Interview - James Brown

James Brown has been described as the 'father of the lad's mag', having been responsible for the establishment of Loaded in 1994 - a magazine which was not only the first of its type but was said to have defined a generation. Having departed Loaded in the late nineties, James kept himself busy with jobs at GQ and setting up further publications such as Jack Magazine.

His latest venture is the online magazine, Sabotage Times. With a focus on music, football, fashion, as well as TV and film, Sabotage Times has a lot in common with what we like in life James recently gave up a bit of his time to have a chat with us about his career, his latest venture, the secrets to a successful magazine as well as a slightly unusual holiday to Scotland.

First off, I'd like to thank you for your time James. Tell us a bit about how you found yourself in the journalism business. Was it something you had planned on becoming? What were your first steps?
I left school and read Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe, wanted a job on the NME, and started a fanzine. People like John Peel said things like 'this boy can write' on the air and the music papers printed my letters and that boosted my confidence and I would send reviews and letters in until someone gave me a chance. One of my first reviews for the NME was for my own band, a band who weren't serious about making it, this didn't go down too well on the Leeds 6 music scene. I guess I was lucky, but my definition of luck is when ambition meets opportunity. There was nothing for me where I come from so I knew I had to get somewhere else to find something I wanted. Music was my way out. I didn't go to university or college, just read at home on the dole and travelled the country selling my fanzine. For inspiration and entertainment I listened to The Specials and The Jam and The Redskins and The Clash.

You worked for a number of publications before establishing Loaded in 1994. Which of these did you most enjoy working for and why?
I had reviews and short interviews published in the Leeds Other Paper, ZigZag, jamming! and Sounds. The editor of Sounds, Tony Stewart, really gave me my first proper break he gave me six cover stories in six weeks. Then I got approached by the NME to become the staff writer.

That was where I learnt most about editing. The NME in those days sold 75,000 copies. By the time I left five years later we were selling over 125,000. It was a period of great change for music during 87-92. Acid house, hip-hop, indie, goth, thrash metal, world music, pop all appeared in the pages of the paper and were argued about endlessly in the office. There were a lot of big characters already there like Steven Wells (who had encouraged me to do reviews for them), Danny Kelly who is now on TalkSport and Dr Stuart Cosgrove who is now very influential at Channel 4 - all big opinionated gobshites, like myself. It was a noisy office. Guys I had read like Gavin Martin, Sean O'Hagan, David Quantick and Adrian Thrills were also on the staff. As were people who had written about music I liked like Dele Fadele and Neil Taylor. It was a very fast moving, loud, dog eat dog environment and into it I introduced Barbara Ellen, Stuart Maconie, Andrew Collins and others. There was a great editor who kept promoting me - Alan Lewis. I was thankful for that.

I rehired the cartoonist Ray Lowry and photographer Kevin Cummins who had both been let go. I got to travel round the world writing about music. I interviewed the Happy Mondays, The Cult, Morrissey, Kiefer Sutherland, New Order, The Pixies, the Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Mick Jones, Primal Scream, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pet Shop Boys, The Manics, Public Enemy, Rick Rubin, The Beastie Boys ad many, many more. It was a great education.

The people I knew who had gone off to university were leaving and having to go on the dole at just around the same time as I was sitting in the Hyatt on Sunset, LA, thinking I was in Led Zepellin waiting for Rick Rubin to show up in his Corvette. They were remarkable experiences for a kid who had never had a job apart from a milk round before. I was glad at that point I hadn't been able to concentrate in school.

What prompted you to set up Loaded?
During an interview where I was applying for the NME editorship, my old boss Alan Lewis mentioned the idea of me doing my own magazine. When they didn't give me the NME job he set me off to create my own mag. I wanted a men's magazine that was full of stuff I was into like football, comedians, drinking and so on.

What challenges did you face when setting Loaded up?
It took a long time to get the big publishing house we were developing it in, to give it the green light. We also struggled getting the right cover style and design, right up to the very end when we were about to launch we still had no clear idea of who was going to design it. Then the art editor of Select rang up and asked for a job and he designed a great logo that same night. The magazine industry en masse said it would fail and men would never read magazines. Even people at the publishing house were knocking it. They were all wrong. Alan, I and the Loaded team were right.

Why do you think Loaded was such an enormous success?
It was funny, self-deprecating and covered subjects men were really into. It knew it's subject matter inside out and was written from an honest and enthusiastic perspective. We didn't think we were better than the readers and we gave lots of beer away. We made having a great time look easy and we were keen to include the reader in the fun. I also found and gave a platform to some very good writers and photographers.

