Britney Spears was shot in her teenage boudoir, Angelina Jolie got her tatts out in a hotel room, Cameron Diaz went skinny dipping, Kathy Burke ’ad a fag and David Beckham was put on the back-burner in favour of a model called Christina Estrada. Welcome to part two of Loaded’s greatest covers.

26

Cindy Crawford
March 1997

Cin city

A Who’s Who of ’90s models, this issue had Crawford on the cover with the innards featuring Claudia Schiffer, Eva Herzigova and Helena Christensen. The edition also saw Howard ‘Mr Nice’ Marks, in his regular column, declare his plan to run for parliament – prompting the headline: ‘That’s all we need, another dopey MP’. Loaded had reached such a peak Vanity Fair announced it was a vital part of Cool Britannia – in its issue splashed with the words ‘London Swings! Again!’ above a picture of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit in bed under a Union Flag duvet.

27

Judge Dredd
April 1997

Dreddful

The Mega City One lawman created to satirise creeping state authoritarianism in pre-Thatcherite England celebrated his 20^th birthday by landing a Loaded cover. The bargain cover price of £2.60 was hailed by the magazine as ‘cheaper than acid’.

28

Jo Guest… again
May 1997

Huh-uh-huh

The issue was put together just before New Labour’s landslide win on May 2, 1997. John Major and Tony Blair are cast here as Beavis and Butthead (Major as Butthead; Blair as Beavis) to mark the occasion, with Loaded’s incisive political analysis summed up by the cover line, ‘Uh-huh, you said election’. Jo Guest lowered the tone by sitting on a chair in suspenders, but inside Helen Mirren did her bit and spoke up for feminists.

29

Harry Hill
June 1997

Fresh lunacy

The former doctor’s cover repeated the enquiry used to introduced the magazine: ‘What fresh lunacy is this?’ Along with Hill riding a badger, the issue saw the formation of Loaded’s first AA group – the Arses Appreciation society.

30

David Beckham
September 1997

Beck of the cover

Sorry, Dave. Your interview was just too boring to land you on the cover alone. The first time Loaded interviewed Goldenballs they decided he wasn’t forthcoming enough, so as punishment they superimposed a picture of model Christina Estrada over his curtained face. Becks’ biggest revelation inside was that he and Posh Spice were like “Liam (Gallagher) and Patsy (Kensit) – but for the kids”. In case you were wondering what became of her, Estrada is currently minted after she divorced a Saudi billionaire.

31

Kathy Burke
October 1997

Deja vu

Burke’s pose with a fag echoed the shoot on the cover of Issue 1 featuring Gary Oldman. The Oldman shoot was a pastiche of photographer Brian Duffy’s iconic Sixties portrait of Michael Caine, and Burke takes the parody further. She ’as a fag, with Waynetta Slob’s catchphrase splashed across the image. Inside, Burke continued to have several more fags and glasses of wine while saying things such as, “I’m not Pamela Anderson, I’m Kathy fucking Burke and if people don’t like it, they can fuck off.”

32

Ian Brown
February 1998

King monkey

Brown’s pet primate Billy Bean spent the singer’s cover shoot shitting on his shoulder and scratching his skin so badly he drew blood. Brown shrugged off the shit while mouthing about how he was on a “one-man crusade to destroy cocaine” because “coke users are pussies”. According to Brown, Oasis were piss-poor, boring and no better than Status Quo.

33

Dennis Hopper
March 1998

Queasy rider

Hopper was holed up in a bomb-proof metal shed in LA when he met Loaded, drinking green tea with his fifth wife. Then aged 62, Hopper spoke of his long battle with alcohol, but added he never regretted his life and ended the chat with his two-word philosophy: “Fuck you”. He lived for another 12 years after giving this interview.

34

Ulrika… Ka Ka
May 1998

Cuff justice

Apparently Jonsson acted ‘fucking mental’ in her chat about sex, drugs and the benefits of having “massive tits”. Maybe that’s why the photographer decided to chain her up. The magazine also dispatched a team to spend time at Jamaica’s nudist resort, Hedonism II. And the daddy of Gonzo, Hunter Stockton Thompson, started to write for the mag, after ringing the office to say he loved it.

35

Mel C
July 1998

C-cup

Football got an intellectual treatment again as France hosted the World Cup, with Sporty Spice covered in gold paint to mark the tournament. Further in, Rod Stewart admitted to pleasuring himself to his own songs. (No need for a Handbags and Gladrags joke.) At this point, Loaded was shifting more than 450,000 copies a month.

36

Alan Partridge
October 1998

Uh-huh

Steve Coogan’s first appearance in Loaded was much like his second. This time he appeared as his alter ego Partridge, book-ended by showgirls. When he later fronted the comedy special in 2011, aged 45, he was photographed putting his hands over then-21-year-old Page 3 girl Elle Basey’s breasts. He ended up going out with Basey for a while. Ah-urgh.

37

Cameron Diaz
February 1999

Cam on

Five months before There’s Something About Mary came out, Diaz did her first and, as far as we know, only fully-frontal magazine shoot. She paddled naked in a swimming pool while chatting about how she liked it rough, loved guns and nearly died after a night drinking 30-year-old sake.

38

Pamela Anderson
March 1999

Pammy’s back…

This appearance was inevitable, what with Baywatch, her sex tape and Playboy shoots. Regular feature Dice Man was also introduced in the issue. It was based on Luke Rhinehart’s 1971 novel The Dice Man, about a psychotherapist who casts dice to make decisions. Loaded called it “the novel of the century”, and the adventures of their own “dice man” saw reporter Ben Marshall rolling dice to determine where his life would go. He went as far as taking heroin and persuading a girlfriend to audition as a stripper.

39

Catherine Zeta-Jones
May 1999

Catty

The 61^st issue featured a cover re-run of a Catherine Zeta-Jones’ photoshoot first printed in Loaded in 1995. Other Loaded picture sets revisited in the birthday issue included one showing Kate Moss holding a teddy bear and wearing just her pants. A pre-adulterous Tiger Woods also appeared. 

40

Sara Cox
July 1999

Flaky

Sara Cox held a giant ’99 ice cream, because 1999 was melting away, we suppose. There were some planets in the background, perhaps because of the approach of the millennium. Inside, Howard Marks hit the road with fellow Welshmen Stereophonics and ‘Keananu’ Reeves was interviewed.

41

Jenny McCarthy
August 1999

Run for the hills

The Loaded Goes to Hollywood edition had a clear theme. Jenny McCarthy of Playboy fame fronted the edition, and inside there was an interview with disabled porn mogul Larry Flynt. Flynt told the magazine he was just nine when he decided to fuck one of his granny’s chickens.

42

Tupac Shakur
January 2000

Thug life

The millennium was marked with 100 different covers, from Tupac Shakur and Steve McQueen to Mary Whitehouse, The Simpsons, Lara Croft and the late Roger Lloyd-Pack. Founding editor James Brown had left the title in 1997, fearing he’d become a drink and drug addict if he stayed. By this stage, at least two of the Loaded staff had gone into rehab. 

43

Britney Spears
June 2000

Brit pop

Britney was persuaded to do her best Lolita act at the age of 18 for this Loaded shoot in a mock-up of her bedroom, complete with cuddly toys. The magazine can’t be blamed – it was Spears’ idea to exploit her youthful sexuality by dressing as a schoolgirl in her video Hit Me Baby (One More Time.)

44

Angelina Jolie
August 2000

Jolie nice

This was Jolie before her damehood, global humanitarian campaigning, rainbow brood and Brad Pitt. In 2000, she was all about drugs, knives, hotel room nudity, tattoos, cars and the beauty of sex with anybody, anywhere – especially in trucks. The interviewer got in trouble with Jolie’s dad Jon Voight after the actor spotted him creeping into his daughter’s hotel room at night and mistook him for a drug dealer. Jolie also addressed the rumours she had an incestuous relationship with her brother, while she brandished a large knife.

45

Mel B
October 2000

Buzzing

Brown acted like her ‘Ya’ Bastards!’ caricature in Bo’ Selecta! by howling deafeningly during her interview about lesbian sex, oral sex, farting, multiple orgasms and kissing the Spice Girls. She also denied she’d ever shagged Geri Halliwell.

46

Al Pacino
November 2014

The reluctant don

Quite the gap in our covers coverage, but the tits ‘n’ ass years from 2000 to around 2014 are best glossed over. Loaded was bought by a series of companies (including one with a sideline in porn) who perpetrated misguided attempts to rival weekly “jazz mags” Nuts and Zoo. They forgot the quality writing and humour that defined the original magazine and packed covers with no-mark glamour girls. This edition, fronted by Al Pacino, was Loaded back to its roots. Pacino explained why The Godfather was the role he never wanted and how booze wiped out a decade of his memories. Kill Your Friends author John Niven started a regular column, Jack Dee took on his role as agony uncle and Julie Burchill was agony aunt. The magazine also sent female journalists to the frontline against ISIS, and they embedded themselves with a group of female fighters battling the fanatics.

47

Idris Elba
December 2014

The name’s Elba

The tone was now firmly raised. Actor, style guru and king of cool Idris Elba fronted The Icons Issue, talking about racism and how fame made him feel as if he was in The Truman Show. Loaded’s new Men of the Year poll launched, which saw tragic Philip Seymour Hoffman voted No 1.

48

Ben Affleck
January 2015

Unmasked

New Batman Ben and his wife Jennifer Garner spoke in back-to-back interviews and hinted at strains in their family life. Five months later their marriage went the same direction as the reviews for Daredevil. Michael Caine told how Hollywood bosses once thought he was gay and Muhammad Ali’s daughters revealed they have already written their father’s epitaph. 

49

Kasabian
February 2015

Eez-eh

Loaded celebrated its 250^th edition with Kasabian, who helped design the cover. Christian Bale told the new-look title why he didn’t feel “likeable enough” to be a mainstream movie star while Carl Barât talked depression, drugs and Pete Doherty.

50

Léa Seydoux
March 2015

Double ooh

A Bond girl – and woman – special, with Spectre stars Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci both shot and interviewed exclusively for the magazine. Big names returned in droves for interviews, with Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Patricia Arquette, Stephen Graham, Jamie Dornan and Eddie Redmayne also starred in the spring issue.

51

And finally…
Noel Gallagher
April 2015

Don’t look back in anger

It’s a brave new digital world, so this was the last print edition before Loaded relaunched here as an online magazine. The Gallagher edition, issue number 252, was on sale until the beginning of May, giving Loaded a 21-year print run. This final edition looked much like the Gary Oldman-fronted first issue, minus a cigarette in Gallagher’s gob. Old regular Irvine Welsh returned to Loaded to put questions to Noel about important issues such as pink jumpers and drugs. Gallagher revealed in a separate interview in the issue that he would like his epitaph to read, ‘Here lies Noel Gallagher. He had it more than you’ – much like Loaded magazine.

loaded’s 51 greatest covers (part the second)

From a smoking Gary Oldman to a bikini-clad Kylie Minogue and trouserless Jack Dee, we present the cream of the cover stars who knew better and helped seal Loaded’s place as the biggest-selling men’s magazine in Britain.

1

Gary Oldman
May 1994

Smoking start

Fag-puffing Gary Oldman stares from Loaded’s debut issue with the same black-eyed, coiled menace as one of his film nuts. But the innards of the first edition didn’t take themselves as seriously as the London thespian.
Kurt Cobain killed himself three weeks before the magazine launched and an advert ahead of publication proclaimed Loaded would provide an antidote to grunge grief by “cheering up Britain’s newsstands”.
Editor James Brown introduced the title by asking in his first editor’s letter, ‘What fresh lunacy is this?’ He was quoting Oliver Reed, who bellowed the line in Ken Russell’s The Devils as he watched a crocodile weave through a demented nun orgy.
Brown continued, ‘Loaded is 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.’

2

Elle Macpherson
July 1994

Celestial body

The Body’s 6ft frame fronted issue three. Macpherson declared in the interview she would be keeping her acting career “classy” and not “doing a Sharon Stone”. Australian Macpherson, then aged 30, spoke to Loaded of her upmarket intentions not to be typecast as an actress who just gets naked… in her trailer on the set of Sirens. The film was eventually only notable for the fact Macpherson got naked in it, a lot.

3

Goals & Girls
September 1994

’For men who score on and off the park’

Times have changed since Loaded illustrated a football issue with two models dressed in replica kits. At least the shirt choices were a good choice – the Premier League was in its infancy in 1994, and Leeds United were one of the most powerful teams in Europe.

4

Frank Skinner
October 1994

‘World Of Smut’

Skinner happily exposed his wink-wink, nudge-nudge “world of smut”, while an amazingly fresh-looking Shane MacGowan posed inside with a gaggle of models, drink in hand, fag in mouth.

5

Prince Naseem
November 1994

Before he was kingsize

When Naz was thin… and Paula Yates was alive. Inside this issue a 35-year-old Yates (who died six years later of a heroin overdose) gave an interview admitting she was “only famous for being a flirt”. She also revealed she used to read Loaded to then-husband Bob Geldof in bed. They divorced 18 months after the issue went to print.

6

Kathy Lloyd
December 1994

Phwoar-set

Gushingly dubbed “the Ava Gardner of Liverpool” by Loaded, Lloyd just managed to keep her cleavage within corset. As the cover says, this issue came with a giant poster of Lloyd and some other ‘blahblahblah’. Note the bottom banner – Stuart Hall also featured. He was named one of Loaded’s ‘Greatest Living Englishmen’ inside. Times really have changed.

7

Liz Hurley (Almost)
January 1995

Makes you want to hurl

Less than a year after an appearance in the first issue, and after she was famously photographed in a dress held together with safety pins, Hurley landed herself a spot on the corner of the front of Loaded. Unfortunately, she was elbowed to the side by a pissed-up, bloody-nosed Santa being arrested. The amount of drugs being consumed by Loaded staff by 1995 probably had a lot to do with the cover choice.

8

Uma Thurman
February 1995

Uma had it

Loaded’s writer nearly exploded in his shorts when he met Mrs Mia Wallace. He gushed Thurman was “as close to heaven as I’ve ever seen on this earth”. In her honour the magazine’s tagline ‘for men who should know better’ was changed to ‘thurmen who should know better’. Cocaine use was said to be at an all-time high in the Loaded offices at this point.

9

Jimmy White
March 1995

Smoking the brown

‘The Whirlwind’ admitted his eyes were set on a world snooker title, if only he had the willpower to stick a sex ban on himself and focus. Elsewhere, there was a serious piece of investigative journalism on the growth of crime in kebab shops after closing time.

10

Reeves & Mortimer
April 1995

Shooting cover stars

Vic and Bob critiqued Liverpool for some reason in their cover interview. Reeves declared, “Liverpool looks like a dustbin stick on a spire”, while Bob Mortimer said, “Liverpool looks like my cock on Halloween night”. The pair also discussed the state of churches around the country. Elsewhere inside, a fiercely ambitious actress from the Valleys called Catherine Zeta-Jones stripped in a hotel bathroom and sat on the toilet in her nightie for a photoshoot and chat during which she eulogised about the charms of older actors in Hollywood.

11

Shaun Ryder
June 1995

Easy Ryder

Among the gems from the Happy Mondays veteran during his cover chat were, “You see the woman behind the bar; she just said to me, ‘Oh Shaun, I never knew you were the singer in the Happy Mondays. I always thought you were a drug dealer’.” These days he’s busy UFO spotting and being back on the road with Bez and Co.

12

David Letterman
July 1995

Chat king

Another cigar being sucked on for the cover. Letterman told of Peter O’Toole riding a camel onto the set of his US chatshow, and Loaded celebrated being voted Magazine Of The Year by the Professional Publishers Association.

 13

Kylie Minogue
August 1995

Kylie likely

The staff decided pictures of Kylie in a swimsuit spoke for themselves so loudly they didn’t bother to include an interview with the singer. The magazine later claimed that by sticking Minogue in a gold bikini it inspired her to wear shimmering gold hotpants in her Spinning Around video – the video that led to Minogue’s backside being worshipped.

14

Paul Gascoigne
September 1996

Gaz bag

Poor Gazza moaned, “Once you’re famous, it’s horrible. That’s what it’s like for me. Horrible. Fucking horrible.” Things would only get worse.

15

Oasis
October 1995

What’s the story?

Well, Noel to be precise. True to form, Liam didn’t turn up for the shoot. Gallagher spoke about eyebrow culture in a lowbrow world and some less serious matters. Editor James Brown admitted in his letter the Loaded team’s better halves were beginning to tire of their debauchery, saying one staff member had been given ‘the “It’s the drugs/drink/having a good time or me” lecture’.

16

Suggs
December 1995

Sugging ’em down

The art director really pushed himself on this one and came up with a shoot of a bloke smoking. Besides Suggs, a post-Neighbours, pre-Torn Natalie Imbruglia posed in her underwear.

17

Jo Guest
January 1996

Be our Guest

A page three bird graces the cover for the first time. Guest’s appearance on the front of a magazine which had championed writing by female columnists including Barbara Ellen led one wit to critique the mag around this time by saying Loaded was becoming the magazine ‘for men who still live with their parents and wank to posters of girls’. At least they got the posters free with subscriptions. Guest would later front the issue that coincided with Labour’s 1997 election win.

18

Martin Clunes
February 1996

Haven’t a Clunes

Dah dee dee da do do da da dee do dee do… dee do, dee do, dee do! Men Behaving Badly’s squalling saxophone theme was part of the soundtrack that accompanied Loaded’s relentless rise to becoming Britain’s biggest-selling magazine. Thus, the inevitable Clunes cover. He made revelations including how the biggest tragedy of his life was his inability to practice kissing himself because he had “fat lips”.

19

Sean Bean
March 1996

Bean there

Mr Bean before his modern day renaissance on Game Of Thrones. He told how he’d swap Hollywood for a night watching Sheffield Wednesday. The issue was curated by the magazine’s first female guest editor, comic Jenny Eclair, who was happy to label herself ‘a filthy bitch’ on the cover.

20

Kevin Keegan
April 1996

Sketchy

Multi-million-pound transfer deals, Premier League glory for Newcastle – and Sugar Puffs. Keegan spoke of his quest for Newcastle glory and filming a cereal ad which saw the Honey Monster become a Geordie for a day. Again, art direction was at a peak with glasses and a ’tache scrawled on Keegan’s mug, seemingly just to annoy him.

21

Danniella Westbrook
May 1996

Chupa chump

The Loaded staff said it: this one sucks. Danniella Westbrook (not sans septum yet) holding a box of Chupa Chups and talking about Brain Harvey. It’s only worth including in our greatest covers selection because Westbrook admitted inside she was spending £600 a night on cocaine. Lines like that don’t come out of celebrity mouths anymore. Not even the mouths of Z-list wonks.

22

Skinner & Baddiel
July 1996

Three loins

A Euro ’96 special resulted in Three Lions stars David Baddiel and Frank Skinner appearing in England kits, surrounded by a ‘team’ of models. (Skinner getting the cover blonde to paw his balls was surely a smart bit of physical comedy on his part referencing the red card penalty implications which can result from shirt pulling.) Loaded won the PPA Magazine Of The Year award for the second consecutive year.

23

Denis Leary
December 1996

He’s definitely not an asshole

The team missed a trick with this one by not weaving in Leary’s “I’m an asshole!” catchphrase on the cover. Inside, the magazine called him “the vitriolic wise guy whose mouth’s been on the butt end of a fag more often than Freddie Mercury”. The New Statesman it wasn’t.

24

Irvine On Noel
January 1997

Highbrow

Two icons on one cover, a year after the release of Trainspotting. Welsh wrote an ode to Gallagher, saying, ‘The reason Noel Gallagher is the most successful songwriter in Britain today is because he has the two most essential qualities any true artist needs: empathy and courage’. Noel later wrote a short tribute to Loaded to mark one of the magazine’s anniversaries. It read, ‘I don’t know how you sorry shower of bastards have gotten away with it for so long’.

