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Quercus nets memoir of excitement and excess from Loaded magazine founder Brown
Quercus has signed a memoir of “music, magazines, excitement and excess” from the founder of loaded magazine James Brown.
Publishing director Richard Milner acquired world all language rights to Animal House: Music, Magazines and Mayhem from David Luxton at David Luxton Associates. The book, which details how Brown made the magazine he founded aged just 27 such a breakout success while battling drug and alcohol use, will be published on 15th September 2022.
The publisher synopsis reads: "Between 1994 and 1997, James Brown’s loaded magazine became the must-buy and must-be-in publication of the decade. It won every award going, year after year, and came to define not only its audience but also a generation. Bright, loud, funny, provocative, ambitious and careless it was read from the barracks of Afghanistan to the England dressing room at Euro ’96. It captured a hedonistic lifestyle of alcohol, cocaine and more. It was the biggest noise in the golden generation of magazine publishing, rocketing from zero to half a million sales in a matter of months. What MTV had been to the 80s, loaded was to the 90s."
Animal House follows Brown’s career from a high school drop-out fanzine writer with few qualifications to NME features editor aged 22, and loaded founder at 27. In between, his mother died in tragic circumstances and gradually his own drug and alcohol use began to take over. It wasn’t until he crashed and burned at GQ, and went through rehab, that any sense of perspective kicked in. Recuperating on the island of Mustique while plotting his return with Oz founder Felix Denis, Brown was asked by neighbour Lord Patrick Lichfield: "How on earth did you manage to sell so many magazines while taking so many drugs?" This book, the publisher says, is his answer.
Brown said: “It’s a book about music, magazines, excitement and excess. I had a fantastic time as a very young man on the NME and then it became even more explosive when I launched loaded which was so successful it was like a second childhood. Every young man’s dream is to be able to do all the things you love and get paid for it."
Milner added: “James has been asked repeatedly to write his life story, and the story of loaded, so it’s brilliant that he’s now put it all down on paper. Animal House is a visceral reminder of what the pre-internet 1990s were like and how James helped define its culture.”