What caused your departure from Loaded in 1997?
A mysterious and funny American guy offered me a fucking massive amount of money to go and work for him - something the company I was making millions for hadn't ever done. Also the Loaded publishers interfered with our announcement that Martin Deeson and I were going to stand for Parliament. As soon as they started doing that I thought 'that's it, I'm off'. The place I went to had a ratio of 400 women to 60 men. It didn't take a lot of selling.

From Loaded you moved to GQ, a magazine which was going through a lot of trouble at the time. What strategy did you pursue in order to revitalise GQ?
I had to get people to know it even existed and also that it knew who were the iconic figures for young men in the late nineties. It didn't really mean anything to many people. So we stuck people like Paul Weller, Eric Cantona ad Oasis on the cover. That was just to say 'have a look here, it's not as stiff as you might think'. It was like turning an oil tanker round as the sales were half what the company were declaring and the staff weren't really up to speed with what was going on in the real world. I hired an unknown chef called Jamie Oliver from the River Café to write about food, hired Tony Parsons to write about men and brought in a few other new faces. The sales improved significantly and the title won its first publishing award for quite a few years, so that boosted morale. The publisher and I also flew to New York to have a look at this thing American GQ did called 'Man of The Year' and we came back and decided to launch it in the UK. I enjoyed the environment and professionalism of the company and it was a luxurious place to work but at that time it wasn't really me. They essentially produced magazines for advertisers where as I'd come from magazines that were for the readers.

Was there a big difference in the audience you catered for when you left Loaded for GQ? Are British and American tastes quite different?
The Loaded audience was massive and a lot of them were very together guys with a lot going on. The GQ audience was very small and when I saw them during research groups I realised they read GQ to find out how to be cool. Sort of David Brent types - it was a bit of shock.

Jack Magazine was established in 2002. Tell us about what you were trying to do there.
I was nervous of doing another men's mag because I knew there was no way I could do another Loaded, so we made it as different as possible - funny name, drawings on the cover, pictures of mountains and lions. It took a few issues to get going but it soon became a great read which the readers loved. A bigger publishing house would have bent over backwards to make it more commercial, which is something I should probably have done. I was really into the idea of reflecting a lot of the National Geographic and Discovery Channel content.

You're currently focusing on Sabotage Times. Tell us a bit about that.
Go here - http://www.sabotagetimes.com/ - and make up your own mind. I think it's full of a lot of funny and interesting columnists and articles.

Who or what is your target market with Sabotage Times?
People who enjoy reading journalism and opinion and like looking at great video clips. Hopefully other editors who need content and have a budget will use it as a window for our syndication and content service.

What makes Sabotage Times different from your previous projects?
We have over one hundred thousand unique visitors a month, eight hundred articles and a lot of video clips but no office or real staff to speak of - just a couple of editors, an assistant and some volunteers. It's a product of keyboards and the internet. It's been edited from beaches, kitchens, bathrooms, gardens and a yacht. We've never met the people who built it but we've seen their office through skype when our designers '&&& Creative' called us from Prague.

What's been the highlight with Sabotage Times so far?
Publishing really funny stories and watching them go viral and watching the analytics just clocking up by hundreds a minute.

Will we ever see Sabotage Times in print format or do you only see it as an online magazine?
Yes, I think we could well do some magazines. We're already investing in one that will come out next year and will have 'Published by Sabotage Times' written on the inside back page.

Is there a secret to a producing a successful publication?
Publish material that the readers will want to read every word of.

What other magazines do you enjoy reading?
I get The Week, Fortean Times, FourFourTwo, Esquire, Junior all sent to the house. Magazines I've come across recently: Spikes is an interesting looking athletics magazine, Sideburn is a great bike mag, Proper is a really good little mag for men into clothes not fashion.

What's been your most interesting or fun experience from your time in journalism?
Sleeping in a cave on an island off Scotland, testing crisps, and playing football with Stan Bowles, then reading about it afterwards. Imagine your best ever holiday chronicled by your favourite writer. That's what some of the Loaded adventures were like.

Also, meeting a lot of very nice people who had taken the time to buy the magazine and are happy to say how much they enjoyed it.

Finally, what advice would you give to a young writer wanting to become a journalist?
Don't start writing until you can see the deadline, get someone else to transcribe your interviews, and always write the end of the article at the start so you've got something good to finish on when you're knackered at 3am in the morning.

Jimmy Jazz would like to thank James for taking the time out to talk to us. We would recommend visiting his new site - Sabotage Times.