The Loaded Story
How Did We Get Involved In Loaded?
TIM SOUTHWELL: For me, it began with my friend James Brown. IPC was a huge company, but it didn’t have a men’s lifestyle magazine, and James had been asked to develop an idea for one. He called me and said, “Do you want to come and help me come up with something?”
We were put in a tiny, windowless room in the low-rise building just down the road. It was a secret project—Project X, or something equally stupid. We sat in that room for the best part of nine months. I brought in my putting machine, we played golf and we talked a lot of rubbish. But we also discussed the magazine we would make if we could do anything we wanted. We wanted it to feel like a national fanzine with proper money behind it, because all of us on this panel had previously made fanzines. That was how I became involved.
BEN MARSHALL: James rang me while I was working at Melody Maker. Melody Maker and NME always had a fractious relationship, but I never bought into the rivalry. We were both doing the same job, and I always got on well with James.
Actually, I first spoke to him about the magazine at Reading Festival. It was miserable: pouring with rain and mud everywhere. James said, “Wouldn’t you rather be covering the Monaco Grand Prix than doing this?” I said, “Of course.” He told me that, if I came to work for his new magazine, I would eventually cover the Grand Prix. Many years later, I did.
BILL BORROWS: I got the call while I was working for 90 Minutes football magazine. We were trying to do different things with footballers rather than asking the standard questions about their most difficult opponent. We took them out of their comfort zones. For one piece, we hired a Ferrari and took it into a field full of cows to see how the player dealt with it. People noticed what we were doing, including James. He invited me to freelance for the new magazine.
When you’re freelance, you think, “Let’s see what happens.” I didn’t know where it would go. But when the first issue appeared, I thought, “Oh my God, this is going to be home for a long time.” It took off from there.
How Tim, Ben And Bill Met
BEN: I remember exactly how Tim and I met. I had split up with my girlfriend and came up with what I thought was a genius feature idea. It was the 1990s equivalent of going on a dating app: you listened to recorded telephone messages and left one of your own. I wanted to write about it, so I contacted Tim.
Tim invited me to meet Bill. We met in a pub around the corner from here, further down Stamford Street. Tim was working on another project at the time, a rock-and-roll men’s lifestyle magazine called The Player, which may or may not still see the light of day.
We spent the afternoon talking about Bill Gates, Apple, entrepreneurship and all the rest of it. We were potentially very boring.
TIM: I think I introduced you to Bill because of that dating feature. I thought, “This bloke has a few screws loose and will do anything, so he’ll probably enjoy working with these two.”
BEN: Which was correct. I did.
TIM: Ben and Bill became editors-at-large for Loaded. They were out in the field, doing whatever mad stories they devised or were commissioned to do. They became integral to the magazine’s ethos: gonzo journalism, getting into interesting situations and then writing about them.
What We Did Before Loaded
BEN: Before Loaded, I worked for Melody Maker and Tatler—believe it or not. Melody Maker was a weekly music magazine that no longer exists. Tatler, which I believe still exists, was for very posh people. I also did a small amount of work for Penthouse.
TIM: When James called me, I was working at Smash Hits, the huge fortnightly music magazine of the 1980s and early 1990s. I was interviewing people such as Take That and Marky Mark. Before that, I had worked at Record Mirror. I also freelanced for 90 Minutes, and we had made fanzines before that.
BILL: I worked for 90 Minutes and wrote match reports for The Sunday Times, as well as freelancing for The Guardian and wherever else I could find work.
Waterloo, Blackfriars And The Magazine World
BEN: The Waterloo and Blackfriars area is significant not only to the three of us, but to journalism generally. The Daily Express building was just up the road. Record Mirror was based there, as was the wonderful music magazine Sounds.
TIM: Record Mirror was wonderful too.
BEN: It was, but I loved Sounds. It had a grit that perhaps NME and Melody Maker didn’t have.
IPC occupied King’s Reach Tower, where the large block of flats now stands. It was one of Europe’s biggest publishing corporations and housed an extraordinary number of titles, including Woman’s Own and TV Times. If you walked into a newsagent at the time, probably 50 or 60 per cent of the magazines on sale were owned and produced from that building.
TIM: Loaded wasn’t in King’s Reach Tower. They put us in the low-rise building across the road. Marie Claire was there, and Loaded was on the second floor.
Why The Low-Rise Mattered
BEN: Being outside the main tower was hugely significant. Proximity to managing directors and chief executives affects how magazines operate. Even the short distance—perhaps 100 or 150 metres—gave us a unique independence.
TIM: I don’t think that was why they put us there. I think they simply didn’t have a nice floor available in the tower.
BEN: Loaded moved into the main building long after we left—and then went downhill.
TIM: I also think management was scared to come into our office.
BEN: They were definitely scared.