25

Jack Dee
February 1997

Jack… with your legs like two suicidal sausages

Dee, interviewed in his pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with his initials, told how while working as a waiter in his twenties he gained a reputation for being “a right bastard” to customers as he used to give them boiling water in finger bowls. Important other features included the Loaded staff travelling to Glasgow and getting off their heads on wine and other substances before they addressed a group of readers.

loaded’s 51 greatest covers (part the first)

How many Loaded writers ended up in rehab? Why did it put Angelina Jolie’s dad in a murderous rage and why did throwing a dice lead a reporter to do heroin? Find the answers to these and many more fundamental questions below.

1

Issue one of Loaded in May 1994 promised to “cheer up Britain’s newsstands” in an ad campaign – because three weeks before launch Kurt Cobain shot himself. Much like the magazine, the ad was a fluke – the promo had been designed long before Cobain used a 20-gauge Remington shotgun on himself in his greenhouse. Loaded later featured one of Cobain’s final photoshoots, in which he posed with a handgun in his mouth.

2

The working title of Loaded was The Right Stuff as a tribute to gonzo journalist Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name about the space race. The magazine was eventually named after Primal Scream’s 1990 hit Loaded.

3

Gary Oldman smoking on the cover of the first issue was a photo based on an iconic 1964 shot of Michael Caine by photographer Brian Duffy.

4

Duffy’s image of Caine was recreated again on the October 1997 cover, which featured Kathy Burke ’avin a fag.

5

The publisher at IPC, the company backing the magazine, never thought it would sell. The day the first issues were shipped to newsagents he had a framed certificate put on his wall that read, ‘For the magazine launch most likely to cost you your job’. Colleagues called it ‘Folded’ before it was first delivered to newsstands.

6

By mid-1998 Loaded was selling almost 500,000 copies a month. Stars told writers during interviews if they weren’t busy being celebrities they would want to work at the magazine.

7

Loaded championed female writing from the start – one of the first regular columnists was Observer writer Barbara Ellen. Her column in issue one was about how she loved to get pissed and hit men.

8

By the December 1994 issue Loaded had passed the 100,000 sales mark. The December ’94 edition carried a revealing interview with now-convicted sex offender Stuart Hall. Jimmy Savile later popped up in Loaded for a 2,000-word interview at a hospital where he said he was helping out kids.

9

New Labour’s 1997 victory allowed Loaded to ride the wave of short-lived hope the win brought the country. The magazine marked the election by mocking up John Major and Tony Blair as Beavis And Butthead alongside the tagline, ‘Uh-huh huh-huh-huh, you said election’.

10

Vanity Fair included Loaded in its March 1997 Cool Britannia issue, gushing, ‘It’s a men’s magazine… but it differs from other men’s magazines in that it makes no attempt to seem cool or conform to anyone’s notion of journalistic propriety’.

11

Founding editor James Brown left the magazine in 1997 saying later he feared if he worked there any longer he would end up a drink and drug addict. Reporter Jon Wilde later told Brown, “I knew it was time to slow down and get out when I heard a discussion between other staff asking if there was enough heroin left for an office day trip to Brighton.”

12

During Euro ’96 England manager Terry Venables said he found it hard to get the players to stop reading it while he was trying to give team talks.

13

Two Loaded writers ended up in rehab. Another spent six months in a mental health institution. One was left brain-damaged after a motorcycle crash and, after getting £4million in compensation, needs 24-hour care for the rest of her life.

14

For a year writer Ben Marshall lived life writing Loaded’s Dice Man series. Based on the cult Luke Rhinehart book, Marshall handed control of his choices in life to a series of dice throws. Marshall went as far as doing heroin on the back of what the dice ‘told’ him.

15

Hunter S. Thompson got posted a copy of the magazine and agreed to work with it on the strength of the issue. John Lydon was another fan, and rang to tell staff, “It’s so good it should be banned.”

16

When Kylie was put on the cover, the staff thought her pictures spoke so loudly for themselves they couldn’t be bothered doing an interview.

17

Damon Albarn gave Loaded probably the greatest interview a musician has ever had with a magazine. He told how he dabbled in bisexuality, ate ladybirds, wanted to sleep with the Queen and had hygiene issues about cunnilingus.

18

The Loaded team once seriously discussed trying to find a reporter who would eat human flesh and report on the sensation in the form of a food review. One of the final issues saw Donal MacIntyre sent to investigate the phenomenon of Mexican drug gangs using cannibalism to intimidate rivals.

19

Questions were asked in Parliament about whether Loaded was corrupting the minds of men and a fertility clinic in Birmingham bizarrely blamed it for inspiring laziness in young men that it blamed on a drop in semen donations.

20

The magazine had an amazing run of shoots with the world’s most famous actresses. Cameron Diaz did her first and only topless magazine shoot with Loaded. Catherine Zeta-Jones also stripped in a hotel bathroom to chat about who she loved old Hollywood actors.

21

Angelina Jolie’s dad Jon Voight wanted to beat up a Loaded reporter when he saw him going into his daughter’s hotel room late at night, and mistook the hack for a drug dealer.

22

One of the magazine’s original staff Bill Borrows said he wanted to produce a final Loaded issue which would libel the richest celebrities, use photos from shoots they’d been barred from printing by publicists, have the price-tag of FREE and a cover picture of a stick of dynamite shoved up someone’s arse under the tagline ExpLoaded.

the finest 22 facts you (probably) never knew about loaded

“Let’s do a feature on cannibalism. Let’s pay someone to write about what it’s like to eat human flesh. They could write it up like a food review and put in what wine’s best with it and get a chef to make recommendations for seasoning and shit like that.”

“Where the fuck do you get human meat?”

“I dunno. Send some fucker to Vietnam or Thailand or into the jungle to get some, they always have mad shit out there. Send them to see some cannibal tribe.”

A third philosopher chipped in, “Yeah, they do loads of crazy shit in Vietnam. My mate was just there and said he ate a monkey’s brain at a restaurant while the monkey was still alive. Maybe we should just get somebody to write about eating a live monkey if we can’t get any human meat.”

So went a genuine conversation between Loaded staff in an idea’s conference at the height of the magazine’s powers (as recalled by a staff member who wishes to remain nameless for the sake of the crumbling remnants of their career.)

“There were fucking insane amounts of drug-taking at Loaded”

Most of the staff at the meeting – held, as usual, in the de-facto conference room of a pub – had started drinking champagne at 11am and were off their tits on the coke they had taken to openly hoovering up in the office.

Other brainfart sessions spiralled into debates on how to create features that would involve firing dwarves out of cannons – decades before Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill debated in The Wolf Of Wall Street the technicalities of using Lilliputian folk for office entertainment.

The magazine later managed to involve little people in features, but didn’t get around to the Hannibal Lecter or monkey brain food reviews.

Loaded’s founding editor James Brown has joked that when he was recently offered the chance to write a screenplay about his rollercoaster ride at Loaded he could have called it The Wolf Of Wardour Street as the experience was so close to the debauchery of The Wolf Of Wall Street.

The magazine’s former editor-at-large Bill Borrows once summed up his employment there by saying, “There were fucking insane amounts of drug-taking at Loaded.”

Loaded was in print from May 1994 to May 2015 and, before its new incarnation as an online magazine, the title had its extreme highs and depressing lows.

At its peak it was a mad, bad and – for the staff who ended up in rehab – dangerous publication that became part of the UK’s naively hopeful Cool Britannia high.

The Right Stuff

Vicious success

Loaded’s first May ’94 issue was published the month after Blur released their Parklife album and Oasis’ debut single Supersonic had started to trouble the charts. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting had just been released.

Loaded was one of those things, like Oasis, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, in the right place at the right time.

The other men’s magazines around in May ’94 were wanky, London-centric fashion ‘bibles’. The Internet as we know it was in its infancy, so the market had a gaping hole for the juggernaut Loaded became. There was no design to the magazine – the whole thing was a fluke.

Founding editor James Brown was told by publishers IPC he wasn’t being given the editorship of NME, but was offered the chance to create a new magazine. When he came up with the idea of producing a men’s magazine that would be an unashamed love-letter to everyday men’s lifestyles, it was expected to die at birth.

Brown’s colleagues dubbed it ‘Folded’ before it launched.

As the first issue, featuring Gary Oldman smoking a fag and looking menacing, were shipped to newsagents, the publisher at owners IPC had a framed certificate hammered to his wall that read, ‘For the magazine launch most likely to cost you your job’. (The message parodied the tagline on the cover of Loaded: ‘For men who should know better’.)

Loaded promised to ‘cheer up Britain’s newsstands’ after Kurt Cobain’s suicide

The Evening Standard ran an article saying men would never read a magazine with the same appetite as women read their titles, and the magazine’s first team weren’t treated well. Brown and his staff of three were on three-month freelance contracts and stuck in the corner of the same office as a magazine called Amateur Gardener. Journalists had to send faxes asking for interviews on paper with the Amateur Gardener logo.

They didn’t care: Brown said his hiring ethos had been to employ ‘nutcases’.

An ad printed before Loaded’s launch promised it would be ‘cheer up Britain’s newsstands’. It was another accident of marketing as just after the ad came out, three weeks before the magazine was on the shelves, Kurt Cobain killed himself. His shotgun suicide plunged teens around the world into a grungy grief Loaded later helped relieve.

The working title for Loaded had been The Right Stuff.

Many have fought to claim ownership of the final title of ‘Loaded’, but there’s no doubt the inspiration came from Primal Scream’s 1990 hit of the same name.

The Peter Fonda sample at the start of Scream’s song goes, “Just what is it that you want to do? We wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. That’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna have a good time. We’re gonna have a party.” Loaded ended up doing just that.

The fresh lunacy

Handsome devil

Brown introduced the debut edition with an editor’s letter that asked, ‘What fresh lunacy is this?’ He was quoting Oliver Reed in Ken Russell’s The Devils – and Olly later became a regular on Loaded’s ‘Platinum Rogues’ pages, which revelled in celebrities’ bad behaviour.

Brown continued in his first editor’s note, ‘Loaded is 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 first issue – featuring Oldman plus pieces on Paul Weller, Eric Cantona, Withnail & I and hotel sex – sold a disappointing 59,400 copies.

Two weeks after publication, two sacks of fan mail arrived at the Amateur Garden office. Loaded got to move offices soon after the letters stared to pour in.

Brown said he packed his things in the office Loaded once shared with Amateur Gardener to the sound of Underworld’s Born Slippy.

By ’97 Loaded was so well-established New York’s Vanity Fair included it in their iconic Cool Britannia issue, with Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit on the cover. You know the one…

Vanity Fair gushed about Loaded, ‘It’s a men’s magazine… but it differs from other men’s magazines in that it makes no attempt to seem cool or conform to anyone’s notion of journalistic propriety.’

New Labour’s landslide victory in May ’97 sparked hope in Britain and Loaded staff went to the same parties as Damien Hirst, Kate Moss, Ewan McGregor, Oasis, Blur and the rest of the ‘Britpop’ crowd. It didn’t matter back then it was all smoke and mirrors – the party was too good to see anything else.

Noel Gallagher later put it, “I didn’t have a crystal ball. I didn’t see Tony Blair was going to turn into a cunt. I was 30, off me head on drugs, and everyone telling me we were the greatest band since who knows. Then the Prime Minister invites you round for a glass of wine. It all becomes part of the high.”

“Loaded arrived at the party, pissed, pissed off, carrying drugs and looking for trouble”

Loaded’s story arc was similar to Gallagher’s.

By ’98 every issue was selling close to 500,000 copies.

Loaded had helped establish Britain as ‘cool’ again. It wanted to celebrate, to revel in its love of good music, literary writing, quality films, blood-sweat-and-tears football as well as drink, drugs, comedy and pissing about in general. In short, it wanted to have a good time.

Looking back it is astonishing there wasn’t a publication like it already to celebrate life’s good times. Once there was, men flocked to Loaded as a monthly salvation.

Bill Borrows summed up the success when he said, “Loaded was based on the premise that the vast majority of men did not live in an up-and-coming London district and would rather play snooker in the back room of a bar in Manchester with Alex Higgins, or at least read about it, than find out whatever the latest airbrushed clown was eating to keep in shape. Loaded arrived at the party, pissed, pissed off, carrying drugs and looking for trouble.”

The talent

A darling bud

Cover stars included Damon Albarn, Cameron Diaz, Dennis Hopper, Denis Leary, Angelina Jolie, Catherine Zeta-Jones, future England manager Kevin Keegan as well as rising comedians Harry Hill, Frank Skinner and David Baddiel and Jack Dee.

The interviews were nothing like the media-trained drool that pass for a cover features now, and stars went further than they ever had before in photoshoots for Loaded.

Diaz went skinny dipping for her first and only naked magazine shoot; Jolie stripped in a hotel room and waved about knives while she chatted about rumours she had shagged her brother and Albarn went into detail about cunnilingus and his bisexual side.

The magazine also had a knack for spotting fresh talent, with Sacha Baron Cohen modelling donkey jackets in a fashion spread. The Office Pest cartoon was created by the men who went on to make Modern Toss, and Charlie Brooker wrote a feature called TVGoHome – spoof telly listings in which Nathan Barley originated.

The fans

Singing Loaded’s praises

As Loaded’s circulation grew, executives couldn’t argue with the magazine’s policy of sending reporters around the world to bring back stories – and huge expenses bills.

Some of the travel features were built around drink and drugs. Loaded ran the ‘Vodka World Cup’ as an excuse to order in exotic varieties of the spirit. Other articles were brazen jollies with no attempt made to cover them up – one was called ‘Loaded staff sleep on an island for a week’.

Other stories involved sending reporters to party with football hooligans, take drugs at all-night raves and watch sex rituals in Italy. 

Hunter S. Thompson was posted copy of the magazine and agreed to work with it on the strength of the issue. John Lydon rang the office to tell staff, “It’s so good it should be banned.”

The Dice Man

Low roller

The drugs and chaos culture were reflected in the regular features.

For a year writer Ben Marshall lived life writing Loaded’s own Dice Man series. Based on the cult Luke Rhinehart book, Marshall handed control of his life choices to rolls of a dice.

Marshall went as far as doing heroin on the back of what the dice told him. Other staff soon started hearing voices in their heads.

The Pornalikes

Jack off

Loaded’s Pornalikes was born out of its staff watching a lot of porn. They involved reprinting pictures of porn stars in compromising situations who resembled famous faces.

During Euro ’96, England manager Terry Venables said he found it hard to get his players to stop reading Loaded while he was trying to give team talks.

The semen shortage

Another wild fan

Loaded’s success was such in the late-’90s it started to worry politicians. Irate ministers got together to ask questions in parliament about whether Loaded was corrupting the minds of men.

A fertility clinic in Birmingham bizarrely blamed the magazine for inspiring laziness in young men and said semen donations were down because young fellas had better things to do, such as frequent the clubs and pubs recommended by Loaded.

Stars began to tell staff during interviews that if they weren’t celebrities their second job choice would be to work at Loaded.

Paula Yates said she loved the magazine, and more cover stars rolled in, including Leslie Nielsen, Denis Leary, Elle ‘The Body’ Macpherson, Prince Naseem, Jimmy White. Later Judge Dredd and The Simpsons got covers.

When Kylie was put on the cover, staff thought her pictures spoke for themselves so loudly, they couldn’t be bothered including an interview.

 “I knew it was time to slow down and get out when I heard a discussion between other staff asking if there was enough heroin left for an office day trip to Brighton”

Industry awards rolled in and Loaded started to print reporters’ mistakes because bosses thought their factual errors were so funny.

A story often told by Brown is how feature writer Martin Deeson was dispatched to cover the Cannes film festival, but ended up calling the office from Connes – a small fishing town in Normandy.

Imitators began to crawl out of the woodwork, including Maxim in the US. TFI Friday and They Think It’s All Over were dubbed ‘Versions of Loaded magazine, just on telly’. And Loaded’s legacy can still be seen everywhere from talkSPORT to Top Gear and the popularity of This Is England ’90. Despite the copyists, reading the original magazine remained exhilarating at the time – and still does. Working there wasn’t after a while.

The coke (and heroin, and booze) casualties

Where’s my leedle white friend?

Inevitably, some of the original staffers crashed and burned. Two writers ended up in rehab. Another spent six months in a mental health institution. One was left brain-damaged after a motorcycle crash. Brown himself left in 1997 saying later he feared if he worked there any longer he would end up as an addict.

Brown had wanted editing the magazine to be like going on tour with the Rolling Stones in the ’60s – and he got what he wanted.

Reporter Jon Wilde later told Brown, “I knew it was time to slow down and get out when I heard a discussion between other staff asking if there was enough heroin left for an office day trip to Brighton.” Yet the party refused to die.

The big boob

Boobed

When features fell through for Loaded in the early days the habit had developed of including a picture of a glamour girl with the message, ‘In case of emergency’.

Lots of what the magazine did now looks dated – because, like so many good things that look dated, it was. It was an ode to a moment in time.

The biggest mistake of Loaded bosses, however, was refusing to move with the times, and grow with the magazine’s readers as their music tastes changed, they stopped drinking and getting high as much and got into jobs and started families.

Instead, the magazine went downhill around 2002. Or rather, tits up.

For more than 10 years, the title was sent on a colossally misdirected journey that involved including Z-list pin-ups in a bid to compete with Zoo, Nuts and FHM. Equally misguided editors went along with it, forgetting it was once a magazine that championed quality writing and counter-culture.

The tits sold the title for a while. But circulation soon spiralled suicidally downward, proving ‘lads’ mags’ were well and truly dead.

As Borrows wrote about the middle years of Loaded, when publishers, advertisers and editors filled its pages with tat, ‘The ethos was – increase the nipple count, forget the words and drive the sales’.

The resurrection 

Rebirth

For its final year as a magazine, Loaded was finally back to its roots and a Who’s Who of A-listers and writers returned to the fold.

In its final 12 months on shelves, there were interviews with cover stars Pharrell Williams, Al Pacino, Ben Affleck, Idris Elba, Léa Seydoux and Noel Gallagher.

The roll-call of interviewees from 2014 to 2015 included (in no particular order) Christian Bale, Eddie Redmayne, Monica Bellucci, Ray Winstone, James Franco, Olga Kurylenko, Nile Rodgers, Pierce Brosnan, Paul Weller, Kristen Stewart, Katie Holmes, Nick Mason, Nicolas Cage, Guy Pearce, Emma Stone, Jennifer Garner, Kasabian, Amir Khan, Jamie Dornan, Stephen Graham, Slash, Katherine Ryan, Jimmy Page, Marilyn Manson, Andy Serkis, David Beckham, Mark Wahlberg, Wesley Snipes, Alan McGee, Bonehead, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley, Ryan Gosling, Johnny Marr, Goldie, Chloë Moretz, George Ezra, Michael Caine, Ricki Hall, Charli XCX, Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Patricia Arquette, Carl Barât and Will Ferrell.

The original Loaded team wanted to libel the richest celebrities, stick on a price of FREE, put an arse with a stick of dynamite shoved up it on the cover and rename the mag ExpLoaded

Just as it had in its glory days, the magazine also championed new talent in art, comedy, music, film, literature, fashion, technology, TV, radio and sport.

Columnists included Kill Your Friends author John Niven, Julie Burchill, Jack Dee, Jerry Sadowitz and Howard Marks – who wrote a philosophical agony uncle column after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. There were pieces by Irvine Welsh and Loaded’s original gonzo journalist Martin Deeson, and the magazine’s Hedonist’s Handbook guided readers through the best developments in eating, drinking, clubbing, travelling, drugging and pubbing.

Reporters were sent abroad for features again. Loaded went on the Pablo Escobar drug tour – way before Narcos was on Netflix. Darren Gough dabbled in investigative journalism by going undercover to expose a cigarette smuggling ring. We interviewed three of Britain’s most prolific hitmen and three of its most notorious witnesses still in police protection.

We broke the story Irvine Welsh was working on Trainspotting 2, stayed at America’s most brutal Death Row prison, went on the road with bands, stayed in Britain’s largest underground nuclear shelter, investigated computer hacking with an FBI advisor and discovered the world’s most precious beer at a monastery in Belgium.

Between 2014 and 2015 Loaded sent Donal MacIntyre to investigate the phenomenon of Mexican drug gangs who were using cannibalism as a form of intimidation on rivals. MacIntyre didn’t go as far as tasting human meat with any of the savages, so the idea of doing a review on what human flesh tastes like is still on the to-do list.

