a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters. Loaded is music, film, relationships, humour, travel, sport, hard news and popular culture. Loaded is clubbing, drinking, eating, playing and eating. Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasn't hungover". The original editorial team also included Martin Deeson, Jon Wilde, Rowan Chernin, Pete Stanton and Derek Harbinson. The first issue, according to Brown, "featured stories on Eric Cantona, Paul Weller and a travel story about a man whose 'bird' was possibly eaten by a shark" in addition to the photos of a Liz Hurley in her see-through lace underwear" with the cover-stars on the first three issues being Gary Oldman, Leslie Nielsen and Elle Macpherson. 1990s Loaded captured the lad culture of the time. Deeson remarked: "I think we just caught some wave in Nineties, because the Eighties had been fairly miserable. Then we got into the Nineties and things started to loosen up a bit. ... It just seemed like a good time, and we just were part of it and caught that wave." The magazine won the prestigious PPA Magazine of the Year Award two years in succession, in 1995 and 1996. Brown resigned from his post at Loaded in April 1997 to become editor of GQ. He was quoted as saying at the time: "I won't talk about Laddism and all that bollocks, that shows a lack of understanding of what Loaded is about. I'm not a 25-year-old loafer any more, I'm confronting new things in my life now and GQ will give me much greater scope... It is a natural step on." Staff at Loaded had mixed feelings about Brown considering him to be a bully while more widely he had acquired a reputation for heavy drinking and cocaine use. Circulation peaked in the second half of 1998 with monthly sales of 457,318, although FHM surpassed competing titles with a 775,000 monthly circulation. At the end of 1999, with circulation in the market sector now beginning to decline, Loaded dropped what was described by Meg Carter in The Independent as its "babe-only cover policy". Launch Deputy Editor and later Editor, Tim Southwell, wrote about the early years of Loaded in Getting Away With It (Ebury Press, 1998). James Brown discussed the title at length and the impact it had on '90s