Aidan Smith: Why I used to love Loaded, why I won't read it now

We’ll come to the reaction provoked by Loaded magazine, now and back in the mid-1990s, but first, let’s recognise footballer Gordon Strachan’s unwitting role in the sex wars.

“Brilliant! … Bloody blimmin’ bloomin’ … and when Strach scored that jeezuzzin’ brilliantin’ goal … and the birds in that nightclub looked like Sharon bloody … jeesuzz look at that cathedral it’s absolutely … Sharon bloody Stone!”

This is how Tim Southwell began his memoir Getting Away With It: The Inside Story of Loaded. He was in Barcelona with fellow Leeds United fan James Brown watching Strachan lead their team to a famous European Cup victory. Brown, who founded the title along with Southwell, responded: “Wait a minute, what you just said, there should be a magazine like this, all about having the best time of your life. It’d be brilliant … ”

James Brown and Trim Southwell while inventing 'Loaded' magazine at IPC, 1994. (Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)

This was how Loaded began, how laddism began. Slap-bang in the middle of the third wave of feminism. And it does seem incredible, despite the fourth wave and the #MeToo movement which followed, that the title is coming back for more.

More is definitely what it’s getting. “The return of Loaded undermines everything we fought for,” writes ex-Women’s Hour presenter Jenni Murray in the Daily Mail. The Guardian meanwhile dubs the mag’s return “the saddest relaunch in history”.

But which Loaded are we talking about here? The original which was smart and funny and fully deserved the magazine world’s Oscars and was the most influential publication of the 1990s? Or, having become a bad influence on the scene, prompting dull, clunky imitations, the one which then sat among them on the top shelf until being put out of its misery nine years ago?

The new editor is Danni Levy, a woman, who says the world has gone “PC-mad” and that the aim is to “bring back all those things that 35 to 55-year old men are being cheated out of by society”. Such as? Here’s where the resuscitated Loaded creates an immediate problem for itself. “Ogling beautiful women like Liz Hurley,” adds Levy, the actress being a cover star back in the day and now pouting lusciously from page one again.

Look, I’m not saying beautiful women weren’t part of the attraction originally. But - you probably won’t believe this because it’s the hoary, attempted get-out of those of my father’s generation who subscribed to Playboy and indeed included Dad - I liked Loaded for the articles.

When it launched in 1995 I was working for a red top, which should have been fun. I got to infiltrate a nudist camp in East Lothian and thought every day would be like that (not necessarily in Pencaitland, obviously). But the paper was so paranoid about its circulation rival that it had forgotten about humour.

Loaded, initially at least, written in a gonzo style, was very much about humour. A regular feature was “Great Moments in Life” - a portentous and weighty title, but first up was the parka, and how every football fan in a famous 1972 pitch invasion seemed to be clad in the combat-green coats.

The Q&A with DJs was called “Got any Spandau Ballet?”, the kind of inquiry which would have infuriated clubland’s potentates. I might have baulked at the heading on the profiles being “Greatest Living Englishman” but couldn’t argue with John Noakes receiving this kind of recognition. At the time, nowhere else in print and hardly on TV either could you find popular culture being treated in this knowing and witty manner. Or rigorous taste-testing of crisps.

And what wasn’t there to love about a magazine which put Sweep on the front? Not Sooty - far too obvious - but the glove puppet’s mildly psychotic sidekick? It wasn’t always beautiful women on the cover in the early years. Gary Oldman kicked things off, then came Leslie Phillips, Rod Hull and Emu, Sean Connery, Bruce Lee, Tommy Cooper, Johnny Rotten, Grange Hill’s Roland and other male icons, some more obvious than others.

The end of the century was a strange time. By then I was at The Scotsman and not just writing features on families storing up on baked beans for fear of the millennium bug but also pieces on the sex wars. Lad culture but also ladette culture. Interviews with the permanently partying Zoe Ball and Candace “Sex and the City” Bushnell. Headlines included “It’s what women really think, but men might not want to hear”. The Girl Power legacy was investigated. Men, teased another article, were “learning to be the weaker sex”.

Loaded, purchased on expenses, was useful for research. “If the magazine was on a crusade at all,” wrote Southwell in his book, “then it was to galvanise a nation of men that you didn’t have to be ashamed of being a bloke any more. We’re all rubbish, you know it, we know it, now here’s a brilliant feature about potholing.”

It was a confusing time but girlfriends read Loaded and laughed. Maybe my wife wouldn’t now but then neither would I. If the reboot is aimed at former devotees, now married and hopefully matured, then I reckon we’re getting our pop-culture nostalgia fix from podcasts like Word in Your Ear and The Rest is History.