The print run

Top man

The result of rebranding Loaded was two award nominations from the Professional Publishers Association, including one for editor Aaron Tinney as Game Changer Of 2015.

Founding editor James Brown said he started to look at the magazine again for the first time in a decade. Before Loaded stopped appearing as a print magazine, the inaugural Loaded Men Of The Year awards were introduced – and the No 1 spot went to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Hoffman’s appearance at the top of the poll was apt. Soon after Hoffman was awarded Man Of The Year, the magazine with a troubled history came to an end.

Bill Borrows has told how the original Loaded team once had a meeting to discuss what they would produce if they only had one more magazine. They decided they would libel the richest celebrities, use photos they had been barred from printing by publicists, stick on a price of FREE, put an arse with a stick of dynamite shoved up it as the cover picture and rename the mag EXploaded.

Their idea would have looked a bit outdated on the cover of what was to become the final print edition of Loaded.

So, the last issue became a tasteful tribute to the magazine’s roots. It featured Noel Gallagher on the cover, with Irvine Welsh interviewing the High Flying Bird.

The Gallagher shoot was a homage to the first cover, as you can see below.

Super lads’ high flying mag

The future

‘People will read again!’

After exactly 21 years in print, Loaded has relaunched as loaded.co.uk.

The online magazine stands for the same principles as the first and last editions of the magazine.

As Thomas Tipp yells at Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, “People will read again!”

‘let’s get someone to eat human flesh’: the demented history of loaded

Gary Oldman’s most recent in-depth magazine interview gave him a headache.

He spent nine hours telling Playboy about the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s Jewish ruling class, defended Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-semitic clangers and Alec Baldwin’s use of the word ‘fag’.

The Londoner also dismissed the Dark Knight Batman series in which he played Commissioner Gordon as “work” he only did for the cash – prompting a mob of Christopher Nolan geeks to bash him on Twitter.

After a backlash over his other comments Oldman disappointingly appeared on a US chat show to beg forgiveness for sharing his opinions.

It was different in 1994, when he sat down with Loaded to front its first issue.

Oldman was just as brutally honest as he was with Playboy: he revealed he wouldn’t piss on Glenda Jackson if she was on fire, told why he wanted to kill Mel Gibson, boasted he was a better star than Mickey Rourke and slagged off showbiz back-stabbing.

Back then, jabbering Twitterati weren’t around and there was no way the man who played Drexl was going to be shoved into making a grovelling apologies for his opinions, reprinted in full here for the first time.

True Brit by Jim Turner, May 1994

As the sun melts into the amber haze hanging over the hills of West Hollywood, Gary Oldman is sipping matzo ball soup inside the candlelit confines of Notes, the restaurant at the Sunset Marquis.

Oldman sits in a quiet corner of the restaurant. If only the women in the hotel foyer knew who was sitting a mere seven steps away, they’d be falling over themselves to join the man whose credits include Sid And Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, JFK, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and True Romance.

Oldman has also completed Leon, directed by Luc Besson (the maker of Subway and The Big Blue), which is scheduled for release later this year, and guest starred as a devilish tempter in the Guns N’ Roses video for Since I Don’t Have You.

The only reason for Oldman’s preferred anonymity is he has artfully mastered the ability to dissolve into the depths of his chosen roles, leaving fans unable to pen him in.

‘How do I sell my latest movie?’

Oldman’s latest role is that of New York cop Jack Grimaldi in Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding.

Reading aloud from the film’s production notes, I tell Oldman his character is described as ‘a voyeuristic cop involved in an incredible dance of double-crosses’, which sends the actor into convulsive laughter, causing him to drop his soup spoon back into the bowl.

“How do we sell this one?” laughs Oldman, pretending to be a film publicist. “How would I describe it? I would describe it as a man who basically can’t keep his dick in his pocket and his hand out of the till, and that sums it up. But of course, you can’t put that on the poster, ’cause it wouldn’t sell movies – or maybe it would. In the story, really, he’s a voyeur just by what he does for a living: he does stakeouts.

“Is he inherently that? No. But there’s a scene in the movie where I watch a couple of girls having a good time across the way. I take a cue from that, and in the next scene that I’m in with Juliette Lewis (who plays Oldman’s mistress), I’ve gone out and purchased an almost identical outfit – suspenders, stockings – and she’s doing a little dance. Then some marketing person calls me a voyeuristic cop!” Oldman laughs uncontrollably. “The double-crossing comes in because he’s working both sides of the table, by selling information – after so many years on the job, one day he decides he’s not just going to rely on his pension, that he should put some serious money away.”

Romeo Is Bleeding writer and co-producer Hilary Henkin describes Jack Grimaldi as “a guy who is in love with desire, and someone who is really chasing after the American dream, someone who also would have no notion of what to do once he got that dream. Consequently, he, as a symbol of that envy, digs himself a hole in the garden that he will never fill”.

Henkin, who was involved in the film from beginning to end, feels Oldman was the ideal choice for the role. “I just felt he was very organic for the character,” she says.

“For playing Jack, a mean sort of guy, I was looking for someone who could make you feel for him as well, and Gary has the capacity to break your heart, so it balanced off this character who was doing some less-than-above-board things.”

For the role of Jack Grimaldi, unlike those of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK, and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears, Oldman relied solely on the printed page for inspiration and needed no in-depth research prior to beginning the project.

“It was all on the page,” he says. “Hilary Henkin wrote a great script.” However, the script was reportedly circling round for the last 10 years, looking for just the right combination of people to put the story on the screen. “I think she has been over-protective of the material, and I would have to say in a good way,” adds Oldman. “And on this journey, she didn’t compromise, which is admirable, I can admire her for that. But I think there’s a point where you can take that kind of fanaticism about a piece of material, and there’s a point where it could become an adverse thing – it could harm you, in a way.

“I think she was adamant, and she came on as a co-producer. She was there every day with her headphones. People would come up with ideas for actors and she was like, ‘No, no, no’. I read where it was listed as one of the great unproduced screenplays in some magazine article. It can work sometimes having the writer there everyday.”

Like Peter Medak’s chilling, dark story The Krays, Romeo Is Bleeding also has sinister elements, but with plenty of black comedy sprinkled along the way. “I think that’s Peter’s thinking world; it flows in his veins,” says Oldman. “If you look at movies like Let Him Have It, that’s classic Medak – a classic in its own right – and The Ruling Class. Romeo has that feeling too. In that sense, it’s got the real stamp of the director on it. I felt Let Him Have It was a better movie than The Krays, because I come from that kind of area, so I look at it with a more watchful eye.”

“Watching myself on screen is a bit like wanking. I think it’s a little bit like wanking, anyway”

Oldman continues, “Romeo is hard to describe. I don’t want to give anything away. See, you do this stuff, and you respond to this piece of material, not really in an intellectual way. JFK is a different read; it sort of gets stuff going. It’s bigger than the sum of its parts, really. It’s an unusual thing in the process where you make a film where you go on your instincts about some thing, and you really don’t intellectualise it. Then you have to come to this part of it where someone asks you, ‘What’s it about?’ It was just fun to play. It’s about comedy, it had some great lines in it, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ I want to have a good time, and I’ve known the piece for seven years. I adored it, and wanted to be around it.”

Director Peter Medak and Gary Oldman share a long time deep respect and love for each other, and Medak felt Oldman was the obvious choice to play Jack Grimaldi in the film.

“We’ve been friends for six or seven years, and known each other’s work, and loved each other’s work, so we’ve always been looking for projects,” says the Hungarian-born director. “Gary was doing JFK, he came to me and said, ‘I’ve just read this script (Romeo) on the plane, and it’s totally insane. If you read it, and like it, we’ll do it’. So I read the script, and the whole idea was to work together – we kind of did it for each other, in a way.”

While working together, Medak says the two of them had such a great time they “began to cry from laughing so much”. He added, “The incredible thing is that we can do that, and just the second I roll the camera, and the minute I say, ‘Action’, it’s just incredible, I’ve only seen one other person who can do this, but… it was Mick Jagger when he was sitting in his dressing room years ago. It was one of his concerts where there must have been 75,000 people screaming for him, and the band were out there already. Backstage Mick was fucking about, putting scarves around his head – here, there – and finally put the scarf around his waist, and looked at himself in the mirror. It was like a demon came out of him – he charged himself up and went out on stage and performed for all of three hours.

“Gary is kind of like that – it’s like a superhuman blink. His eyes start to blink, like he’s sort of hyperventilating. You’d hardly notice, it’s so subtle though. He doesn’t purposefully do it, but he revs himself into this thing. And by the time I say ‘Action’, he’s on this supersonic flight. It’s just phenomenal. Fortunately, I’ve worked with some wonderful actors, but I’ve never seen anything like him in my life – his intensity, and what he puts into a role. I can’t wait to work with him again, because it’s just absolute magic.”

Slash said a similar thing after the GN’R video: “It’s great to watch him get into character. It’s the same kind of energy we have before we go on stage.”

‘Of course I watch my own films’

Does Oldman watch his own magic on screen? “Of course,” he smiles. Does he enjoy it? “If I’m good, it’s all right,” he says. I suggest there are a number of actors who say they don’t go to see themselves in the final cut of the film. “They’re lying,” laughs Oldman. “I’m not saying that they all enjoy seeing themselves, but to say that they just don’t see it, those who say, ‘I never watch myself, I never go to dailies. I never see the movie’…” he trails off in a tone of disbelief.

I ask if it’s hard to watch himself on the screen with an audience. Long pause. “Yeah,” he replies. “Watching myself on screen is a bit like wanking. You know what I mean? I think it’s a little bit like wanking, anyway.”

Oldman says Drexl – the white pimp who thinks he’s black – in Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance was one of the characters he most enjoyed portraying.

“I loved doing that. It looked like I was having fun, didn’t it?” he laughs again. “I just took that part on spec. I hadn’t even read the script. I met Tony Scott at the Four Seasons hotel and I hadn’t read the script. He said, ‘The story is about… oh, I don’t know, I’m terrible at telling a story. I don’t know what it’s about. I can’t describe it to you. He’s a pimp who’s white, but thinks he’s black’.

“I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it’. I had a lot of fun doing that. There would have been more of that character, but in order to get the rating down, I suffered a bit of the scissors.

“I really went for it. I thought, ‘I’ve only got two scenes, I might as well make my mark’. Good days, happy memories.”

Smoking gun

Oldman says Dracula was the most physically taxing role he has played, but his London theatre days were the most difficult as an actor.

“Nothing really compares to that kind of hard work,” says Oldman, pouring chilled water into his long-stemmed glass.

“I’ve done far more hard work than movies, on stage – just going out there every night. Dracula was physically exhausting, because of the nature of the beast – no pun intended. I was in the chair for five or six hours every morning having that make-up put on. In a way, it becomes like a cloud that hangs over the next morning. When you think you’ve done a long day and it still takes an hour and a half to take it all off.

“Everybody’s long gone home and you’re still there having your make-up removed, and you think, ‘In only another five hours, I’ll be in a car coming back to do the whole thing again’. That was a very hard film. With theatre, it never gets easier – that first performance, that first night. With film you’re somewhat cushioned, because you can just go, ‘Oh, fuck it. Cut! Do it again’. It’s not black and white, there’s a lot of grey areas.

“When you think about it, like we just said, ‘I suffered the scissors’. When you’re in a play, you’re your own editor, it’s a continuous journey. No-one’s going to come up on stage and manipulate your performance to take something away from you. You’re doing it live. But it can become a drudgery doing it every night.

“Obviously, some nights and performances are better than others. I don’t know anything like the down you get after a not-so-great performance, and the high you receive after giving a good performance. There’s no drug, or anything else, that can touch it. With film it’s not the same dance. When you come offstage after a great performance, you feel like god. You’re like a king.”

Oldman throws both arms towards the sky and smiles as if multitudes of followers were on the streets below him.

“It’s unbelievable! It’s my heritage, really. I started in a small barn when I was six years old…” he begins, slipping into luvvie-speak.

I ask if it is hard to walk away from a project and leave the final product up to someone else.

“It’s not your business,” he replies. “I can’t really put it any clearer than that. If it’s a good script, and you’ve got a good director – in that case, no, it’s not terribly difficult, because it’s a relationship of trust. You get on the boat, you set sail, and hopefully the captain will land you where you’re supposed to go. It’s all a gamble.

“It’s a strange business, a strange living to make, where you get up in the morning, and you come in and what you do that day is photographed and will go up on the screen on a piece of celluloid that will outlive you.

“You’ve got to be inspired, you’ve got to be on, you’ve got to be good that day. You could wake up with a head cold, or feel suicidal, or have a hangover, or maybe your wife’s just left you – you have to come to work and be wonderful.

“Or you could be in a comedy, and there is a tragedy going on in your private life. You come in and have to be funny. It’s a very strange game to be a player in. There are people making all of the money and having careers that are undeserved. A lot of it is luck, I think – luck at the beginning. It’s holding on to that.

“I was going to do something last year as a director. It was possibly the worst year of my professional life. I would have been editing by now. If I hadn’t made it in films, I’d be in the arts. I play the piano and I can draw. I’m writing a screenplay, but the worst it could be is really bad, and I’ve really got nothing to lose. That no-one would read it, and if they did, and they said it was a piece of shit, would be the worst that could happen.

“You begin to think, ‘If I get a Golden Globe nomination, or an Oscar nomination, then that could certainly make me more noticed, and bring my price up’. Or I can open a movie and it goes well opening weekend, then that gives me more muscle. It doesn’t always feel like that, but sometimes it can feel more like a race: who’s doing well this week, who’s down this week. I’m much more aware of that side of the business.”

“As soon as you get successful it’s like, ‘You should be miserable, you’re British! Why aren’t you fuckin’ miserable like the rest of us?’”

Should films teach a particular lesson? 

“Well, we learn lessons from movies. I mean, Jurassic Park’s lesson was, ‘Don’t cast Richard Attenborough!’” Oldman breaks into more laughter. “I guess Steven Spielberg learned that one too late, though. I think he’s made up for that one, hasn’t he? Teaching is different from preaching. I’m a great fan of Cassavetes, though. I like those small, intimate, human stories. Why can’t you make a film about an accountant? I think there are some people out there trying to do it. Obviously, an intelligent way to go is to keep the budget down.

“My mind boggles when I hear $45 or $50million to make a picture. But that has a lot to with the fact that people have a quote of $5million. And some of these movies are $16million above the line before a frame of movie is shot, and that’s only two principal players’ fees, and maybe a director.

“It’s their price. And they’ve worked hard to get that price – some of them – and why not? Why not, if you can get $5million a picture? Fuck! There’s nothing wrong with that, unless a movie’s like Jurassic Park. Then, I guess, the money’s on the screen. You know where the money went. Any film that requires hardware, to a point, I can understand that.

“A lot of these people are very, very good. You pay the bucks.”

‘Success makes them jealous’

Currently, Oldman calls New York home, where he can go out in public relatively unnoticed – which he enjoys. “I get recognised, but not very much,” reveals Oldman. “I enjoy a good deal of anonymity in New York, because no-one gives a fuck! Everybody’s just getting to where they want to go.”

In his homeland, however, Oldman has experienced a bit of what he calls “professional jealousy”.

“As soon as you get a little successful…” Oldman begins, choosing his words very carefully. “They don’t want you going away, and doing stuff that, in a sense, they don’t have control over. If I’m not at the Royal Court Theatre, and Kenneth Branagh is not at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Queen isn’t in Buckingham Palace, then it’s like, ‘Hold on a minute, what do you mean you’re doing that? You’re all of a sudden being incredibly successful, you’re not supposed to do that! Don’t show off! Keep in your place! You should be miserable, you’re British! Why aren’t you fuckin’ miserable like the rest of us?’”

Oldman is definitely an actor who doesn’t take any shit. But before printing this issue, his manager Douglas Urbanski wrote to us concerned about the way the British Press perceive his boy as ‘a fighter and a troublemaker’.

Urbanski went on to point out, “Whilst he is honest, he is also fair, excruciatingly a gentleman on all counts.” He specifically raised concerns we had referred to Oldman as an actor who “doesn’t take any shit”. But, Urbanski, it’s like this: British screen entertainers are a like a gang of jelly babies wearing wigs for the benefit of canned laughter.

So when someone like Gary begins to carve his name into the world of film, like so many love hearts on a tree, it’s hard not to get excited.

Oldman gives good quote… on everything from Glenda Jackson to sexual tourism

“I wouldn’t cross the street to spit in her ear if her brain was on fire.”.
On Glenda Jackson

“Oh my God! Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Denmark… I do hope they ask me to play Horatio. Then I can kill him!”
On Mel Gibson playing Hamlet

“I’m a better actor.”
On Mickey Rourke

“I’ve worked with some real monsters.”
On fellow thesps

“I think that showing what a knife does when you cut someone across the face is valuable.”
On violence

“We all have that bit that stands over there saying, ‘This is boring, come on Gary, what can you do tonight, let’s get ourselves in a bit of trouble, let’s go out and get ourselves nicked’. Terrific!”
On the devil inside Mr Oldman

“It’s fun for eight weeks to be a gay man (he’s talking about his part as homosexual playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears.) We were like two screaming queens by the end!”
On sexual tourism in acting

“Marrying an actress is an occupational hazard for an actor. It’s like a holiday romance. You spend 12 weeks falling in love, then realise you fell in love with the character they were playing.”
On marriage

Super lad?

gary oldman: ‘i’ve worked with some real monsters’

Angelina Jolie has reinvented herself as a modern day saint.

She has launched global humanitarian campaigns across the globe and raged against child rape in war zones, female genital mutilation and deforestation.

The earth mother is a matriarch of a Mia Farrow-style ‘rainbow family’ and medics have hailed her as a heroine for raising awareness of gene testing after she revealed she had a double mastectomy to avoid hereditary risk of cancer. She’s also a respected director and last year was made an honorary dame by the Queen for railing against sexual violence.

Jolie sealed her sainthood by going traditional and wearing all white last September when she got married to Brad Pitt.

But don’t let her piousness spoil the fun times, when Jolie used to enjoy drugs, booze, lesbianism, knife play and joyriding.

Pre-sainthood, the 40-year-old was a blood vial-wearing goth junkie who moved in with her first boyfriend when she was aged 14. She had a lesbian affair in her youth, once boasted about trying every drug on the planet, divorced Billy Bob Thornton, dabbled in S&M and threesomes and never used to cover up her tattoos.

Hollywood’s finest bad girl sat down with Loaded in 2000, two months after she turned 25 – to get naked in a hotel room and explain why she hates people who see sex as dirty and to chat about how Lara Croft’s tomb raiding breasts were too big.

Despite her best rebel act, Loaded hack John Perry still couldn’t resist seeing her as an angel… even back then.

A Jolie Nasty Cherub by John Perry, August 2000

The Angel pulls £2,500 in cash from a wall safe. She rifles through the bills with an elegant thumbnail. “It’s all there,” she smiles, thrusting it into my hands.

I stand there frozen, my jaw creaking like a broken fridge. My chest has tightened and I feel like I’m moving underwater. This Hollywood screen goddess has just handed me two-and-a-half grand. The Angel turns her head on one side and grins, “You wanna count it on the bed?”

Très Jolie

I first met Angelina Jolie in a hotel in London. The Hollywood wildchild owed an associate of mine – a Northern “businessman” – two-and-a-half grand. Well, five actually, but that’s another story. (A story that involves fast motors, money-laundering and a pink-haired punk rock singer called Texas Terri.)

It’d make a great movie, possibly featuring line-dancing and artistically justified sex scenes. I idly consider selling it to Jolie, then suddenly become distracted as she sprawls on the bed, counting £50 notes into little piles.

“One thousand and eight…one thousand and nine…” she whispers, her arse bobbing like an apple at Halloween. “Two thousand!” She rolls over and smiles at me. As she moves, her T-shirt slides up. “Are you keeping count?” she smiles.

In March, Jolie won an Oscar for her portrayal of a manipulative psychotic in Girl, Interrupted. She’d already won a Golden Globe for her smack-addicted lesbian in Gia, and is about to blast off the screen alongside Nic Cage in this summer’s car-chase blockbuster Gone In 60 Seconds.

