment was when Brown placed a bucket of his own vomit in the writers’ room.

“Younger people of today’s generation are less likely to be embracing hedonism and more likely to be cautious about ‘well what happens if I wake up with a hangover’ and ‘am I going to die if we take this pill?’” says Hernu. Brown – who documented his editorial escapades in his 2022 memoir, Animal House – agrees that the moment has passed, claiming he would not be able to launch a magazine like Loaded today. But even after years of sobriety, he still takes pride in its chaotic legacy.

“We were just having fun, we weren’t hurting anybody,” he says. “It was a f***ing great rock and roll time.” Still, when the party’s over, no one wants to be the last one out the door.

Substance abuse pervaded other areas of journalism, too

While music journalists in the Nineties rode the wave of MDMA, the party culture associated with the fashion industry was also a hotbed for addiction.

“There was sort of an offce speed dealer, who also dealt to people like The Fall and The Pogues,” he says. Within a year of him joining the magazine, the arrival of ecstasy had an unprecedented impact on the British music scene, including NME. “Ecstasy changed how many people were using drugs, and it almost replaced alcohol as what you wanted for a night out,” says Brown. “It f***ed a couple of people up.”

While substance abuse was a part of the wider culture at NME and many other magazines, Brown intentionally introduced it into the writer’s room at Loaded, where

“A responsible person or someone who didn’t have a drink or drug addiction wouldn’t have been throwing up in the afternoon,” he says. What had become normalised behaviour for Brown within the confnes of Loaded – where even company lawyers cracked jokes about employees’ coke habits – was concerning enough for Condé Nast to refer Brown to therapy.

“My mum had died of an overdose and I was self-medicating with alcohol and drugs. I do regret how I spoke to staff at times. I was really young and mercurial,” he says, refecting on his tenure as editor.

Against the backdrop of the British rave scene, it’s really no wonder Brown was able to disguise his addiction for as long as he did. The cultural shift of the early Nineties was fueled by the emergence of new drugs,

“You can hide in plain sight if you’ve got a problem,” says Melanie Rickey, current digital editor of Sphere Magazine and founding editor of Grazia. “I worked in fashion media in the late Nineties. I was in quite a glamorous, hedonistic world of parties, events, and shows. There’s often free bars and you’re given more alcohol than food. I can’t blame the industry, but at the end of the day, it enabled a lot of people.”

One of the things about addiction is it’s a progressive illness,” she says. “So what was once fun when you’re in your twenties, and a little bit naughty in your thirties, by the time you get to your early forties, it’s not a good look. I really knew I had to do something about it when it was no longer fun and it just felt embarrassing.”