The Fake-Money Incident
BILL: Here is one reason why being in the main tower would never have worked. Tim, designer Steve Read and I went to Brighton for a fashion shoot. It was supposed to look like a group of gangsters in Saint-Tropez, except we were at Brighton Marina. We hired a yacht and about £100,000 in realistic-looking prop money.
The shoot went very well. We returned to the office on a Friday afternoon and somebody—not anyone here—got extremely drunk and emptied the fake cash onto Stamford Street, one of Waterloo’s busiest roads.
The police opened the office door and asked, “Did you idiots just throw a load of fake cash into the street?”
We said, “No.”
They asked, “Well, who did?”
Somebody replied, “Marie Claire.” Their office was below ours.
Security, Chaos And A Pirate Flag
BEN: The building staff hated us. One security guard refused to let me in because I didn’t have my pass. That month’s Loaded contained a huge photograph of my face, so I picked up the magazine and said, “Look, that’s me.” He still said, “No pass, no entry.”
At the same time, a man from Shooting Times walked past carrying a rifle in a case. The guard didn’t even question him. He could take a gun into the building, but I couldn’t enter without my pass.
TIM: James always threatened to put a skull-and-crossbones flag on the building. We really should have done it.
We held editorial and features meetings in pubs all over this area. We would go there to find some peace and quiet because the office was more chaotic than the pub.
BILL: Walking over the bridge today felt strange. Tim had a little moment and said he was getting déjà vu.
TIM: I had been here before.
BILL: There was once a fight during an editorial meeting, involving a member of the design team. Somebody then slid down the banister, hitting every balustrade on the way. Loaded left its dirty fingerprints on quite a lot of the damage around here. You can almost feel the chaos still humming.
Life Inside The Loaded Office
BEN: It sounds extraordinary now, but people could smoke and drink in the office. The first time I visited the low-rise, the entire carpet looked like one huge cigarette burn soaked in lager.
Magazines received lots of promotional gifts, so the office was always filled with strange things. One day it was stacked from floor to ceiling with heartburn tablets, presumably because somebody had written about drinking too much and getting heartburn.
TIM: We encouraged people to send us free gifts.
BILL: I never smoked during the day, but Martin Deeson sat on one side of me and Michael Holden on the other. I was cocooned in smoke. I might as well have been smoking.
BEN: Today, health and safety would shut the office down in about 15 seconds. It would be treated as a crime scene.
TIM: Everybody smoked, and most people started drinking at about 11 in the morning—sometimes before reaching the office.
BILL: At one stage Tim said to me, “Before you go to the pub, Ben, would you mind coming into the office first?”
BEN: Somebody also put a drug dealer on the company payroll, which wasn’t helpful. It caused chaos across IPC because the entire company was banned from using taxis. An empty taxi would leave the Loaded office, travel to an address in Brixton and return apparently empty.
Famous Visitors And The Fashion Cupboard
TIM: When Robbie Williams briefly left Take That, he turned up in our office. Famous people would simply be hanging around near the kitchen and fashion area.
BEN: There were all sorts of people in the fashion area. We eventually had to build a lockable cupboard because magazines received clothes ahead of the shows and people kept helping themselves to the fashion gear. I still can’t believe the police never raided us.
TIM: A health-and-safety man occasionally came around with a clipboard. Eventually, he more or less stopped trying. He would walk through the office with an unbelievable expression on his face, looking as though he was on the verge of tears, and then scuttle away.
When Did Loaded Become More Than A Magazine?
BILL: For me, it was when I picked up the first issue. It looked unlike any magazine I had seen, and it contained things that no men’s magazine had included before.
Then there were strange moments, such as being recognised in the street or being asked to autograph a copy. That doesn’t normally happen with a magazine; it isn’t an album. It was incredible.
TIM: For me, it was the freedom. If somebody had a good idea, it happened. That is rarely the case now. Everything has to go through focus groups and approval processes. We were genuinely free to do what we wanted.
BEN: There was an enormous amount of trust placed in the writers. If you trusted somebody’s writing, you also trusted their ideas. Even if a writer proposed something that seemed a little thin, you knew that person could turn it into something special.
That meant the editors had to be extremely careful about whom they chose. The quality control was extraordinarily high. Anyone who received proper work from Loaded could really write. We all came from the music press, which had many brilliant writers, but plenty of them never got a look-in at Loaded because they weren’t right for it.
TIM: Equally, we might take somebody off the street who had brilliant ideas, a strong personality and a distinctive way of speaking, and tell them, “Write it the way you talk.” That was another thing that made Loaded different.
BEN: Look at the issue containing my Hunter S. Thompson story. The brief was: “Go to America and don’t come back until you’ve got into trouble.” That was it. And I was given an expensive flight to make it happen.
Closing
TIM: Wherever you are in the world, thank you for watching or listening. We are three of the original Loaded team—not the only people responsible, of course, but certainly part of it.
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The Loaded Story
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