Not only that, she has just taken the part of Lara Croft in the long-awaited Tomb Raider movie.

“With tits like that I don’t know how Lara Croft can jump about without causing an earthquake”

But it’s her hedonistic lifestyle that has seized headlines. The 25-year-old daughter of screen legend Jon ‘Midnight Cowboy’ Voight, Jolie scandalised Hollywood by talking freely about her bisexuality and drug experimentation (“ecstasy, coke, acid” in her own words), her short-lived marriage to Jonny Lee Miller, and her subsequent whirlwind splicing to screen psycho Billy Bob Thornton.

If Jolie came from Gateshead, she’d drink White Lightning, appear on Kilroy and push soft toys around Sainsbury’s. But she’s from Hollywood, a town built on excess. And in Hollywood, Angelina Jolie is as hot as the sun.

Back in the bedroom, and I’m still staring at her arse. Honed by her training for Lara Croft, it’s like a mirage, her tattoos growing like palm trees from beneath her unbuttoned jeans – an oasis. I could certainly do with a drink.

“How’s the training going?” I croak.

“I hate it,” she sighs, bouncing playfully on the bed. “I figure if I get enough tattoos…” – she pulls up her T-shirt to show a black dragon crawling under her skin – “…no-one will be able to see how small my muscles are.”

She adds, “Right now we’re working on the bra,” casually squeezing her tits together. “I mean, Lara Croft’s are pretty big and we’re trying to work out how she does this…” Jolie jumps into Lara’s two-handed shooting stance and I’m now convinced that I’m about to faint.

“With tits like that,” Jolie muses, “I don’t know how Lara Croft can jump about without causing a massive earthquake.”

Tatt’s entertainment

She pulls out a folder marked ‘Lara Croft’ and opens it on the bed. Inside are artists’ impressions of the tunnels, Lara’s house, the coastal village, all currently being built at Pinewood Studios.

“Here’s the gun. There’s the robot I have to fight. Here’s me in the show,” she grins like a tiger. Jolie may have lips like a bouncy castle, but I find myself falling hopelessly in love with her for completely different reasons.

She has invited me into her room, given me a fuck-load of cash and is happily flirting with me like we’ve met at Tesco’s cheese counter.

“You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed and you’ve got knives… shit happens”

For a complete stranger to be so charmingly open would be exceptional; considering she’s currently Hollywood’s hottest talent, it’s a fucking miracle. I feel like weeping. But then, maybe that’s because she’s showing me a picture of herself in shorts… very snug shorts.

“Actually I won’t be wearing shorts,” she adds. “I tried them on and the reality is that you can’t kick high.”

She catches the glazed look in my eyes.

“Don’t worry, we’re not taping my breasts down or anything. They’re letting me get all dark and dirty. Lara’s going to be primal.”

I start coughing violently. It’s been quite a day. I was expecting an unmarked envelope. Instead, this lovely woman squeezed her tits and told me secrets.

“Say, I’m in London until Christmas. Maybe we could get together…”

She gives me her telephone number and I leave my heart on the Corby trouser press.

Back in black

The Angel comes at me, clutching an evil-looking knife. It must be two feet long. Christ, it’s only been a week. It usually takes me years to drive women to this.

“Oh my God! It’s you!” she shrieks. “What are you doing here?”

The second time I meet Angelina Jolie is in a restaurant in Greece. It’s a week after the transaction in London, and over her shoulder I can see the Acropolis laughing at me. What am I doing here?

The official explanation is I have come to see the first screening of Gone In 60 Seconds, but the real reason is that I want to be near her until the flesh falls from my bones and my mortal soul is carried into the sky by seagulls, raining on the hills like flat red tears. Something like that, anyway.

I look warily at the knife (it‘s a gift from a fan, incidentally) and ask if her dad is around. Jolie giggles. But she glances around first. Jon Voight, you see, wants me dead.

Back in London, as I was striding manfully towards his daughter’s suite, the screen legend had stopped me in my tracks.

“Where are you going?”

“To see your daughter,” I squeaked.

“What about?”

“Money.”

“I’m just silly. I’m even getting a fireman’s pole fitted in my house because I want to go straight from the bedroom to the kitchen. I’m a nutcase”

Any other time, he probably would have snapped my neck like a twig. As it was, Jolie appeared between us like the genie of the lamp.

“Hey, I got to worry when I see handsome young men going into my daughter’s room,” said Voight as the door closed on him.

“This happens all the time,” sighed Jolie. “He thinks I’m buying drugs.”

In Athens, she is excited. Perhaps it’s the Acropolis, perhaps she’s just happy to be away from Daddy, but her words tumble out in a torrent, like koi carp from a cracked fishtank. “Oh, don’t worry about Dad,” she says. “He’s like any father – he sees a guy going into my room, he thinks I’m getting into some kind of trouble.”

We both look at the knife. Jolie has certainly given daddy cause to worry in the past. She has scars on her neck, her arms, her belly (“You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed and you’ve got knives… shit happens,” she says), and when she married Miller, she wrote his name on the back of the T-shirt she wore to the ceremony – in her own blood.

Now rumours abound, perhaps confirmed by Voight’s protective presence in London, that daddy is trying to get her new marriage to Thornton annulled on grounds of mental instability.

“No he’s not!” says Jolie, outraged. “That’s not at all true! Billy’s really close to my family, and dad knows I’ve never been happier.”

There’s no celebrity game-playing with Jolie and no bland soundbites or careful slalom around the darker spots of her life: if you ask her a question she assumes you want the answer.

“Yeah, I have this ‘bad girl’ image but I’m just more honest than people would like me to be. I’m certainly not a bad person. But of course, I can be really bad when I want to!” she laughs.

Bareback

When it comes to the scale of being bad, of course, one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. But near the top of most people’s ‘bad’ list is getting off with a member of your own family.

Jolie made headlines at this year’s Oscars when she ‘passionately kissed’ her brother James.

“Don’t you mean, ‘Slept with my brother James’?” she spits.

Well, incest was the implication.

Did it upset you? “No!” she says emphatically, “I wasn’t even angry – it was more like, ‘What sick fuckin’ people would come up with that?’ They think I’m crazy – they’re the fuckin’ crazy ones.”

Were you being deliberately provocative? “Why? Because I said that I loved him?”

No, the kissing. “Yeah? Well, people are out of their fucking minds.”

Perhaps, but the public perception is that you’re the one who’s mental.

“People think I’m so serious and fucked up, and that I wear black a lot ’cos I’m so dark and cool. But I wear black because I spill stuff on myself all the time. I’m just silly. I’m even getting a fireman’s pole fitted in my house because I want to go straight from the bedroom to the kitchen. I’m a nutcase,” she retorts to this line of interrogation.

“I just don’t see sex as this dirty, horrible thing – I see it as a connection with another human being”

I’ve blown it. By now, Jolie, like her father, wants me dead. I eye the knife and try to explain that she has a reputation for being uninhibited.

“When I say things like, ‘I find everybody attractive’, people jump to conclusions,” she says. “They go, ‘Oh that means she’s just fucking anyone’. I just don’t see sex as this dirty, horrible thing – I see it as a connection with another human being.

“So what I mean is that I think there’s something amazing about everyone, and if I spent enough time with someone, I could find them attractive… even an Englishman.”

I blush, and stutter something about Englishmen being far too reserved. She smiles, looking at me like Supergirl melting my ice with her eyes.

“Nooooo, not at all,” she purrs.

“Behind closed doors, you’re the insane ones.”

Loaded’s Quickie-And-Angie Session 

In honour of Jolie wrapping filming on Gone In 60 Seconds when she spoke to Loaded, interviewer John Perry gave her a quick Q&A and discovered her obsession with auto-eroticism.

Loaded
Ever had it off in a car?

Angelina Jolie
Of course! I’m an American, for god’s sake! It’s part of our culture! Those big leather seats… ooh!

L Is it possible to have an erotic relationship even with a battered Capri?

A Oh yes! My car’s a pick-up truck, not too erotic. But when you’re at one with the steering wheel and the gearstick and you’re racing around kerbs, that’s very sexy. Or to be driven by someone, and they accelerate… that’s sexy too.

L If I gave you a coathanger, a spark plug and half a tennis ball, how long would it take you to break into a car?

A Depends on the car. Probably slightly more than 60 seconds, I guess. I could do it but I really love cars so I wouldn’t want to scratch the paintwork. I’m sure I could break a window or jam the door open but hey, it’s always better to stick it in slowly… open it up gently, jiggle those alarms and take your time. Know what I mean?

L Indeed we do.

Cover girl

unholy jolie!

Bisexuality, shagging the queen, fancying Adam Ant, the wheelbarrow position, cunnilingus, losing his virginity, period sex – and eating live ladybirds.

Welcome to (probably) the best interview ever given by a musician, courtesy of Damon Albarn. The Blur frontman may have confessed last year to taking heroin.

These days it’s unlikely you’ll get Albarn, 47, to talk about much beyond his love of African music and his arthouse musicals such as Dr Dee and the recent Wonder.land.

Thankfully, things were different when the singer sat down with Loaded in September 1994 to be interviewed for the magazine’s fifth issue.

He was 26, it was just after Blur released Parklife, and Albarn didn’t give a toss about what he said. 

Some of Albarn’s answers were obviously tongue-in-cheek. A lot of his interview was about sticking his tongue in cheeks. Some of his chat was about how he used to eat live ladybirds.

Here’s the sometimes startling interview reprinted for the first time – it will make you mourn the fact media training has killed such chats.

A Boy Who Likes Girls. And Boys, And Bi’s, And Royals by Jon Wilde, September 1994

Loaded Were you artistic as a kid?

Damon Albarn I was more autistic than artistic. I was extremely slow in learning to walk and talk. My mum took me to the doctor and he said quite solemnly, ‘I wouldn’t expect too much from Damon’, like I was backward or something. I used to get away with murder though, as I had big blue eyes and a blonde fringe. I’d be wheeled around in this pram and grannies would queue up to tweak my cheeks and say nice things about me. Throughout my childhood, I felt a bit like the kid from The Tin Drum. Not that I was a psychotic midget, but I had this amazing clarity of perception about everything that was going on around me. I suppose that was the direct result of an alternative upbringing. My dad was an environmental sculptor. In our back garden in Leytonstone we had this 20-foot pea-pod made out of fibreglass. Things like that gave me a different perspective from most kids of my age.

L As a kid did you find yourself doing odd things like staring at wardrobes hoping you could will them to move?

D Nah, I didn’t spend much of my time experimenting with wardrobes. The oddest thing I did was eat ladybirds, which I did up until the age of 12. It’s just something I started to do to get attention at a young age, and I suppose I developed a taste for them. I’d swallow handfuls of the things. I’d put them on my tongue and swallow them. But there was never any chewing.

L Who was the first pop star you wanted to shag?

D The first pop star I fancied was Adam Ant, but I wouldn’t have wanted to shag him. That was never on the table, or in the bed for that matter. I never went through that latent homosexual phase. I never even thought of sticking a carrot up my bottom or anything like that. I’ve always been more of an intellectual bisexual. I wouldn’t get a hard-on looking at another bloke, but I like the idea of bisexuality. It’s just that I’m not physically capable of coming up with the goods. I’ll say this though – I’m more homosexual than Brett Anderson. Always have been. As far as bisexuality goes, I’ve had a little taste of that particular fruit, or I have been tasted you might say. But I’ve never been able to get very excited about all that. When you get down to it, you can’t beat a good pair of tits.

L What about wanking?

D I was never that experimental when it came to wanking. I never went at it with raw liver or a loaf of bread with the middle gouged out. The only wanking anecdote I have is that there was this buzz at our school about bottles of Vosene. They reckoned that, if you cut the bottle in half and slipped it over the end of your dick while lying in the bath, the suction power would bring you off. If you had a particularly small dick, you’d cut the bottle at the top. If you were more generously endowed, you’d slice it off in the middle where it started to widen out. Sadly, it never did much for me. Though it did leave me slightly chafed.

“I think the appeal of cunnilingus has a lot to do with how many drinks you’ve had and whether she’s washed down there recently”

L Were you a particularly enthusiastic masturbator?

D Not really. You’d get these kids who would beat themselves off seven or eight times a day. I couldn’t understand that. Never felt the need. I was never a Guinness Book Of Records candidate in that respect. As far as I’m concerned, that kind of over-activity is the sign of a vacant mind. People who wank seven times a day have got no more between their ears than Mrs Smith who lives next door with her cats.

‘I’m more homosexual than Brett Anderson’

L Who were your teenage heroes?

D Herman Hesse, Terry Hall, Suggs, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Stewart – people like that. They were the closest I got to role models. I was never drawn to the depressed, tragic types. I liked The Smiths but I despised all Smiths fans. All my mates became vegetarians and started acting all moody and suicidal because of Morrissey. I thought that was pathetic – a load of bollocks. At that age, between 15 and 19, kids are very vulnerable. They’re leaving their family environment, finding their sexuality, trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They’re full of late-adolescent paranoia. So many bands like Joy Division, The Smiths, The Cure, Depeche Mode and Suede consciously play on that. I had those feelings of insecurity myself, but I was never going to sit in a room listening to fucking Morrissey or fucking Robert Smith or fucking Brett fucking Anderson. It’s all a big con to me. It’s selling the audience short in the worst way imaginable. That’s why I can understand kids who are into rave music these days. They can dress up and go to clubs. They’re attractive and the dancing is very sexual. The whole attitude is very positive. It’s all so much healthier than stuff like The Cure and bands like that who I regard as a malignancy. Thank god kids these days have got someone like me to look up to.

L Were you always successful with girls?

D I must admit that I always found it incredibly easy to get off with girls. When you’re a teenager, picking up girls is a bit like getting run over by a large vehicle. You see a juggernaut approaching and you have to know when to throw yourself under it. I always seemed to know when to throw myself on the floor and get what I wanted. I always seemed to attract older girls. I was into drama and music. I used to walk around with a volume of Karl Marx under my arm. This seemed to set me apart from the Dennis Wise types that populated the Essex area where I lived. I must have seemed sophisticated, and most of the older girls saw me as this kind of romantic Byron figure. And, consequently, wanted to shag my brains out. I had few complaints about that, obviously.

L How did you lose your cherry?

D I lost it at the age of 15 in a semi-detached house at the back of my school in Stanway, Essex, to a 17-year-old girl called Jane, who was the daughter of a district nurse. I’d been going out with her for four months and, because she was the oldest, she called the shots and decided the time was right. We lay down on a very clean bed, did the business, and then I walked home and had a nice cup of tea and a fancy bun. These days, I could write a thousand songs about an experience like that. I just didn’t have any perspective on it then. I just remember walking out of her house, rubbing my hands and thinking, ‘Well, I’ve done it at last!’ The earth didn’t move. I was just relieved I didn’t fuck a virgin.

“I like Caribbean girls, Indian girls, African girls and Mediterranean girls. I don’t like Orientals at all. Well, I like them, but I never fancy them”

L Any other memorable sexual experiences?

D Nipping over the garden fence after a maths lesson, drinking a bottle of Baileys and having a good shag. You can’t beat a bit of sex when you’re supposed to be doing double physics. There’s a touch of anarchy about that.

L How did you feel when girls first wanted to shag you because you were famous?

D It helped a lot that I was at ease with my sexuality before I became famous. So I was never like a child let loose in a candy store. A lot of pop stars who are sexually inexperienced tend to get a bit fucked up when the whole groupie thing starts. My message to Loaded readers is to get it all out of your system before you even think about settling down and having a few kids. I’ve sown a fair few wild oats in my time and I feel all the better for it. But I wouldn’t think about settling down until I was completely spent. It quickly becomes blatantly obvious that a girl only wants you because you’re famous. It becomes the easiest thing in the world, but the sex is shit. And it does fuck all for the ego. The sex doesn’t become devalued as such, but it doesn’t give you the sense of well-being that you need. The problem is that, as soon as you become well known, you have this illusion that you’re irresistible to women. It’s a bit like walking down the street really fast and forgetting that you’re wearing roller skates – which puts you at an unfair advantage.

L How would you define the sexuality of Blur?

D The good thing about Blur is that we don’t make a virtue of the fact that we’re quite sexy. Mick Jagger is considered sexy because he announced the fact that he was sexy. I find all that quite amusing. Madonna’s the best example of that type of thing. We’re talking about a woman with miserable skin who’s considered to be the world’s greatest sex symbol. She’s living proof of the fact that there’s nothing less sexy than sex, especially when it’s being waved in your face 24 hours a day. What she does with her sexuality is like the equivalent of Super Mario Bros. It’s all a massive overstatement. I’d like to think Blur are much more subtle.

L Cunnilingus. Is it all it’s cracked up to be?

D I’m quite ambivalent about cunnilingus, though I can see that it’s an important arrow in any man’s quiver. I think its appeal has a lot to do with how many drinks you’ve had and whether a woman has washed down there recently. If you’ve had a skinful, it doesn’t matter so much that she hasn’t been near the bath of late. But I’m no expert on the subject. I mean, I don’t need a diagram to show me where the clitoris is, but I’m quite a long way from mastering the art of going down. I reckon a 65-year-old pensioner is always going to be far better at it than someone of my age. It’s a case of practice makes perfect.

Hand-ruff

L How about going down on a lass when she’s got the painters and decorators in?

D I think it largely depends on how much you’re into giving pleasure to someone else. It also depends on how heavy the flow is. If we’re talking Niagara Falls, you might want to explore other possibilities for the time being. There are advantages though to that time of the month. For a start, a woman’s tits are biggest when she’s having a period, so you might fancy concentrating on them for a bit.

L Favourite sexual positions?

D I’m up for anything, basically. The classic wheelbarrow position is always a good one to fall back on. My own particular favourite is the ‘French Maid’ position, which, for the benefit of the uninitiated, involves a fair bit of bending down and picking up imaginary feather dusters. You can’t go wrong with the French Maid in my opinion. 

L Describe the kind of women who give you the horn.

D As far as celebrities go, there’s Nanette Newman who’s always worked wonders for me. Also Neneh Cherry – I think she’s very nice. I like Caribbean girls, Indian girls, African girls and Mediterranean girls. I don’t like Orientals at all. Well, I like them, but I never fancy them. I’m not a legs man or a tits man. I think that’s a terribly restrictive way of looking at a woman’s body. That’s what porn does to you. A lot of blokes have this perspective on a woman’s body which has been learned from the camera angles in porn films – the way a woman’s body is panned over and lingered on. Personally, I prefer the whole package. Porn films have never done much for me and I’ve never had much time for things like Carry On Up The Khyber. I never found the women in Carry On films remotely attractive, even Barbara Windsor. They were always too Anglo-Saxon and plump-thighed for my liking. I prefer to watch Spanish films like Golden Balls that take their time over things. If they’re going to focus on a penis or breast, they don’t rush it. That always seems more effective somehow.

“Would I shag Prince Philip? Nah, he’s a Greek isn’t he?”

L Given the chance, would you give the Queen a good seeing to?

D I have to admit that I quite fancied the young Elizabeth Regina. I’d have been happy to have given her one when she first came to the throne. Not just because she was the Queen. I just thought she was very sexy. The same goes for that Princess Margaret who seemed like a bit of a goer. They’ve both lost it a bit recently though. I don’t honestly think I’d be too tempted these days. And would I shag Prince Philip? Nah, he’s a Greek isn’t he?

L Tell us what sorts of things move you to tears.

D Stars In Their Eyes always makes me weep. Also things like Good Fortune with David Frost. That really chokes me up. Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper films always have me in floods. See, I love crass emotion. It does me in every time and brings out these previously unknown sentiments in me. One of the most profoundly moving experiences of my entire life was watching the last scene in Planet Of The Apes when he sees the top of the Statue of Liberty. I practically had to be stretchered off after watching that.

L What do you hate with a passion?

