The revamped lad mag that might go off half-cocked

As it's announced that 'Loaded' is being brought back for the lad-turned-dad (who still wants to ogle women), magazine founder James Brown says good luck for trying but it might be better off featuring cosy blankets and useful flasks...

- James Brown

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.

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.