James Brown on Creating Loaded, GQ & the Wild 90s

0:00 Intro — Reuniting with James Brown after years 1:00 Thank you — What Loaded meant to a generation 3:00 The Loaded documentary — Why James refused to watch it 5:00 NME years — Mark E. Smith, Shane MacGowan & Nick Cave in one room 7:00 Discovering Stuart Maconie, Barbara Ellen & building the NME 11:00 How Loaded was born — Alan Lewis and the NME rejection 12:00 Assembling the Loaded team — Tim Southwell, Mick Bunnage, Rowan Chernin 13:00 The Keanu Reeves connection 17:00 What made Loaded different — Connection between writers and readers 21:00 Living in a squat in Hackney and feeling alienated by men's magazines 25:00 What was in the water in the 90s — 1984 vs 1994 28:00 Jools Holland playing Hound Dog backwards 29:00 The 90s cultural explosion — comedy, art, ecstasy and comprehensive school kids 34:00 Hiroshima, nuclear fear, and growing up in the Cold War 37:00 The Cannes Film Festival — Blagging into the William Morris party 39:00 Derek Ridgers, Courtney Love's strip club, and the NME in LA 41:00 Hunter Thompson's rule — Be the story 44:00 Why nobody made money from Loaded 47:00 Legacy — Sobriety, addiction and a generation's reckoning 48:00 Paul Smith, Damien Hirst and Frank Skinner's interventions 50:00 Howard Marks and Stringfellows 53:00 The champagne bottle through the GQ window 55:00 James's mother — Grief, mood swings, and what Loaded covered up 59:00 Getting fired from GQ by Nicholas Coleridge 63:00 Animal House & Zine Age Kicks — The books Martin Deeson sits down with James Brown, founding editor of Loaded magazine, for their first conversation in years. An extraordinary interview. James Brown was one of the most influential magazine editors of the 1990s. He launched Loaded in 1994 and transformed British men's media overnight. Before that, he was features editor of the NME at just 22, championing bands like The Charlatans, the KLF, and helping launch the careers of writers Stuart Maconie and Barbara Ellen. In this episode, James tells stories never heard before — from hanging out with Keanu Reeves in London and spending time with the Beastie Boys in LA, to the night Mark E. Smith, Shane MacGowan and Nick Cave were all doing soul plates in his Camberwell kitchen. He talks about what Paul Smith, Damien Hirst and Frank Skinner each said to him about his drinking, and the moment at GQ when he threw a champagne bottle through a window and it smashed through a car windscreen below. James also opens up about his mother's death, how it shaped his years running Loaded, his path to sobriety (now 28 years sober), getting fired from GQ by Nicholas Coleridge, and using his payoff to build a company he later sold for over £6.5 million. This conversation covers the full arc — from fanzines and the NME to Loaded, British GQ, Condé Nast, Howard Marks, Irvine Welsh, Hunter S. Thompson, the Loaded documentary, and James's books Animal House and Zine Age Kicks. 🎙️ Martin Deeson Unloaded — the podcast interviewing survivors of the 1990s. 📕 James Brown's books: Animal House Zine Age Kicks: Visual Evidence of a Life in Music and Magazines 🔗 Subscribe and follow: 🌐 https://unloadedpodcast.com 🔗 https://linktr.ee/martindeesonunloaded #LoadedMagazine #JamesBrown #90sCulture #BritishMedia #NME #GQ