Partying with Oasis, ‘street strip’ stunts & celeb shoot that sparked ‘arms race for nudity’… wild secrets of lads’ mags
A YOUNG female magazine reporter navigates her way round the piles of beer cans and half-eaten food to take her colleague a cup of tea in exchange for a cheeky snog.
Paying no mind to one of the bosses coughing up blood, she laughs off a passing joke about their readers enjoying looking down her top in her latest shoot all about Formula 1 cars.
It is all just a day in the life behind the scenes of the UK’s first and arguably most famous lads' magazine Loaded, where loutish behaviour, heavy partying and checking out girls were the height of cool.
It’s an image painted for viewers in new BBC One documentary Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem, which dives into the background of the sordid industry in the height of its fame.
“I was kind of an honorary bloke in the things I liked doing,” recalls Juliette Wills, who joined the cohort of writers at football magazine 90 Minutes in the late 1990s, sharing an office space with Loaded.
“If somebody looked down my top as I was cleaning a Formula One car, I didn’t feel the need to sue them or have counselling. It was just a bit of a laugh.
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“We worked next door to Loaded, the entrance to our office was through theirs, so you couldn’t avoid their chaos, I hung around in their office more than mine.
“You’d arrive in the morning and see blood on the carpets, and I’d take a cup of tea and a 50p to their writer, Michael, every Friday at around 3pm in exchange for a kiss - you couldn’t do that now.”
Loaded was founded by magazine lover James Brown, then working for NME and The Sunday Times, but was keen to produce something that he could relate to as a young man growing up in northern England.
With the help of some funding, the group of young men soon had their product - a lifestyle brand and community centred around music, sport, and women, marketed as the magazine for “men who should know better but don’t”.
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Girls hadn’t always been at the centre of the idea but, when one of their early features fell through, and they replaced it with a semi-nude photo shoot of Elizabeth Hurley, it proved itself a sell-out success.
James reveals in the documentary: “I was just creating a magazine for me and my mates, something where you could have fun, f*** around with the format and be true to your own ideas.”
Once the first edition had sold out, it marked the start of a race to satisfy their male readers, seeing some of their favourite female artists in scantily clad images.
And, the writers were propelled to new levels of fame - working alongside the likes of Oasis and the Spice Girls, travelling the world to interview top bands, presenters, and musicians.
The glamorous lifestyle was packed with celebrity parties, where drinks flowed at free bars and drugs were easy to get hold of, propelling the magazine to new heights of infamy.
By 1995, a year after launch, it was the biggest selling men’s magazine of all time.
Spiral into addiction
It didn’t come without its costs though for those working at Loaded, with a number of the team members battling cravings for Class A drugs - which were booming as part of a surge in cocaine consumption across the UK.
Some team members stopped sleeping entirely, surviving on narcotics for days on end, hallucinating and struggling to control their addictions.
Founder James was among the staff that ended up checking into rehab.
He remembers: “It got to the point where I was chewing somebody out at Loaded, five minutes before I’d have been praising them or sending them to go and do a great job, I had no control.
“It was like being on a yacht that wasn’t tethered, I had these terrible mood swings.
Are we one of the influences on Modern Britain? Yes. But is it our fault it went that way? No f***ing way
Loaded writer Martin
“Growing up, when I was a teen, my mum had mental health problems, she was in the mental hospital occasionally, and people with these kinds of conditions would be laughed at.
“Just 24 months after my mum died from an overdose, I was in a state of shock, and Loaded comes out and is a massive hit, I was just laying it all up, hunting adrenaline highs, shutting down sadness.
“I don’t know if everyone else was a drug addict, but I was. I just couldn’t stop, even with alcohol.”
James' manic lifestyle at the time has left him with lifelong health issues.
Using an inhaler and wearing two hearing aids in the documentary, he says: “This will be the last interview I ever do, I’ve been so unwell I thought I was going to die, the doctors said they were really concerned.”