D I don’t feel anything with a passion. I’m not a very passionate bloke. I can’t bring myself to actually believe in passion. But there are things I hate. I hate bands like Gun. I hate people who do cover versions, get to No 1 and have the audacity to go on Top Of The Pops and act like they wrote the bloody song. I’d hate a lot of showbiz types but I’m far too showbizzy myself so I can appreciate all that stuff on a kitschy level. I hate Dick Francis books but I’d probably love the film adaptations ’cos there’d be all these sexy birds running about in jodhpurs, and you can’t go far wrong with jodhpurs in my opinion. Oh, I also hate Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham and anyone who’s not a Chelsea fan, except QPR fans, because they’re too inoffensive to get worked up about.

L What difference has being in Blur made to your life?

D Until Blur came along, I didn’t have a context. I was into all the wrong things. I was into Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht and Erik Satie when cool kids were getting into The Jam and J. D. Salinger. But I’m quite grateful for the fact that I kind of did things the wrong way round. I never went to football when I was a kid. Now I’m an official Chelsea fan who gets interviewed by 90 Minutes and Shoot. A lot of kids start out with those things and get into art and literature later. But I started out reading Nabokov and now I’m into football, dog racing and Essex girls.

damon albarn’s pork life

It took 20 years for Cameron Diaz to get naked on film after she started acting.

She made a big deal of it when the moment came, but it was a severe disappointment, as Diaz ended up stripping for the crapocalyse that was Sex Tape.

But in February 1999, aged 26 and flush with success from her role in The Mask, she happily stripped and went for a swim with Loaded, making it her only ever topless magazine shoot.

As well as going full-frontal, the stories Diaz told about nearly dying after a night on the sake and gun-play weren’t bad.

The Golden Girl by John Perry, February 1999

Sploosh. Stroke, stroke, breathe. Ooh, you can’t beat a bracing morning dip in the municipal baths, can you? Up with the lark, pull on your skin-tight Speedos (with contrast piping, mock-belt and anchor motif) and plunge into the restorative waters of the local open-air lido.

Watched only by Mr Bushy the squirrel and the odd bent copper, you’re free to plough gaily through the placid waters to your heart’s content. Apart from Wednesdays of course, when the council does a special rate for celebrities.

When glistening Californian movie goddess Cameron Diaz, star of The Mask, There’s Something About Mary and comedy thriller Very Bad Things, turned up in the shallow end of the pool, I got an eyeful of her impressive doggy paddle.

“GOOD CHRIST WOMAN!” I spluttered, “You’re not wearing any pants!”

Bundling her up in a towel, I frog-marched her into the changing rooms and gave her a good rub-down over a Bovril and a bag of Wotsits. It’s a relatively dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

So squidge the chlorine out of your ears and listen up as Cameron spurts about booze, breasts, bullets and broken noses.

Bit nippy

Loaded
You’ve just split up with Matt Dillon, your partner of three years. I have to say, you don’t look too heartbroken to us.

Cameron Diaz
I have every reason to be happy. There’s Something About Mary is a huge hit and I’m really pleased with my new film Very Bad Things. And suddenly I’m being offered all kinds of roles with top notch directors and stars. It’s very strange, but a very nice position to be in.

L Talking of strange positions, when you starred alongside Matt in There’s Something About Mary, he put on weight and wore false teeth. Did you still fancy him?

C Yeah! He would kid around between scenes like, ‘Come here baby, give me a kiss!’ And I was like, ‘Please just stay away from me!’ But the weird thing is, even with the teeth and the moustache and the extra weight and the ugly clothes, I still found him incredibly sexy.

L It’s not surprising he still tried to get his mucky paws on you – in the film you’re cast as ‘the ideal girl’.

C Yes, I’m every man’s dream girl – the girl who eats everything, who doesn’t shop, who drinks beer, plays golf and shares all the same interests as her boyfriend.

L Are you like that in real life?

C I don’t like golf. I would probably kill people if I had to play golf. But I do like beer, basketball and football.

Don’t say breaststroke

L According to Mary director Bobby Farrelly, you drink “like a sailor”. Has it ever landed you in sticky situations?

C Yeah, it nearly killed me. I was on a beach drinking champagne and vodka. Then at night I had sake at a Japanese restaurant. They gave me this 30-year-old sake that nobody can drink, but I did it in one shot. The next day, I felt like I was dying. I called my mom and asked her to bring my body home if I died.

L That’s my fantasy about waking up next to you ruined then. But do you consider yourself beautiful?

C No, I never did. I’ve got a nose that’s been broken three times and as a teenager I was so skinny at school that they nicknamed me Skeletor.

“I did 30-year-old sake in one shot. The next day I called my mom and asked her to bring my body home if I died” 

L How about plastic surgery? Is there any part of you you’ve ever fancied changing? I’ve got a mate who’d do it for you for a pony, no questions asked.

C There’s no way I’d want to do it because the ‘in’ look changes constantly. Four years ago, big boobs were in. Now nobody gives a shit what size your tits are. So, why should you change yourself to please the masses?

L Hang on – you had massive tits in The Mask?

C It wasn’t me. I had three inches of padding. I kept saying, ‘Do they jiggle?’ because if they jiggle, they look real.

L Woof. So did you get loads of film offers after that?

C Only cheesy titty roles like ‘the beautiful Russian doctor’ in foreign films. I decided to wait for a role that could show people I could do other things.

L Weren’t you supposed to be doing Mortal Kombat?

C Yeah, but I broke my hand rehearsing the kick-boxing. I hit my trainer in the head. He had a frigging skull like a rock and my hand was destroyed. I couldn’t do the film after that.

R&R

L Bloody hell. In Very Bad Things you crack Christian Slater over the head with a lampshade. Is this a psychopathic urge or is it some sort of bizarre method acting? And did you get, umm, touchy-feely with Keanu Reeves when you played a stripper opposite him in Feeling Minnesota?

C No, Keanu’s the oddest person I’ve ever met. He’s incredibly intelligent and well-read and he likes to talk about philosophy. I love him, but I worry about him taking care of himself. He’s like a child.

L And how did you get on with Ewan McGregor when you played his romantic interest in A Life Less Ordinary?

C We immediately just fitted. We went straight into a dance rehearsal for four days so we got very close very fast.

There was something about Cameron

L In A Life Less Ordinary, you go around shooting things indiscriminately. Apparently you showed Ewan how to shoot his big gun… I bet you’ve done that before.

C I had! On Christmas night, Matt and I went to a gun ranch. We just wanted to have a bit of fun, but then saw all these other guys shooting on their own and I got real sad. I have total respect for guns.

L After all the shagging, car crashes and gunshot wounds of A Life Less Ordinary, you took 10 months off, reportedly ‘to relax’. What exactly do you do to relax?

C I lie on my bed!

“If you want to torture me strap me to a chair and put Mariah Carey on, over and over again. That would be eternal hell for me”

L You lay in your pit for 10 months? Respect! And is it true you don’t own a television and don’t read newspapers?

C Oh yes, I cut myself off from all that two years ago. I got so upset by the news, I felt there was no hope in the world anymore, and the whole world was sick. I hated feeling so negative and out of control.

L You’re a nutter, aren’t you? I’ll bet you’re a big Sepultura fan aren’t you?

C Yeah, heavy metal! Anything softer than Alice In Chains makes my skin crawl. If you really want to torture me, sit me in a room strapped to a chair and put Mariah Carey on, over and over again. That would be eternal hell for me.

L Enough of this trumpery, let’s get you dried off…

Lights, Cameron, Action!

come skinny dipping with cameron

Austin Powers, Hugh Grant, Shane Warne, billionaire Steve Bing and Indian textile heir Arun Nayar.

Liz Hurley has been through her share of relationships and film duds, but at 50 still smells of high-ranking Hollywood glamour.

The woman who once legendarily labelled non-celebrities ‘civilians’, implying the famous were fighting in the trenches of life, once had an image that was ubiquitous.

She had a middle-class upbringing in Basingstoke but transformed herself into a caricature of posh as well-planned as anything by Jordan.

Ever since a safety-pin Versace frock and her entanglement with Hugh Grant propelling her to fame (thanks largely to his dalliance with hooker Divine Brown), she worked hard to establish herself as a national treasure and now mainly wafts around charity do’s.

For years, she has preferred that one refers to her as Elizabeth (despite shooting royal oral sex scenes as a fictional Queen Elizabeth in the panned American TV show The Royals.)

Twenty-one years ago she was a bit more relaxed, when she spoke to Loaded from her Los Angeles home in 1994. She’d done not much more than a few BBC bit-parts and appear in Passenger 57 with Wesley Snipes.

Here’s Hurley discussing Madonna trying it on with Hugh Grant, her desire to be a female Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing prostitutes and how she embraces nudity in film – as long as it’s integral to the part.

Not Hurl again

Queen Liz’beth by Tim Southwell, May 1994

She’s tough, sultry and damned sexy. What’s more, she’s got the kind of posh Home Counties accent that can polaxe a man on the other end of a trans-Atlantic phone line.

She is Elizabeth Hurley, 27, from Hampshire – currently soaking up the Los Angeles sun with a portable phone in one hand and an elaborate cocktail in the other.

Elizabeth got her big break six years ago in Dennis Potter’s BBC film Christabel. Before that, she’d formed her own dance troupe, did a Schweppes commercial with Richard E. Grant, toured the Far East playing opposite Leslie Phillips and appeared in a couple of episodes of Rumpole Of The Bailey and Inspector Morse. Most people, though, know her from the box office smash Passenger 57, where she played a wicked terrorist alongside Wesley Snipes.

This year you’ll be able to see her in the futuristic serial-killer-monstrosity Beyond Bedlam (it’s terrible – she’s good) and later this spring alongside Sean Bean in the TV drama Sharpe’s Enemy.

“We shot Sharpe’s Enemy in Russia,” says Elizabeth in her husky, English Rose transatlantic telephone manner (she now divides her time between LA and London.) “It’s a Napoleonic war style thing with lots of men in sexy uniforms and girls pulsating everywhere. I play a prostitute who’s pulled herself up in the world.”

“I think Madonna wanted to go out with Hugh. It didn’t bother me at all – she’s not a real person is she”

It was while she was in Russia that Elizabeth heard of all the rumpus going on back home concerning her boyfriend Hugh Grant and an overzealous would-be-suitor. While Elizabeth was swanning around the Russian Steppes, Madonna was tramping up hers at home.

“Yeah, I think she did wanna go out with him. It didn’t bother me at all, I thought it was funny. I was reading in the papers how, back home in England Madonna had this big crush on Hugh. Actually, it was a complete disgrace because it was one of my girlfriends who gave her our phone number! But the whole thing was hilarious, it would have been like Prince Charles ringing me up and asking me out – absolute fantasy land. She’s not like a real person is she.”

Still, Elizabeth is hardly likely to be diverted by such flimsy distractions. She’s an ambitious actress disenchanted with the lack of a real challenge since doing Christabel. She’s writing her own screenplay, and she wants to play exciting, substantial lead roles, star alongside Robert De Niro, and do stuff that’ll be remembered in years to come.

“Big commercial films aren’t very satisfying for me – they’re very boy-orientated. I’m sure if you’re Arnold Schwarzenegger it’s really cool but not if you’re the girl running around after him. I’m forever being offered roles here where I wear a low cut dress, mini skirt, have dirt on my face and an AK 47 in my hand driving a Porcshe, but what’s the point? Mind you, I wouldn’t mind being a female Arnie. Yeah, that kind of role reversal would be interesting.”

“I like sex in films. I’d never do anything with sleazebags where I felt I was being manipulated”

And what about the risque stuff?

“I like sex in films. In LA they all think I have a very European attitude towards nudity but it’s never something that’s crossed my mind. Taking my top off in Aria (a highly acclaimed arthouse film) was intrinsic to the story. I’d never do anything with sleazebags where I felt I was being manipulated. The minute I feel something going on which I don’t like, I’m the first one flying out the door. I can always sense a good situation. It’s like the pictures I did with John Stoddart (Loaded’s photographer), I absolutely adored doing them. We were in this great hotel and we had The Clash blaring out really loud – it was brilliant.”

She gladly gives us a run-down of her agenda for today: taking the alsation for a “proper” run, going on a second reading for a job (about which she’s too superstitious to elaborate), then it’s off to isometrics class, lunch with friends, rounded off with a bracing horse ride in the valley. Hark at Lady Muck! Oh yeah, and then she’s got to watch a video for work and sort out her accounts. If she has any time after that she might try to fit in some breathing.

So do you want to go out for a drink then?

“Yeah, sure. where are you?”

Er, Waterloo, actually.

“Oh,” (soft husky irresistible voice), “that’s too bad. But you must come out to Los Angeles for cocktails soon. You can call me on this number…”

Directory enquiries? Virgin Airlines… AND FAST!

Debutante

queen liz’beth

A highly opinionated Ben Affleck spoke to Loaded in January about playing a penis-flashing “dick” of a husband in Gone Girl and getting ready to face down his critics when he straps on the Batsuit.

He also gave tips on how he tries to make his marriage to Jennifer Garner work – including how he submits to his wife “beating the living shit” out of him.

Five months later, he announced he was splitting from Garner.

Here are Affleck’s thoughts reprinted in full.

Interview by Tom Mitchelson 

Holy Hollywood revenge Batman! Ben Affleck is angry.

He’s raging about the mass criticism his dud films have received in the past.

Now, he’s determined to prove everyone wrong when he dons one of the world’s most famous disguises as Batman. And he should silence the doubters who say he shouldn’t be playing Batman – Affleck’s anger is the perfect emotional inspiration to make his version of a scarred, rage-filled vigilante unforgettable.

Yet the announcement he could be wearing the cape formerly cloaked around Christian Bale brought forth the same howls of protest you’d expect to hear from Robin’s bedroom in Wayne Manor if he ever faced up to his closet homosexuality.

Previous occupants of the Batsuit offered support to Affleck in the face of fans’ and critics’ protests. Michael Keaton exclaimed, “He’s going to be great!” Adam West warned, “Remember, Ben, with the cape and cowl comes great responsibility – and lots of heat. Bring deodorant.” Outgoing Bat Bale said, “I’ve emailed Ben offering bits of advice that I learned the hard way.”

“Most women journalists go, ‘What was it like playing a dick?’”

Frankie Boyle joined the mass critical reaction and greeted the announcement by tweeting, “As a dad, I have to go to all the big superhero movies. Ben Affleck’s casting has actually made me love my children less.”

The rest of Twitter simply responded to the news with variations on the word, “Nooooooooo!”

So, the fact that Ben is the new Bat got the same reaction he’s been getting for years – hatred from his critics.

There is something about Affleck that has always divided opinion – unfair as that may be.

After soaring into the limelight on the wave of 1997’s Good Will Hunting, he started dating movie stars and working with master of movie testosterone Michael Bay. Suddenly adoration turned to irritation.

A series of dud movies nearly did the sort of career damage a wrecking ball made of Kryptonite could do to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

First Affleck stunned audiences in Pearl Harbor for all the wrong reasons. He then struggled in Harrison Ford’s shadow as Jack Ryan before reaching a personal nadir in Gigli with his then girlfriend Jennifer Lopez.

Their on-screen chemistry was more of an inert gas than nuclear reaction. His grimmest years were 2003 to 2004 after the release of five back-to-back flops – Daredevil, Gigli, Paycheck, Jersey Girl and Surviving Christmas. All the while, the public sneered at his relationship with Jennifer Lopez.

A series of dud movies nearly did the sort of career damage a wrecking ball made of Kryptonite could do to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. 

And all he’d done was act the way most of us would if we were handed global fame – take big-money roles and date beautiful celebs.

Critical hostility was typified by the drubbing meted out by the Wall Street Journal at the time. One critic wrote about Affleck’s turn in Gigli, “More stupefying follies may come, but it’s impossible to imagine how they’ll beat this one for staggering idiocy, fatuousness or pretension.”

Even Affleck’s home paper The Boston Globe turned on him and once snarled, “It is fashionable to loathe Ben Affleck. To be honest, the guy makes it easy.”

Yet after a career that’s been more checkered than a chess grandmaster’s, Affleck seems to have come full circle. His pet political project Argo picked up a Golden Globe and Bafta for Affleck’s directing, followed by a Best Picture Oscar.

The 42-year-old’s recent performance in Gone Girl has united audiences and critics in praise, along with a surprising amount of coverage for the brief cameo of his penis (watch the closing shower scene very carefully… apparently.)

But Affleck still hurts from the days of his bad press. He smarts so badly, he has recently compared the crucifixion-by-media his character Nick Dunne endures in Gone Girl to the slagging he has faced.

Holy shit Batman

Before we get to the Bat, the first question is: does Affleck feel playing an unlikeable character like Dunne in Gone Girl (who cheats on his wife) is a more fulfilling role than the square-jawed good guy?

“As far as Nick being a dick or a jerk or whatever and becoming smarter later, it’s interesting,” muses Affleck.

He talks very calmly, choosing his words carefully. He’s clearly now a man who thinks before he speaks, after years of criticism. Affleck adds, “I have seen different reactions to the Nick character and I think that it’s complicated. He does change, but a lot of it has to do with the audience perception of him changing as they learn more about him.”

“So my job was to empathise with him and really what I found is that women and men have a very different reaction to this character. Like, most of the women journalists go like, ‘What was it like playing a dick?’”

“Ben makes life tough for himself. He’s got a lot of complications” – Gwnyeth Paltrow

It’s a question that clearly stirs up unpleasant memories of the hatred he got when he went out with Jenny from da block.

The complicated marriage at the centre of Gone Girl (combined with the likes of Argo and the directional flair shown in Affleck’s Boston-based crime epics Gone Baby Gone and The Town) seems to have made people appreciate he is far more complicated than the “wooden piñata” who was suffering “over-exposure” and a “curdling of talent” in the words of some critics.

Those are the types of remarks to which Affleck was once subjected almost daily in the Press.

He says about the layers of his character in Gone Girl, “This movie says really provocative things about marriage. If you look at them together it says that marriage is fraudulent in some ways and it’s based on lies.

“I think in this story a real marriage means you have to go through this crucible of hurting each other and loving each other and hating each other, lying to each other and telling the truth.

“And then after you’ve done everything possible to each other, you can truly be married.

“Now, I don’t believe that, but that’s what the movie says.”

Affleck has been married to Jennifer Garner since 2005 and they have three children together. They met on the set of Pearl Harbor but didn’t fall in love until they appeared together in another ill-fated film, Daredevil.

Affleck portrayed a superhero blinded by toxic waste, which enhanced all his other senses, though the role didn’t seem to sharpen Affleck’s critical faculties. The film scored a less-than-fresh 45 per cent on film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Artistically, it’s a film he regrets.

Affleck has said in the past of the experience, “It just kills me. I love that story, that character, and the fact that it got fucked up the way it did stays with me.”

He has also attributed meeting Garner with helping his career and life when it was at its “lowest” (if you consider being a multi-millionaire who’s shagged J-Lo “low”.)

“My wife and I made Pearl Harbor and Daredevil,” he says. “With our track record, I don’t know if anyone’s looking for a three-quel” 

He says, “Getting to know Jennifer, falling in love with her and being connected with her gave me a foundation to reach out and said, ‘OK, I’m going to do Hollywood. I’m going to direct Gone Baby Gone’. Those were the first steps forward I needed to put positive stuff on the board.”

“My wife and I made Pearl Harbor and Daredevil,” he says. “With our track record, I don’t know if anyone’s looking for a three-quel.”

Affleck has said before it was Daredevil that set the tone for his relationship with Garner, revealing, “She won most of the fights in the movie, which was a pretty good predictor of what would happen down the road – my wife holding swords and beating the living shit out of me.”

So did the combative element in his home life provide inspiration to convey a very volatile marriage to a psychotic missus in Gone Girl?

“Well, Rose (played by Rosamund Pike) is so good that it was easy to play opposite her. What was really interesting was that the book asked really hard questions about marriage and relationships and it didn’t want to gloss over the things that we don’t like to look at – whether it be in others or ourselves. And sometimes you find out ugly things when you ask hard questions – and that’s why they were hard.

“So Rose definitely had the courage to go toward that, and we wanted to sort of give truth to a really dark look at marriage and David Fincher’s subversive take on that very dark look at marriage.”

Affleck’s past relationships have been well documented. Surely he may have drawn on any experiences of difficult past loves, I ask?

