‘Bringing back Loaded so midlife men can ogle at women is missing the point’

Seeing people saying “we’re bringing Loaded back” feels pretty strange. I’ve always felt it was of its time, the end of the 20th century, and launching then was so intense, personal and all-consuming that this feels like someone bringing the Sex Pistols back with none of the original band members in.

I’ve had to think a lot about Loaded over the last year. My recent memoir, Animal House, which captures that time has been optioned for a documentary due to be broadcast this autumn and yesterday I was watching videos of myself being interviewed in 1995. It was quite unnerving how precocious and confident I was but I understand why.

I was launch editor of Loaded and oversaw the magazine which became a phenomenon from 1994 to 1997. Back then, it felt like we’d struck oil. A genuinely new kind of magazine that broke publishing records, won awards, inspired TV and radio shows and multiple copycat magazines. While everyone thinks we were the original lads mag with all that entails, the original covers were stars of sports, music, screen and comedy, ranging from Will Carling, Kevin Keegan, Gazza, Prince Naseem, Noel Gallagher, Kylie, Sean Ryder, The Simpsons, Vic and Bob, Frank Skinner and Harry Hill.

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Invariably it’s usually people who didn’t like or even read Loaded who get the column inches to consider the title’s past or present incarnations. And this debate tends to focus on what that “lads” market became – a landscape of flesh, where covers full of naked boobs barely covered by splayed hands, sat side by side across the middle shelves.

The success of the original magazine had far more to do with the self-deprecating humour and full range of subjects than the porn mag-in-disguise trope that is constantly trotted out. In the first three years we only ran 10 covers with women on and only two were wearing swimwear. But we were honest in openly admitting how much we fancied women – almost gleeful in our trampling over the invented media concept of the “new man”.

How will that transfer to today? Danni Levy, the executive editor of the rebranded Loaded World has said that it is aiming to recreate the nostalgic feel of the original in a world that has gone “PC made with men subjected to a severe safety net”. Their target market is midlife men - blokes who remember it the first time around.

I regularly get social media requests from men asking me to create a new title or “bring back Loaded”. Whereas younger readers of my book have responded in disbelief about how life was back then, there is also a feeling among older men that they are restricted in what they can say and do now. Whether that’s their own family and work and age-related restrictions or a sense of an over-prickly social mores, I don’t know, but it’s natural for older people to think their lives used to be better in days gone by.

The new team is right to say there aren’t any strong male-orientated media brands that originated in print, but for me everything we put into the original Loaded – football, clubs, humour, girls, travel – just streams through my Instagram account. Instead of reading (or writing) a profile of Frank Skinner as we did 30 years ago, I see new comedians like Matt Bragg or Vittorio Angelone actually being funny in short live posts.

Once they’ve finished I’ll get a suggested clip of Danish footballer Michael Laudrup’s greatest assists, and then photos of The Clash, followed by Iggy Pop posting a personal video of himself playing with his parrot Biggy Pop, and then Liz Hurley pops through in another bikini launch in some sort of unfathomable anti-ageing process. She looks better now than she did when we put her in the first issue as an unknown actress. But my point is that everything I like is there; self-curated as their target market. I don’t need a magazine title to deliver a contents list of what I might be interested in.

The immediacy and access of social media have created a generation of user-editors and, in terms of the creators, the sort of bright young people who poured into magazines in the 1970s, Eighties and Nineties now just create their own content on YouTube and TikTok. It’s this that has sucked the life out of magazines.

The original target audience for Loaded was essentially the guys in their late twenties who I played or watched football and music with. Nowadays, I play football with blokes of all ages, but mainly forties and fifties and rather than referencing current or past magazines, the media brands they mention are podcasts (or Dadcasts) like lower league football legends Under The Cosh or The Rest Is Politics.

As hearing is the laziest sense going, podcasts are a very male medium. It’s easier to listen while exercising, walking the dog or working than it is to read. The men I know have reverted to the sort of specialist subject media landscape that existed before we chucked numerous subjects together into one pot for the original magazine. While the new Loaded may be right to aim for an older market with a fondness for days gone by rather than Gen Z’ers who don’t even know what magazines are, I honestly don’t know anyone my age who is kicking around waiting for another Katie Price/Jordan magazine shoot.

My pub-going friends and I still talk endlessly about the football we watch or play, but it’s also accompanied by conversations about our health, relationships, families, holidays and so on. The difference is all these concerns are reflected across the media now whereas they weren’t in 1994.

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Over the years, I’ve sometimes taken out pencil and paper and scribbled out cover lines and cover stars for Olded – my own interpretation of what a mag for the original Loaded readership might look like. I’ve done it for my own amusement and I’ve also done it as a way to make myself laugh at the ageing process – “Best new Blankets and Flasks!” But, in a way, the original Loaded generation is already catered for with the history and politics podcasts and brilliant TV shows like Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. Or the rolling nostalgia of Instagram.

Filming for the documentary recently, it’s been laughable guiding the crew through our original publications and looking at the hundreds of pages of words not breasts and sometimes only seeing Jack Dee or EMF in their underwear in one whole issue. The people who truly knew the magazine were the original readers, advertisers and team that created it. I guess the publishers of the new Loaded are hoping those guys want to come back into the fold, but a “safe space for ogling” as it has been pitched is missing the point.

I can’t think of many magazine brands that have been relaunched decades later and worked but The Face does have a new life with a quarter of a million followers on Instagram. A quick glance at the Loaded World insta suggests they have a lot of work to do there, as it has almost no interaction at all. But if the new publishers can attract as much user interest as media interest it might give them a chance.

The mass market magazine era is long long gone, but 10 years ago few would have believed vinyl or cassettes would be selling again. Good luck to Loaded, I hope it works, but they shouldn’t focus on babes in bikinis; if they make a funny and recognisable product with brilliant connection, they may have a fighting chance.

‘Animal House’ by James Brown (Quercus) £8.99