Race to the bottom
Still, even with the likes of original writers like James leaving the industry for rehab, things only escalated - with the growing promotion of more lads mags like FHM, Nuts and Zoo.
And with the amount of competition increasing, the magazines had to compete with one another by seeing who could print the most outrageous, and often pornographic, images.
Among them, the launch of Loaded’s Street Strip, which invited everyday women, typically young, to try their hand at stripping on camera and having racy images taken for publication.
For those cashing in on the business, it was just part of the day to day.
But Scottish TV presenter Gail Porter knows all too well how the industry has the power to both make and break the women who dare to work so closely within it.
In 1999, the then-young telly starlet was asked by magazine FHM to appear in a shoot, which she agreed - after asking her grandmother for permission - could show her bare bum.
Weeks later, the image was projected onto the side of the Houses of Parliament, as part of a marketing campaign by FHM to boost their readership.
Gail, now 53, reveals: “I was asked to do FHM, and so I did the shoot.
“I was a little nervous but because everybody was fussing with my hair, making sure I was tanned, and my mum was there, it was quite exciting - it was like being in a movie. It was fun, I felt quite empowered.
It got to the point where I was chewing somebody out at Loaded, five minutes before I’d have been praising them or sending them to go and do a great job, I had no control
Loaded founder James
“But on May 9, 1999 - I got up in the morning, I was in my bathroom doing my teeth, and I had BBC news on, and I heard my name and I thought, ‘BBC News? Why are they talking about me?’
“I went straight into the front room and saw this image, of me on the side of the Houses of Parliament.
“I felt stupid, let down - it was a big PR stunt for a magazine, and the only person uninformed was me. I was an easy target, I guess, but consent would’ve been nice. I would’ve said no.
“It was a strange time in the 90s where men were mean to females, like some of them seemed to think that it made them look like a film star, a big man in front of their mates.
“It felt like when you get bullied at school, a group of people, a group of lads who would pick on you and not really care what you feel.”
Juliette agrees: “There was no desire to pick up a copy of Loaded in 2000 to 2003, it was such a shame because it had basically turned into everything else - like Nuts, Zoo, all of that awful stuff.
“It went really dark in men’s magazines, that’s where it became really misogynistic.”
Dark side of mags
Even those working for the magazines now admit that it went downhill, and fast - and it wasn’t just all about the growing sexual exposure, but the way magazine writers were coping with demands.
Photographer Derek Ridgers says: “Sex and girls were part of the conversation - and so we needed more flash, more women, more sexy sex, and competition breeds bad behaviour sometimes.
“It was like a flesh-filled arms race, so we started to do things that were a bit weird, which you don’t see until you stop.”
While the UK lad culture was once defined by the likes of drinking beer, watching football and being interested in girls, in recent years, it’s become synonymous with sexism, misogyny, and harassment.
‘Laddism’ has increasingly found itself intertwined with the darker side of internet culture, including the 'manosphere', an online network of men’s communities who promote anti-feminist beliefs.
It’s internet spaces like this that have given rise to the likes of misogynistic internet personality Andrew Tate, who long discussed online how to pick up and sexually exploit women.
But the founders of Loaded - which ceased production as a print magazine in March 2015 - insist that with with lad culture still spreading via the internet long after their demise, they aren’t entirely at fault.
James continues: “I can’t stand the perception of it now, it’s depressing, because we did something good and then as time passes, it became something else. It was just very much all of an era.”
Loaded writer Martin Deeson concludes: “I have thought, ‘what the f*** have I created? The pornification of the men’s magazine market felt like it was our fault.
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“But would Andrew Tate have happened if Loaded hadn’t happened? Yes, he’s a f***ing psycho. Are we one of the influences on Modern Britain? Yes. But is it our fault it went that way? No f***ing way.”
Loaded: Lads, Mags and Mayhem airs on BBC Two on November 22 at 9pm