“I’ve been really lucky in my personal relationships,” he insists. “I look back and think the major relationships I’ve had were all with really good people who I like quite a bit still to this day.

“So I’ve ducked that landmine of romantic encounter in this way that Gone Girl paints with this big brush, a story of murder and so on, but at the end of the day, this movie does talk about how we as men and women see things differently. We have different expectations, and we act like different people when we’re getting to know people instead of who we really are – and you eventually find out who the real person is.”

Affleck’s ex-girlfriend Gwyneth Paltrow (who dated him after she split with Brad Pitt) has said of the actor, “Ben makes life tough for himself. He’s got a lot of complications and you know, he really is a great guy. I just think we have a very different sort of value system.”

“I’ve never been accused of murder – which is about the only thing”

It seems she never thought she was the one for Affleck. Paltrow was quoted as saying his perfect woman would be “any sort of stripper… anyone that serves cold beer in a bikini”. Whether or not that’s what Lopez did so well for him, we may never know. Though those famous shots of him stroking her booty in the sun on holiday would suggest she was a fan of that sort of activity.

Lopez recently admitted Affleck was her first love – despite, when she met him, having been married twice before. And, she said, she enjoyed smartening him up so that he looked more like a movie star.

This led to an awkward looking Affleck shuffling around in public clad in a white cashmere overcoat when he was with her – leading to more public mockery.

But that’s all in the past.

The chauvinistic character suggested by Paltrow is at odds with Affleck’s current standing as one of Hollywood’s leading liberal political mouthpieces.

Going in to Bat

A few months ago he appeared on US TV, passionately defending Islam and accusing the host of being racist and the guests of being ignorant.

A magazine once called him, ‘‘The world’s most over-exposed actor”. But his current renaissance has been met with enthusiasm rather than suspicion.

Hollywood needs more like him – politically astute men who seem no-nonsense at the same time. Yet Affleck is a sensitive soul. He tells Loaded he got as much stick from the media as Dunne does in Gone Girl – despite Dunne being accused of the murder of his wife.

He says, “I’ve never been accused of murder – which is about the only thing.”

“Notoriety is the American version of crime. You have people going out and committing crimes just so they can be famous and hoping that happens because we treat criminals like celebrities.

“It was great to work with David Fincher…I would do it again and again a million times. It was a joy”

“We cover them so much in the media and we focus on them so much. And in America, everyone can reel off everyone from OJ Simpson to Amanda Knox, and the whole gamut in between. They are famous killers, and the way we obsess over them is interesting. It goes back to John Dillinger and Al Capone. I don’t know why we want to make people like Jesse James a hero – people who murdered other people – but it is what we focus on. I don’t know. We watch these things on TV and I can identify with the tabloid media fame part of it, but I think it’s a whole other thing when you get into this cable killer 24-hour cycle.”

Affleck clearly doesn’t suffer fools. But he also isn’t rash enough to burn any of his Hollywood bridges by being difficult on set. Gone Girl director Fincher is a famous perfectionist with a back catalogue that includes The Social Network, Seven, Zodiac and Fight Club. Robert Downey Jr has compared working with him to being in a gulag and it is rumoured the actor used to leave jars of urine around the set of Zodiac in protest at the long hours he was made to work.

But when the chance to work with Fincher – who, like the famously exciting Stanley Kubrick, does an average of forty takes per scene – Affleck says he couldn’t have signed up faster.

He enthuses, “I definitely at this point in my career as an actor decided that it’s all about the director really. So when David called me I thought, ‘I would have done the phonebook with David’. So you could imagine my relief, when I read Gone Girl, that it wasn’t an alphabetical list of names.

“Before all my movies that I directed, I watched David’s Seven, and I feel like it’s the most perfectly meticulously Swiss watch-made thing. I thought, ‘What kind of person makes a movie like that?’ It was great to work with David and I learned a great deal from him. It was a pleasure to be around him and it was a true learning experience I loved. And I would do it again and again and again a million times. It was a joy.

“David is also, in spite of his reputation, a very funny and nice guy, not just a demon. Smart and sweet. I was really learning a lot as a director and sort of standing next to David and watching what he did and why he did it, and being really interested in learning why he did it, because I truly do, without jerking him off, think he’s one of the greats working today.

“He is genuinely an actor’s director. And he’s got one of the deepest and most proficient understandings of the technical aspect of film-making of anyone I have ever worked with. So he’s got this engineer’s mind and yet this taste of an artist. I didn’t think there was that filmmaker out there, so I was really impressed by that duality. And that’s the last time I say anything nice about David!”

“Is he taking on the Batman role to get his own bit of revenge?”

Affleck obviously hasn’t let his devotion to Fincher influence his choice to take on the biggest role of his career. Fincher said in a recent interview that superhero moves are dull and lack jeopardy – but Affleck tells us he couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of donning the Dark Knight’s cape. Maybe it’s his sense of injustice during his dark years at the hands of the press that makes him want to fight back onscreen? Is he taking on the Bat partly to get his own bit of revenge by proving critics wrong and becoming a monstrously influential blockbuster draw? Affleck sort of sidesteps that one.

“It’s definitely a dream,” he says.

“I’m excited to do it and it’s a real challenge. The thing I’m most excited about is the script and the director.”

Affleck’s Batman will be even more serious than Bale’s Bat.

There will definitely be no nipples on the Bat suit, à la George Clooney, or harking back to the surrealism of Adam West’s portrayal when Robin would ask him things like, “Where do you get a live fish, Batman?” and he’d reply, “The true crime fighter carries everything he needs in his utility belt, Robin”.

Affleck’s more world-weary persona will fit the idea of the older Bat – a beaten-down, ageing crime fighter.

The latest movie incarnation of the Bat is said to be based on graphic novelist Frank ‘Sin City’ Miller’s take on the superhero. Miller’s version sees the vigilante bitter and bruised after decades of battling corruption, hiding in Wayne Manor in semi-retirement. But new levels of sick violence and government corruption drive him back to the streets – putting him at odds with US authorities and Superman. The pair go head-to-head in a bruising battle at the end of Miller’s story.

Roided-up Bruce Wayne gets himself into a metallic Iron Man-esque suit in a bid to bash Superman. But movie geeks are saying he’ll team up with Superman in the film, not try and kick him to pieces.

How does Affleck feel about the return of the scepticism – that he’s so used to – since he took the role?

He shouldn’t feel too bad. It’s not as if he’s the first actor to be a controversial choice for Batman. When Michael Keaton was announced as the star of Tim Burton’s 1989 movie, Warner Bros received 50,000 letters of complaint. But we’re in the Internet age, so objections to Affleck’s casting have taken the form of a Change.org petition that asked the Obama administration to denounce the decision to let Affleck play the Caped Crusader.

“If you do the movie well, people will like it. And if you don’t, they’ll appropriately let you know”

“It’s this thing where these huge projects like Star Wars or Batman or even Fifty Shades of Grey, anything where fans have really intense feelings about it and they want to vent them and get them out there – that’s part of the give and take,” says Affleck. “And they’re entitled to their opinions.”

He chooses to accentuate the positive when talking about the reaction. “I’ve never done a movie where I’ve had more people come up to me with more enthusiasm,” he says. “So it’s a movie that gets a lot of attention. But the truth is, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s how you make the movie, and that’s what I have discovered about anything I’ve done is that if you do the movie well, people will like it. And if you don’t, people will appropriately let you know.”

He can bet on that. What’s known for sure at the minute is that Batman vs Superman stars Henry Cavill as Superman, Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. The rest of the facts we’ll leave to online geekdom until it’s out in March 2016.

Bruce foresight

Affleck is that strange thing: a box office draw who sometimes turns people off. A big name with art-house sensibilities. He’s had a career that’s hit highs and plumbed depths – making him an established star who still feels that need to prove himself.

But, as I said, if Affleck needs emotion to draw on so he can play a vigilante determined to go his own way and prove his doubters wrong, he only needs to tap into his old anger.

That, and his square jaw, should see him through far better than any of his doubters might expect.

ben affleck on jennifer garner beating the ‘living shit’ out of him for years

For the final nude edition of Playboy, there was only one woman Hugh Hefner had in mind – step forward 48-year-old Pamela Anderson.

And in case you didn’t get the theme of the shoot from the cover’s shot of her most famous assets, Pammy is wearing a massive gold choker that spells SEX.

The cover marks the 14^th front page for Anderson. Inside, Heff gets acting whack-job, sorry, top investigative journalist James Franco to interview her. Which is good news for people who buy Playboy on its literary merit…

Bye bye

The mother-of-two showed some initial reservations about stripping off for the iconic magazine in her forties, but son Brandon urged her to go for it.

Anderson told Brandon: “Hef just called, he wants me to do the last cover of Playboy.” To which a seemingly very open-minded teenager Brandon replied: “Mom, you’ve got to do it. We’re older, we not embarrassed of you anymore. You know, we think you’re great.”

Safe in the knowledge her teenage offspring were no longer ashamed of her, the original Baywatch babe got back to doing what she does best.

It’s little wonder her kids felt so at home with their mother appearing in the magazine, as Anderson said of the Playboy Mansion: “I don’t want to get too detailed, but I’m sure one of my sons was conceived there.”

The romance…

Oi Oi Captain

Although she’s now obviously very much at home with Playboy, Anderson told Franco that her first cover shoot wasn’t so glamorous.

She recalled of the 1989 cover: “The photographer shot me in one roll of film because I was nervous and throwing up. But then I saw the pictures, and from there it was hard to keep my clothes on. I was painfully shy before, but then it clicked in my head that nobody cares what you look like naked except you. People are more concerned about themselves and their own flaws.”

And she admitted that although she doesn’t see herself as beautiful, Anderson thinks people are attracted the by the aura she gives off. Indeed.

“I don’t think of myself as beautiful, but I know I have a deep, sensual drive,” she said. “People respond to that more than physicality because your spirit never ages. I’m a bit of an exhibitionist, and I like being playful and having fun.”

Vintage dress code

Playboy’s January/February 2016 double issue is out on December 11.

playboy’s last hurrah with pamela anderson

When Jennifer Garner spoke to Loaded in January, all seemed perfect.

The star only got flustered when talking about protecting her three children from stalkers and her hatred of the hackers who perpetrated Hollywood’s ‘fappening’ scandal of leaking celebs’ nude photos.

Five months after her Loaded interview, she’d split from husband Ben Affleck, but rumours about the seemingly on-off status of their relationship have been rife since.

Garner and Affleck were interviewed in the same issue of Loaded – the last time they have spoken publicly about their marriage and family.

Interview by Tom Mitchelson

When being interviewed, Hollywood actresses are likely to spend the entire time dodging interesting questions and heaping praise on their co-stars, wittering about the pressures of fame or the difficulties of getting under the skin of their latest character.

Jennifer Garner, though, is a breath of fresh air.

She’s most enthusiastic talking about sex photos. Well, last year’s Hollywood hacking scandal to be exact.

In a town that controls the flesh on display to the point it’s common practice to put in a contract precisely how many seconds of a nipple are allowed in the final edit of a movie, it was a shock to the system of screen sirens including Jennifer Lawrence to find photos of their most intimate moments splayed across the web after last year’s ‘fappening’.

It’s time, Garner argues, to fight back against anyone who tries to violate women. Her gloves are well and truly off when it comes to hackers.

“It’s an invasion. It’s violent. It’s a violent abuse of women,” she snarls. “They’re not just doing it to any women. These women know when they’re walking down the streets that so many people have seen them in this way. It just makes me want to hurt somebody.”

Protective

Fortunately for Garner, she seems to have resisted the temptation to pose for steamy photos and store them on iCloud, which was the downfall of J-Law and Kirsten Dunst, to name a couple of the dozens of stars who had their naked pictures pilfered from their Clouds.

Garner didn’t just fly into a rant against hackers on a whim. The dangers of the Internet are the subject of her latest film, Men, Women & Children.

Garner plays Patricia, a domineering mother obsessed with monitoring her teenage daughter’s online behaviour in an effort to keep her safe from Internet predators.

“I totally connected to the role,” she tells me. “She made perfect sense to me. Don’t judge her at all.”

At first this is surprising. Garner’s character Patricia not only installs a GPS tracker on her daughter’s computer, but also intercepts and deletes messages on her phone and social media accounts.

It’s a dilemma familiar to any parent: how do you begin to control an online world that your child understands so much more completely than you do? How much freedom is enough? Is Garner as fiercely protective in reality over the three kids she has with Ben Affleck?

“Patricia makes a lot of sense,” Garner nods. “It is scary out there. What I understand about her on a cellular level is that we would all do anything to keep our kids safe.

“To her, rightly or wrongly, it’s a black and white issue that the Internet’s evil and all of that kind of communication is evil, and she’s going to save her daughter.”

Vow of silence

Garner can’t be blamed for identifying with the protective mother. The actress had a stalker so extreme he was locked in a mental hospital in 2010 and is under orders to stay away from her and her family for 10 years.

So does Garner subject her kids to an Amish-style lockdown?

“Sometimes as a parent, it’s when you’re trying the hardest,” she says. “It’s when you’re trying to do the most on their behalf that you’re fucking up the most.

“And so, every day is just an opportunity to get it wrong as a mom. It’s so painful when you realise you did. Sometimes you realise that night, sometimes you realise a week later. Sometimes you look back and you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I drove that poor kid crazy trying to help’.

“But every day is a chance to start again as a parent too. In the movie you do see her realise she’s going to be a different mom after this and I just love her for that.”

The problem with being one half of the ‘Bennifer’ super-couple is that ‘normal’ is an elusive quality.

“Photo hacking is an invasion. It’s violent. A violent abuse of women. It just makes me want to hurt somebody”

“You go to all these parenting classes, especially in LA,” Garner says.

“There are so many people who are really helpful and so you take advantage of it. This one teacher said to me, ‘You prepare your child for the road, not the road for your child’. So, if your kid is having a problem at school, you don’t go to the teacher saying, ‘This has got to change’. You actually go to your kid and have the kid learn to advocate for themselves.

“This is a prime example of that. We’re on this road. The train has left this station, there’s no way we’re going to grow up and my kids aren’t going to see things they shouldn’t see online.

“They maybe already have, for all I know. So you have to just look at it and say, ‘Okay, I have to get in front of this as much as I can and prepare them’.”

But would Garner take such extreme measures as her character Patricia to monitor her kids’ online activity?

“I might be tempted,” she laughs. “I’d like to think that I would set things up in a way where there are boundaries that are gradually opened up bit by bit and trust is earned, and that there’s enough of an open line of communication that if something goes on then that is discussed. But I don’t know, I really don’t.”

Garnering praise

Garner is careful to balance the work she does with the needs of her family.

“I’m more selective as time goes on, I’ve realised that it’s been good for me,” she says. “There used to be a lot that I would do, but now it has to be something where I can’t say no. It has to fit for my family.

“That does have to happen, unfortunately, otherwise there are some things that I would have probably taken a chance on. If you have a director that you believe in that much, then there’s really no question.

“I was on my way back to Cleveland and Jason (Reitman – director of Men, Women & Children) was on his way there to meet his dad.

“He kind of passed up his iPad and said, ‘Will you read this? I’ve been working on it’. I read it and it blew me away.”

“You can’t just decide, ‘I’m not going to be famous anymore’. We’d move away and you’d be the weirdo in town”

The indiscriminate publicity machine in Hollywood is such that looking through an actor’s back catalogue sometimes turns up little-known gems, even though it’s the well- funded turkeys that can unfairly hog the limelight. Garner says one of her underappreciated flicks was her recent film Butter. “Nobody even saw it,” she laments.

“It was just released as video on demand. It breaks my heart to think about it. People come up to me saying, ‘I was at that first screening and it was magical’, but you just have to give it up.

“Everything’s not going to pan out. Last year the fact that Dallas Buyers Club, which was one of the smallest films, truly, and that I got to be a part of a movie and part of those boys’ performances that rode the wave that it rode – I’m not going to get that every time.

“You can kill yourself over the rough times, and they do hurt, but it’s like, come on, let’s keep a clear eye on your landscape. But I do wish that people would see it because I love it.”

Also, it has to be said, Garner produced Butter, a political satire based in the world of a butter sculpture contest.

Garner does, however, see a difference in what she’s prepared to give to one of her projects and the type of dedication her husband Ben Affleck is increasingly having to give to his.

There’s a feeling her approach is more 9-5 for the sake of their kids, while her husband’s is more immersive.

She’s not going to talk about Batman, but hinting about the workload her husband is about to take on by becoming the caped crusader, Garner says, “What he does when he directs something, it’s so personal to our family. It’s such a commitment for our family.

“As invested as I am, it doesn’t compare to a two-to-three year investment of him directing, writing and starring in something.”

Perhaps Garner’s flexibility is responsible for the strength of her and Affleck’s nine-year marriage, which by Hollywood standards, is deserving of some kind of award for longevity.

The actress may be conscious about steering clear of the celebrity world and protecting her kids. But she is realistic about the price of fame, saying she’s skipped too far down the Hollywood Boulevard to ever be able to look back.

Daring roles

“It’s too late. You can’t just decide, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be famous anymore’,” she says. “It really doesn’t work that way. We would decide we were leaving LA and we’d go and look. We would find a school somewhere, find a house. Then you’re the weirdo in town.

“I’m sure that eventually that would chill out because we would be so aggressively normal. But then some fool buys a camera and starts following you around.”

The story of Greta Garbo, who managed to opt out of the Hollywood rat race, has obviously passed her by.

The star famously announced, “I want to be alone” in the film Grand Hotel – and in reality packed up movie stardom and did just that.

Still, that was before celebrities were routinely snapped and tweeted while having an “aggressively normal” lunch, as Garner puts it, so maybe she has a point. She adds the paparazzi are currently a day-to-day work hazard the couple seemingly have to accept.

“I have a job I love and my kids. I’m so lucky”

She says about one run-in with an aggressive snapper, “We’d been living in Boston for work. Eventually a professional paparazzo shows up, but some dude was in a minivan with his kids strapped in car seats in the back just following us around, running out of his minivan and running out in front of us in traffic. And we’re just like, ‘Dude?’”

She knows her ‘job’ has plenty of upsides. Garner stresses again, “You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to be done with this’. We have jobs we love. I have a job I love to do and still have my kids with me, and it fills me up. I’m so lucky.

“There are some negatives that come along with that, but it’s too late for those. Those weren’t even around when we first started out. We had the luck to luck into a time when all of that stuff – kids of celebrity marriages, etcetera – became the forefront of what people were selling and reading about.”

Perhaps cautious of sounding a little too hard done by, 42-year-old Garner (she’s just four months younger than her husband) adds that she’s going to have her feet well on the ground when Affleck’s caped crusader takes off on screens.

“We’ve had these incredible opportunities,” she says. “There’s not a day when we’re not grateful for that. We have it all in perspective.”

jennifer garner: ‘i’d kill for my family’

She’s currently in the news for taking down a “small fry” thief who tried to rob her at an ATM.

Had the robber read this classic Kathy Burke interview from Loaded in October 1997, he probably would have thought twice about approaching her.

While it’s not known if Burke told him she was “Considerably-Richer-Than-Yeow”, she did tweet: “FUCK YOU SMALL FRY – MY GENIUS IS STREET WISDOM”, after fending off the attack.

It’s typical of Burke’s magnificent ability to give zero fucks for anything life throws at her. A recent convert to social media, her Twitter is one of the very best there is.

Back in 1997, Burke was just as refreshingly mouthy and honest while recovering from her Best Actress victory at Cannes and in the middle of a hilarious battle of the classes with a snooty Helena Bonham Carter.

Here’s her brilliant musings, reprinted in full.

Interview by Jon Wilde, October 1997

She pauses for a moment, takes a quick slurp of PG Tips, a quick drag of her umpteenth fag, and laughs the loudest, loveliest, dirtiest laugh you’ve ever heard in your life. Kathy Burke’s just been informed by her interviewer that he fancies the arse off her. And she doesn’t mind one little bit. Not a jot.

“I don’t mind at all mate. I love it. Fucking love it. Let’s face it, we all love being fancied, don’t we? Years ago, I never heard compliments like that. I’d hear people saying, ‘Oh, you’re a funny girl you are.’ Stuff like that. Now, it’s like, ‘I really fancy you.” Not that I get chatted up very much. Wish I fucking did. But I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a bit more attention from blokes lately. That’s probably ‘cos I’ve got a bit more confident. And it’s a sexy thing, isn’t it, confidence?”

If she was any more confident right now, she’d surely ignite and burst into flames. Not that she’s short of reasons for feeling so chipper. Fifteen years after copping her Equity card, during which time she turned in more pigging great performances than you could comfortably reckon up, Kathy Burke is finally getting the recognition she so richly deserves. Her priceless contributions to Harry Enfield & Chums started as a cult, gathered furious momentum and set her up as one of the best-loved and most instantly recognisable faces on the telly.

Numerous star turns (in everything from cinema’s Scrubbers and TV’s Mr Wroe’s Virgins to theatreland’s Amongst Barbarians) has singled her out as a talent of the decidedly one-off variety. What was needed though, not to mention fully deserved, was another kind of recognition. Something that would apply the rubber stamp and confirm to the world what we’d all known for a good while – that Kathy Burke was , as Gary Oldman recently put it, “the absolute bollocks.” And, sure enough that recognition arrived.

“Getting the award at Cannes and all that was a great buzz. A great excuse for a piss-up and all the rest of it”

In May, at the 50^th Cannes Festival. She waltzed off with the top award, Best Actress, for her awesome performance in the film Nil By Mouth, in which she plays the brave, long-suffering wife of a South London would-be Mr Big Shit (played by the irrepressible Ray Winstone). Caught up in a hedonistic spiral of drink, drugs and all manner of loose living, the Winstone character loses control by degrees until finally, it all gets violently out of hand, with Burke’s Val character finding herself on the receiving end.

It’s a film that has you under the cosh from the very start and never lets up for a moment. At once frantically funny and harrowingly intense, it’s the kind of movie that will have you ringing up strangers and imploring them to dash off to the local multiplex for a butcher’s. No kidding. A masterpiece, no less.

“I’m proud,” says Kathy. “I’m just so fucking proud of this film. Getting the award at Cannes and all that was a great buzz. A great excuse for a piss-up and all the rest of it. But it could never top the buzz when I first saw the film. After the screening, I couldn’t sleep for 48 hours. I just knew it was the best thing I’ve ever been in. Know what I mean?”

The Sunday after she picked up the Cannes award, her good mate Harry Enfield wrote a piece in one of the qualities in which he reasoned that, if Helena Bonham Carter or Emma Thompson had won the award, we would have said, “Good old Britain.” But Kathy won it. “And we say, ‘Oh brilliant! We love that girl.’”

Which of course, we do. We love that girl for a whole raft of reasons. One of which is that she isn’t Helena Bonham Carter or Emma Thompson. She’s Kathy Burke and she’s the bollocks. Top woman. Honorary bloke. Not only funny as fuck, but so much more. In short, 100 per cent proof gorgeous.

“I do think of myself as gorgeous,” says Kathy Burke. “Very much so. I put that down to the blokes in my life. Friends. People I’ve worked with. Like the men in this film – Gary Oldman and Ray Winstone. I’d be doing scenes where I looked really rough, a proper state. But I was never made to feel that way. Even when I had to prepare for violent scenes and had all this heavy-duty make-up on, these lads wouldn’t allow me to feel ugly. I would sit on the set and feel beautiful and people like Ray Winstone would come up and say, ‘You’re bloody fantastic, Kathy. You’ve got a bit of a weird looking face. In fact, you remind me of my nan. But, y’know, you’re fucking gorgeous!’ And I’ll be thinking, ‘Yeah, he’s right…’”

Wine time

Not that self-confidence always came to her so readily. Growing up as she did in the rough end of Islington, times were tough and virtually everything seemed to conspire against her feeling good about herself. Her mother having died when she was just 18 months old, she would be looked after by her two older brothers while her alcoholic father disappeared on lengthy binges.

“I think the reason I adore men so much,” she sayd, “is because I was brought up by them. What my brothers did for me was just incredible. I suppose that gave me high expectation of men. They haven’t always lived up to those expectations. Some have. Some haven’t. But, what I’ve learned over the years is that a good man can make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world. So, when you come across a really good man, that’s a real joy.

“I wanted them to fancy me. I wanted them to want to fuck me”

“But when I was growing up, it didn’t take me long to work out that the blokes I knew looked upon me as one of their mates. They didn’t fancy me. They didn’t want to get me into bed. I was Burkey, the little fella in a skirt. Even when I started getting into relationships, I didn’t believe deep down that they really fancied me. It wasn’t enough that they loved me. I wanted them to fancy me. I wanted them to want to fuck me. But, even then, I always had a sense of fun about myself. A much as it bothered me, I could be tongue-in-cheek about it. I’m just a funny girl, basically. Always have been.”

It was while watching the film Kes for the first time, in her early teens, that it first occurred to her that life might just offer an alternative route to leaving school and working in the local bakery.

“It really opened my eyes, that film,” she recalls.

“When I saw Kes, I didn’t feel like an outcast any more. Also, I’d be watching the film and I’d see that these people weren’t real actors. They were just normal people who happened to be in a film. They all looked like the people who lived in my flats. I’d never seen that before. It must have had an effect on me ‘cos I started acting out scenes in my flat.

“Like I’d go looking for injured birds with the idea of bringing them back home and making them well again – like the boy does in the film. But I couldn’t find any birds. So I got a cat instead. Nobby, I called him. He was fucking mad though.”

At 15, an English teacher suggested she attend classes at the local Anna Scher theatre school, which ran special cheap (50p) evenings for the working-class kids in the neighbourhood. This led to a few years playing “the fat friend of the leading girl” for BBC Schools TV and the like.

“I suppose there came a point when I thought ‘Well, this is what I’m stuck with’. Either fat friends or cleaning ladies. Then, a bit later, it was haggard-looking prisoners and the mentally ill.”

“Before the acting took off, she endured a stint at the local bakery. For a brief period, while studying drama at college, she worked as a music journalist on the student rag. In her final review, she happily announced that Bob Marley had recovered from cancer and was now in tip-top health. By the time the piece was published, Marley had snuffed it. And that was the end of that.

Deja vu

Then in 1982, she landed her first plum film part – starring as a borstal inmate in Mai Zetterling’s Scrubbers; quickly followed by the role of Johnny Rotten’s moll in Sid & Nancy, and a substantial role in Alex Cox’s ill-fated ‘ravioli’ Western Straight To Hell. Mention of which brings drunken memories flooding back.

“Oh yeah, Straight To Hell. Crap film. Just the pits. Even as I was reading the script, I was thinking, ‘This is fucking appauling’. But how could I turn down the chance of partying with The Pogues, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello? That was some party I can tell you. A hoot. A blast. The beginning of me drinking far too heavily if the truth be told.”

By the end of the ‘80s, she was probably best known for her comic roles. There was the pregnant, dart-throwing Tina Bishop character, who was an instant cult hit when she became a regular on Jonathan Ross’s The Last Resort. Numerous guest appearances on French & Saunders, including a hugely memorable skit in which she starred as Bananarama’s newest recruit. And, perhaps best of all, her rip-snorting cameo in Roland Rivron’s Set Of Six series, in which, playing Rivron’s down-and-out partner, she swigged from a bottle of cider and warbled a medley of Freddie & The Dreamers songs.

Come 1989 and she found herself at a curious crossroads in her career. Offered the chance of joining French & Saunders on tour, she opted instead to head off to a regional theatre to perform as the sister of a drug trafficker in a production of Michael Wall’s Amongst Barbarians.

 “It’s not like working down a coal mine, is it? The only time I get really stressed out on jobs is when the people I’m working with are complete cunts”

“That was an important decision for me. ‘Cos it would have been dead easy for me to head off down the comedy road. But I had to remind myself that I was an actress. Most of the time it’s a piece of piss, I mean, it’s not like working down a coal mine, is it? The only time I get really stressed out on jobs is when the people I’m working with are complete cunts.”

Through the ’90, she’s popped up all over the shop, bringing her distinctive raw energies to bear on a startlingly diverse array of TV stuff. There was Harry Enfield & Chums, of course, as well as Murder Most Horrid, After Miss Julie, Common As Muck and even bloody Jackanory.

Then there was her truly remarkable BAFTA-winning performance in Mr Wroe’s Virgins – which found her getting her kit off on screen for the first time.

“Bit weird that,” she says. “Doing nude scenes, because it goes out on the telly. Then, next morning, you’re doing your shopping at Safeway, you see someone’s recognised you and you realise they were looking at your fanny the previous night, which can be a bit…”

Disconcerting?

“Yeah, disconcerting. Not that there was anything titillating about my nude scenes in that play. I mean, I was covered in scabs and all that. Nothing you could have a crafty wank over. It’s just that it’s usually the actresses with fit bodies who get asked to do the nude scenes. But it honestly doesn’t bother me. I look at my arse in the mirror and quite like it. Which is important, I think. To feel good about your body.

“See, I’m heterosexual and everything, but I can appreciate a beautiful woman as much as a block can. I can understand why they get all weak at the knees when they see a lovely pair of tits.

“The way I see it…you can have this bird who’s got the best knockers in the world, the best arse and all that business, but she could be thick as shit and a right old bitch to boot.

“Of course, there’s men who will put up with that because men are peacocks, basically. They want to walk down the road with something good on their arm. They want to strut and show off a bit. I can understand that. Fucking good luck to them, I say.”

Right now, Post-Cannes, she finds herself up to her eyebrows in work offers which show no sign of letting up. Meanwhile, she’s just completed filming an adaptation of t he novel Tom Jones for the BBC. Her latest writing project, a 10-minute TV play entitled The End, is due to start filming this month. Then, around the same time. She starts filming a movie about the life of Elizabeth I, in which she plays Mary Tudor. “My first posh part,” she admits, somewhat bashfully.

Not that there’s much chance of her traipsing off to regularly into swanky Merchant Ivory territory. Indeed, the chances of her mixing in those particular circles would appear to be remote after her recent spat with Helena Bonham Carter. This highly entertaining saga began when Carter was quoted in Time Out magazine as saying: “If you’re not pretty and you’re working class, you have an easier time in terms of people’s attitudes to you.”

“They like the dirtiness of being with a bit of rough, but they wouldn’t want to breed with me. Which is fine ‘cos I wouldn’t want to breed with them”

Clearly, this sort of hogwash didn’t go down at all well with our Kathy, who responded thus: “As a lifelong member of the non-pretty working classes, I would like to say to Helena Bonham Carter, wholly pledged member of the very upper-middle classes: shut up you stupid cunt…”

Reminded of which episode, she grins a grin as large as a shopping precinct.

“Well,” she says, “I thought it was something that needed to be said. Helena Bonham Carter’s gripe was that she was stereotyped but the way she put her point across was just fucking ignorant. I just felt she had to be pulled up about it. Not that I was waving the flag for the working class or anything like that. I have never had a working class chip and I’m proud of that. It’s not that I’ve got a problem with posh people. In fact, I’ve been out with a few posh boys in my time. They are a bit weird with women like me. They like the dirtiness of being with a bit of rough, but they wouldn’t want to breed with me. Which is fine ‘cos I wouldn’t want to breed with them. I don’t give a damn to be honest with you. I mean, I know what I am, I know who I am and where I’m from. I’m not Pamela Anderson. I’m Kathy fucking Burke. And, if people don’t like it, they can just fuck off. Know what I mean?”

We do. We certainly do.

Gorgeous.Totally, utterly, fantabulously gorgeous. That’s how it is. That’s all there is and there ain’t no more.

“i’m not pamela anderson. i’m kathy f**kin burke”

Danny Dyer has become part of the mainstream TV landscape since he – and the rest of the Carter family – moved into the Queen Vic on Boxing Day 2013.

This Christmas sees Mick Carter marry his longtime sweetheart Linda. Obviously, this being Albert Square at Christmas, it’s not looking as straightforward as all that. Dean Wicks is still at large and winding up everyone, and the rapist looks like he’ll be served his comeuppance at last. Mick losing his rag and knocking several shades of shit out of him would cheer viewers.

And you know the minute anyone wishes for a “A nice quiet faaamly Christmas”, divorce papers or a paternity reveal will turn up and spoil festivities. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s all a long way from the days when Dyer was in danger of being typecast as a thug, both on and off-screen. But he’s deservedly moved away from fronting BBC3 documentaries about football hooligans to remind people that (a) he can act and (b) he’s killingly funny in real life too.

Dyer first opened up to Loaded in 1999, when he made his film debut in 1999 drug-munch marathon Human Traffic, appearing as Star Wars-mad stoner Moff.

Square go

Danny Dyer on masturbation and Moff by Rowan Chernin

“The Emperor wants to control outer space. Yoda wants to explore inner space. That’s the fundamental difference between the good and the bad sides of the force… I just don’t know where it comes from sometimes. I mean, it frightens me.”

That’s Danny Dyer speaking as the character Moff in Human Traffic. A truly great moment in method-ecstasy acting, where the Londoner’s bug-eyed soliloquy of after-hours bong-talk leaves the audience howling.

How do you prepare for such as drugged-up mentalist role?

I’ve lived the scene and know the score, so it’s easy for me to get into Moff’s head. It was hard though, because of the energy Moff had to have. Sometimes you’d wake up and think: “I’m not up for this today.” But if you’ve ever been paranoid, you’ll never forget it. So it clicks back in.

That must have been one of the longest imaginary ecstasy experiences ever…

It fucking was, mate. One long comedown afterwards, too. It was a fucking laugh – you can’t get a better film than being out of your nut for six weeks being a mad canehead.

How has Human Traffic changed things for you?

It’s made me a lot more confident. I’ve got loads more offers coming in now.

Are you trying to get things going in Hollywood?

I’d like to, but I’m a London boy at heart. I start this film called Wildflowers in a couple of weeks and the directors and producers are all American. I went out for dinner the other night and they couldn’t understand a word I was fucking saying.

Have you been to any casting out in LA?

Never. I haven’t been to America. I’d love to. I wouldn’t just go out there cold and try and crack it that way, but it’s got to be the place to be, innit?

How would you fancy a house in Malibu, a big yacht, your own palm trees to swing your hammock from?

I’d love it, mate. That’s the dream, that’s why we’re in the game. Whether I get there or not is another thing.

There’s a hilarious comedown wank scene in Human Traffic. I don’t think I’ve seen any of Hollywood’s greatest canons banging one out on screen – you’re lengths ahead. How do you feel about that?

That’s heavy, mate, really heavy. Originally I was meant to be reading a porn mag and it was going to cut to a dream sequence of these two beautiful women rising out of the mag. It was going to be my greatest scene. They were going to get two models to take their bras off and kiss me. Get to the day and Justin (Kerrigan, director) goes: “They’ve pulled out, Dan. You’re just going to have to wank.” So I just had to wank for fucking six hours. Long scene, mate, and not even coming at the end of it.

Heavens!

I didn’t actually have my cock in my hand. I pulled my pants down and bashed away. There were 40 people in that room. It’s horrible for me to sit there now in the cinema, because that is me wanking.

I don’t think I need to know any more, or do I?

It’s a difficult one to tackle, a personal thing. Me wanking and my mum comes upstairs – it’s everyone’s worst fucking nightmare. But it goes down well with the audiences, so I’m happy.

danny dyer: ‘i just had to masturbate for six hours’

The ever modest Tyson Fury has had a 2015 to remember after winning and then stripped of the World Heavyweight Championship. 

He sat down with Loaded last year to tell us he didn’t care about titles and only wanted money.

Here’s why, from the Gypsy King himself. 

Interview by Scott Walker

March 2014

“David Haye hasn’t got his little toe to hide behind this time, but we’ll see what excuses he comes up with.”

Tyson Fury quietly expected the worst when Loaded spoke to him ahead of his planned bout with the Hayemaker last August. Sure enough, Haye cut his eye during training and postponed the £10 million Battle of Britain, only to then require career-ending shoulder surgery last November, flooring hopes of the pair ever meeting in the ring and our interview with them seeing the light of day.

On to the south of France, and another Fury training camp – “Same shit, same shit, same shit. Same bullshit every day, three times a day. Sleep eat, shit, train. That’s it. Nine, 10 weeks, then you fight.” And we were worried he’d be in a bad mood…

The Motormouth Manc is returning to the ring on February 15 in an undercard bout to headliner Dereck Chisora, whose rematch with the unbeaten Fury is pencilled in for June.

“They fancy him to beat me,” says Fury, typically bewildered at the thought of anybody, let alone someone he has already picked off with ease, taking his unbeaten record from him.

“It’s crazy. They fancied him to do me in 2011 and now they fancy him again, because he was overweight the first time, they say. He had a 14-week training camp for that fight. It wasn’t like he had three days’ notice. He prepared himself for that fight. If I go into a fight unprepared and lose, it’s my fault. I can’t blame the opponent. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks and Chisora is not good enough to beat fighters like me. I just hope he gets through this next fight on the 15^th, because with my luck, something could go wrong.”

Could veteran bulldog Haye shut up yappy pup Fury once and for all?

Indeed. The proverbial barrel of tits wouldn’t do Fury’s luck over the past few months’ justice. Twice on the verge of a fight that would set him up for life financially, whatever the outcome, and twice frustrated.

Could veteran bulldog Haye shut up yappy pup Fury once and for all? Could Fury mark a new dawn and save an ailing heavyweight division? British Boxing needed them to thrash it over a few rounds, not least after David Price’s consecutive defeats in his own back yard last year, and Chisora’s losses to Haye, Vitali Klitschko, and Robert Helenius.

It’d have been a bonus if Haye had fought, but shit happens in boxing,” says Fury. “We had to take the gamble, but what can you do? The big thing about that fight was I was going to get a lot of money from getting a few million. It was security for the rest of my life. Apart from that, it was only another boxing match, and it’s on to the next one.”

The reality of what might have been has turned the gung-ho trash talker we met in 2013 into a pragmatist “sick of slagging people off”. Fury even one million people per cent retired” from boxing after the Haye fight and his attempts to goad the likes of Lennox Lewis into the ring fell flat, only to announce his comeback plan of one fight a month to make up for a year of wasted training and celibacy.

Modest Fury

That may have to wait.

Fury insists he needs to top names in the opposite corner, in 50-50 fights where people feel his spotless record could be bruised.

Going 12 months 12 times a year with that calibre of opponent would be a stretch. For now, whether he likes it or not, he’s got a three fight deal with Boxnation, taking him to the Chisora rematch.

“Boxing’s all about money,” he tells loaded. “Money talks, and bullshit walks. I already beat Chisora three years ago, and because {promoter} Frank Warren has put his hand in his pocket and got out a big cheque, I’m going back over the same path. Three years and seven fights down the line, I’m going over old ground because of money. It’s not about glory, fame or any other stuff.

“Money controls the lot. There’s nothing to fgain from the fight, only money, but then we all need money to live. A man’s got to earn his living. I’ve got a family to provide for, and I’m not interested in winning belts, going down in history, and all that bullshit fighters say. To me, it’s purely about money. A way of earning money.”

“I love shagging women; I love eating food. I’m not bothered about getting punched in the face, but I don’t fucking love it.

It doesn’t bode well if cash is the only reason one of the few names who can shake up the sport is spoiling for a fight.

Fair enough, anyone would struggle to keep the faith, but surely there’s more to it.

“Look, there’s nothing enjoyable about waking up and training your balls off three times a day. This is my line of work. It becomes enjoyable when you’re fit. But getting fit and going through that mill is hard work. The actual fighting part of it, there’s something crazy inside of me that likes to fight and I like to box. But I wouldn’t say I love it.

“I love shagging women; I love eating food. I’m not bothered about getting punched in the face, but I don’t fucking love it.”

Fury hopes to get another three fights under his belt in the second half of the year. Undefeated American Deontay Wilder is on his hit list, but the pay-per-view channels here and abroad have yet to be convinced it’s a big enough draw.

Hungarian heavyweight Kubrat Pulev is another possibility, but Fury isn’t sold on the notion of people who are struggling to put food on the table spending money on a boxing ticket. So who’s left?

Wladimir Klitschko – “the robot”, as Fury called him last year. With his brother, Vitali, “the pensioner”, retired, the world champion is the one he wants -m it always has been.

With Haye out of the picture, and the Chisora bout potentially a final eliminator for a title shot, Klitschko jr would be the only one left.

“He’ll go into hiding,” Fury says. “He only wants easy fights. The guy’s 37 his brother’s retired and you have to question how much he wants it. No matter how many time I call people a pussy or dickheads or whatever, if they don’t want to fight they don’t want to fight. It’s the same with Wlad. I can only fight who I’ve got in front of me. I’ve tried getting boxers out of retirement. I’ve tried all that stuff.”

There’s always UFC heavyweight champ, Cain Velasquez.

“If (UFC boss) Dana White puts some proper money on the table then I’d go over there and have it, whatever he wants,” says Fury, although we put it to him that it smacks of a frustrated fighter desperate for a scrap.

“Look, as long as things are fair and equal and I’m not getting the piss take out of me then I’m alright, I don’t mind where I go. This year, I’m just going to stay active, stay training, no holidays. I want this year to go smoothly. No more hiccups, I’m not going to rely on world title fights any time soon. Someone like me has to fight his way into position, because I’m classed as a dangerous fight for anyone. Sometimes you can be too good for your own good.”

tyson fury: the past and the furious

Idris Elba has had a couple of years to remember. Critical acclaim for Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom and Netflix’s Beasts Of No Nation, the endless Bond speculation, and the birth of his first son, Winston, in 2014.

The coolest man in Hollywood is stepping away from Hollywood this Christmas to return to TV screens in BBC’s Luther.

In Loaded’s classic interview from 2014 he discusses everything from family, to fame and what’s keeping his feet firmly on the ground.

Interview by Lia Nicholls

December 2014

Getting tossed around in his broken boat by waves under the control of media gods, Truman Burbank is the epitome of the lost little man in the search of big answers.

So it’s a shock when the world’s man-mountain of the moment chooses the movie metaphor to describe his place on the planet.

Idris Elba is, after all, the majestic Hackney hulk who mesmerizes men and women, and makes Barack Obama want to change career.

He’s the Oscar-contender who made it despite living in a van and peddling weed to make ends meet. He’s the man who became Stringer Bell, Luther and Mandela. He spent hours kissing Beyonce for a movie before hanging around with her husband Jay-Z.

And he’s carved a reputation as being ‘Mr Cool’ – with a nice line in furious rage when it’s required on screen. You’d think philosophical fears including uncertainty about your position in the world would be the last thing to burden his linebacker-broad shoulders.

Yet he’s in a pensive mood when talking to me about his juicy spot as a power-player in Hollywood.

“You know the Truman Show?” he asks me.

Yeah – the one about the average, powerless Joe who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.

“Sometimes you’re not sure what’s real or not, especially when it comes to relationships,” Elba growls, in the voice soon to be used to give life to Shere Khan in the remake of The Jungle Book. “If you’re adored by millions, sometimes even on your own front doorstep you can become paranoid and constantly question, ‘Who is he? Who is she?’ I know I’ve been guilty of that in the past.”

Elba isn’t over-egging how famous he has become. He is adored by millions. Whether you know the 42-uear-old for the thinking man’s drug mastermind Stringer Bell, as world-weary John Luther in the BBC’s cop series, for his acclaimed acclaimed portrayal of freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, or for his ever-increasing blockbusters (Pacific Rim, Prometheus, Pacific Rim, Thor) or for the rumours he’s going to be the first black Bond, chances are you like him.

There are plenty of reasons why mere mortals admire stars – there’s those who make us laugh, there are those the old cliché goes who men want to be and women want to bed.

But there are few stars admired so widely by other stars – and that’s when you know you’ve really made it.

Elba spent a lot of time getting close to Beyonce Knowles in the critically-derided Fatal Attraction-esque thriller called Obsessed.

“Mr Cool? Me? I think people like to see some genuine attributes in people they admire, you know a bit of relatability, I think I have that. And I think I’ve always managed to remain as Idris”

At a White House dinner last year Obama asked Elba to sit beside him. Prince Charles has had him at Prince’s Trust Awards, he made Mumford & Sons cool by appearing in one of their music videos, Vogue editor Anna Wintour things he’s a style icon and Daniel Craig says he’s the natural successor to the Bond crown.

And Elba has admitted he has the desire to be CEO of his own brand and become a one-man empire like Jay-Z.

His storming CV is all well-worn territory by now.

What I want to about about Elba – full name Idrissa Akuna Elba – what is the secret of being ‘cool’. Especially if sometimes feels like Truman.

“Mr Cool? Me?” he chuckles (very modestly.) “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. You know what I think it is? I think people like to see some genuine attributes in people they admire, you know a bit of relatability, I think I have that. And I think I’ve always managed to remain as Idris.

“It goes a long way in this business if you’re relatable to people. They believe in you more, they want to see you win more and support you better.

“I’ve been on both sides. I’ve gone to America as the new boy and come back to England as the old boy and I’ve watched American actors come here and realise immediately why they aren’t relatable – you just don’t want to go to the pub with them.”

He really has been on both sides – a proper Hackney boy-done-good who has referred to himself in the past as a “fucking Dutty rude boy”.

The rags part of his riches memoir is that he was raised in the East End of London where he struggles to pay his acting school fees. When he upped sticks to the US he ended up breaking up with his wife, living in a van, working as a doorman and hustling by selling ten-spots of weed in New York before landing The Wire job – ironically as a drug kingpin.

The man for Madiba

Surely the essence of Elba is more than just being in touch with his roots and the feeling blokes get that they’d like to have a better with him?

The answer to his cool is probably – and more unglamorously than you probably thought – family.

It seems that’s what keeps him grounded when he could so easily spiral into the drugs, drink and orgies that are on a plate for him most places he goes.

It’s 9pm and he is speaking to me in Paris after a day on set – his family by his side. Elba and girlfriend Naiyana Garth are happily bringing up their son Winston, named after his father who died last year after a long battle with lung cancer.

Elba’s able to travel with his family because Winston is only seven months old.

It’s probably why he tones it down a bit when talking about he temptations that could take him down a Stringer Bell-style path. Chuckling again, he tells me: “I get so many people coming up and asking, ‘Will you come to my birthday party?’ Will you come to my wedding? Will you…” (he trails off – probably for the benefit of his loved ones’ ears.)

Elba and his ex-wife Kim have a 12-year-old daughter Isan, and he’s said before he would “give it all up” for his little girl if the sacrifice was called for.

The man has also never forgotten where he comes from.

He’s supporting a £6.2 million affordable homes scheme in Hackney, where Elba House is one of two blocks in the Andre development, an ex-factory site and one of the more prominent affordable home schemes taking root across Britain to ease the pain of first-time buyers.

But even when Elba stays indoors with his family – shunning the women throwing themselves at him – he causes meltdowns.

Twitter went batshit crazy when a man tweeted a poem in February complaining about his wife’s obsession with him.

Called I Am Sorry I’m Not Idris Elba, the amateur poem read, ‘I am just a regular man / With a regular 9-5 / That does regular things / But you let the characters he plays / And the pictures he takes / Interfere with our relationship / I’m building companionship / But he’s your man crush / When it’s me you should be crushing on.’

Idris responded by posting a picture of himself on Instagram with the caption, ‘I am not sorry I’m Idris Elba.’

Again – see – cool bastard.

A similar frenzy followed in October when a short video of Idris doing press-ups in preparation for his part as a CIA agent in new action thriller Bastille Day. He was topless.

He tells me, “I was in the gym with a few of the guys and I thought it was funny to show the pain they were putting me through. The next thing I know, it’s on the bloody news. I mean, what’s that about?”

This is a men’s mag, but the answer is rippling pecs, Idris, pecs.

With or without clothes, he’s aware of the full-scale intensity that surrounds him. “Yeah, the attention is all a bit mad now… you know, how I’ve become this person,” he says.

What, a sex symbol?

“Yeah. But remember you said that not me.” Luckily, so far, the adoration has never come with any stalker-type bother.

“It’s funny, a lot of people approach me for different reasons,” he says. “There’s the Luther shout-outs, a lot of Stringer chat, but never any trouble.

“It’s always hugs, especially from blokes. Well, they give me hugs and the women give me kisses. It’s all good.”

Kisses stop at kisses these days though as he insists to me that his “hustler days are over”. He was once given the DJ moniker ‘Mr Kipling’.

Elba was once quoted as saying it was because of his “exceedingly good tunes”. 

In fact, it’s a name his mates gave to him because of the amount of “tarts” he had at his heels. Now, the two-legged tarts are gone.

Elba wants to talk about more serious matters than fame and fortune. And again, its basis is in family.

He’s keen to stick his neck out about the Ebola crisis. “You can’t lose that many people and not do much about it,” he barks, all the chuckles gone. “It could have been worse than the plague, and for me, it wasn’t acted upon quick enough.”

He’s full of far more passion discussing the outbreak of the disease than when chatting about Mr Kipling nicknames and Twitter poems.

It’s because the crisis is close to Elba’s heart. He may have been born in Hackney, but his mother Eve is Ghanaian and his late father Winston was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, where entire villages have been wiped out by the disease.

Ebola is claiming the lives of thousands and Elba says more isn’t being done because it’s a third world problem.

“Because it begun in West Africa, there was lethargy about it,” he says. “It would have been different had it have been a western country.

“I’m not afraid of Ebola, but I am afraid of ignorance. It doesn’t have to be a death sentence.”

It’s not just Ebola that is eating away at the actor with a social conscience, he’s also at war with the conflict in Syria.

“The world is at crisis point,” he says.

“Of course we’ve been here before but this happens to be our time. We have all the tools to talk one another, all the advancement but we’re still fighting over religion, I mean really fucking each other up. As a race, we’re super successful but so primitive in certain things. I find that fucking mad.”

Elba’s humanitarianism is probably heightened by the reason he’s chatting to me about his album Mi Mandela.

It’s the result of days of research dedicated to discovering the music loved by anti-apartheid icon Mandela.

It’s also a love letter to Elba’s dad – and says it’s the first of many planned “character albums”.

“Mandela was really into his music and it was my job to understand what he liked,” Elba says. “What I probably didn’t realise at the time was just how much there was to discover. In the course of that journey, I felt like I discovered the roots of South African music.”

Once he’d finished filming his role as Mandela, Elba says he watched the movie with his dad, who was seriously ill at the time. His father said how inspiring South African music was – and it stuck with Elba.

“My dad said, ‘You’ve always loved music, so you should go back to South Africa and do it’,” Elba recalls. “A little later my dad passed away. At the funeral, my uncle was DJ’ ing and he played all of these amazing songs that my dad loved.  I just said to myself, ‘Man, I’m going to do it’.

Idris Elba being Idris Elba, he managed to get some big hitters on the record.

James Blake, Maverick Sabre, Mumford & Sons, Nothembi Mkhwebane and George The Poet are a few of the names on the album. “They’re all my boys and all hugely talented,” Elba says. “They saw what I wanted to do and supported me 100 per cent. Mumford & Sons and I have mutual respect for one another. They took it away and loved it so much, they ended up playing on it. It all happened rather organically.”

Just like that. No bribe necessary. 

He adds, “It’s definitely been a labour of love. But when you care about something so much, you want to get it right. It started off as a love letter to my dad and Mr Mandela and now I’m planning to do it for some of my other characters and others in the future.

“It’s a different take to the classic soundtrack.” As well as a record deal with Parlophone, he has the blessing from the Mandela estate. “Winnie Mandela has heard it, yes. She said, and I quote, ‘I love, love, love it!’ That is the most satisfying of all.

“I’ve become close to the family and they champion what I’ve been doing. They were among the first to hear it, I was so nervous about playing to them but luckily they like it.” 

The Commandant awaits

So not only is Elba a power-house actor – he’s now in the inner circle of a revolutionary family.

Music has always been part of Elba’s path to success.

A record deal means graduating musically to the ‘next level’, in the parlance of The Wire’s drug overlords.

“I’ve done music all my life, one way or another, whether it’s producing for my own desire or being a DJ, but I’ve never really tried to sell music,” Elba says about the industry. “I didn’t have a record deal before so this is all very new to me. Playing music to someone is a very personal process so I was nervous playing it to the experts at Par lop hone. They were very honest and criticised it in parts but on the whole they genuinely loved it. They felt there was a future for it and went for it.”

When things get too crazy, the studio is the place he goes to find solace.

“It is important for actors to have other things, that is why I DJ,” he says. “When I’m in Ibiza spinning to a room of 200 ravers, they don’t really care I’m an actor.

“I’m letting off steam with my personality. You know, shaking some of the bullshit off.”

Most people would assume he’s talking about Hollywood “bullshit”.

It is rare for actors to slag off Hollywood – and bite the hand that feeds.

Occasionally they pop up, like John Cusack, who earlier this year laid into Hollywood, calling it a “whorehouse” on the verge of producing “kiddie porn” and saying it’s “ripe with frontier crazies”.

Elba’s nowhere near joining Cusack. Tinsel Town has been kind to him.

“For the film industry, there is no other place,” he says. “I like being in Hollywood, I do a lot of business there, I can’t knock it. It is what it is, an engine.

“It is work but if I go there to live it’s an entirely different thing.

“In the industry, you need to go there, you need to get work there – it’s a very progressive system. Hollywood has always reached out to different people to make it richer culturally. It’s incredible for British actors right now.”

But there are heaps of casualties from Hollywood excess.

It seems natural then the conversation turns to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams, who both paid with their lives this year from the deadliest cocktail of all – depression and drug-addiction.

“It is important for some actors to let off some of the burden they carry,” admits Elba. “No-one feels sorry for actors, you are getting paid, and millions adore you.

“But there is a lot of residue when it comes to actors, especially those who throw their heart and soul into their work. You end up taking something home with you.”

With back-to-back film jobs booked for the next two years, Elba is not gearing up to knock on doors, flat cap in hand.

There’s the remake of The Jungle Book, Bastille Day, Avengers: Age of Ultron, independent project A Hundred Streets, in which he’s starring and co-producing.

“Who wouldn’t want to be Bond? It would be a huge honour.”

Maybe Guy Ritchie’s remake of King Arthur, or Bond are on the horizon.

Bond had to come up in conversation.

It seems Elba’s been touted as the man to get into the spy’s tux for years.

And as our shoot shows, the agent’s garb would fit him like a glove.

It is not that Elba minds being asked about the Bond gossip. But it seems to be getting tedious for him.

And it appears it’s the bit about being “the first black Bond” that jars.

In keeping with his usual response to being asked about Bond he says, “Who wouldn’t want to be Bond? It would be a huge honour.”

With or without the golden gun, Elba hasn’t many complaints about life at the moment.

Worldwide accolades came for his portrayal of Mandela in Long Walk To Freedom, a Golden Globe for Luther, and most importantly, the birth of his son has made this year one of his best yet.

He’s smiling as he says, “It has been an amazing year, we’re incredibly lucky. I say ‘We’ because I have a team of people who make it work, I don’t do it by myself. When you’re trying to do a number of things, you know, acting, music, DJ’ing, you end up having to really rely on your team. I’ve had some personal highs and some real personal lows but the work has been consistently growing and I’m very happy about that.”

Back to his roots

There doesn’t seem to be a minute when Elba isn’t working. He’s always being a dad, actor, DJ, musician – or using his velvet baritone to sell us Sky 1. Despite family being central for the man, you can empathise with his loved ones, who think he takes on too much.

Defending his schedule Elba says, “People say I do too much, but I think it is based on faulty logic. It is based on the idea we’re not meant to use more than 12 per cent of our brains.

Most comes down to logistics. You have to be clever with your timing. I’m a workaholic and I love the idea of being multi-faceted. I can’t just call myself an actor. I’m an entertainer, an artist – and if you are, you have more than one art.

“I find the time to fit it all in because I love it. I also think it’s important not to ram what you’re doing down peoples’ throats. Some people make that mistake.”

There’s one thing that won’t make him work this Christmas though.

It’s his first festive season with son Winston and his second without his dad – so he’s going to be home.

“It’s even more important to be together at Christmas now,” he says. “It’s a time to rebuild bridges and spend some quality time with the family, and as we know I’m pretty bad at taking time off throughout the year. You need to take time off when it’s there.” If existential Truman Show worries about his fame and ambition might keep him up at night, Elba can rest assured his boat hit the wall a long time ago – and he knows exactly where he is headed.

“Robert Redford is the perfect example,” he says of his acting idols. “He directs and every now and again he’ll pop up in a movie and for me that is the way to do it. Classy, in and out, but stay acting.

“I’m always going to want to act but it will be more about directing and producing for me in the future. I don’t want to be too old and trying to pull in the crowds. I think it’s admirable to have lifelong careers but I don’t want to have to do it. It is far more satisfying seeing a film that you have helped make come to life than a pat on the back at an award ceremony.

“Awards are great. I mean, they’re great for your ego, they’re great for the kudos, it’s great for your pay check but I don’t work for the awards, I really don’t.”

With regards to the cash – Elba will let his team to run his schedule, but he is the boss of his bank.

“Doing your own banking really puts a lot of things in perspective. I leave the technical stuff like tax up to the accountants but on a basic level, I like to pay my own bills,” he says.

“You’ve got to know where it’s coming in and coming out – like a very good curry.

And his is one full–on, no–messing–about vindaloo.

idris elba: ‘my life is the truman show’

Greg Davies, Johnny Vegas, John Niven… Three names you’d love to be entertained by at Christmas, just not necessarily in person. 

Whether it’s Man Down sitcom star Davies, Kill Your Friends/Straight White Male author Niven or possibly reformed lunatic Vegas, it’s hard to imagine any of them having a remotely normal Christmas. 

So it proved when Loaded asked our columnists to share their Christmas plans…

John Niven: “Every year my mum will start asking me what I want for Christmas around September. My answer is the same every year – nothing.

This all has to do with managing expectations: if you don’t want nothing then you got nothing to lose, as Bob Dylan nearly said. When it comes to buying gifts for others it’s simple: allocate one day in the first week in December and go out and spend roughly double what you felt you could afford on everyone. You will achieve two key goals here: being seen as a generous person while avoiding trying to end your own life in some department store of Christmas Eve.”

Greg Davies: “Most Christmas mornings between the ages of 17 and 35, the day began with my mum saying to my sister and I: “Why? Every year I ask you not to get hammered.”

Johnny Vegas: “Saturday: Ended up getting the rest of me Crimbo presents at Camden Market, so it’ll be a windchime/puppet/friendship-bracelet/juggling-balls/knitted-tye-die Christmas this year. Our Kid has sold his car, so I gave him the cash to hire a van to get me and my booty home.

“Sunday: It was a few weeks before Christmas, and in the car park of a service station just outside London not a single creature was stirring – apart from the fire brigade, who were frantically trying to put out the hire van. Apparently it was caused by an electrical fault started by a cigarette or something.”

loaded columnists’ festive frenzy

She was a Welsh wild woman and Darling Bud of May before she charmed Michael Douglas.

Bet you won’t find Catherine Zeta-Jones CBE going on about fancying Jack Nicholson these days.

Things were different when she was in the Valleys and not the Hollywood Hills.

Back in this classic 1995 chat and photo shoot (a shoot so hot it was used again four years later), the 25-year-old Zeta-Jones appeared as you have never seen her before.

Blue Zeta

It’s a bit disconcerting when you’re interviewing someone and you realise she looks exactly like the first girl you ever lusted after.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is sitting in fishnet stockings, legs crossed like a goddess while elegantly sipping her second glass of champagne. And she’s pontificating about the importance of having a good arse.

It’s a big moment in need of a very considered response. But I’m set adrift on memory bliss somewhere back in 1981 on the park swings with Mandy Heasman, eating chips, humming Love Action by the Human League and wondering whether I could venture my hand onto her knee without getting my face slapped.

“See, some guys’ arses look great in jeans but when they take them off it all goes everywhere,” says Cath. “Basically, I’m not an arse person, I’m more your inner arm kinda girl.”

Eh? What?

It’s not every day you find yourself in such exalted company, and the least Cath deserves from a fop like me is my total concentration.

I resolve to get a grip. This is, after all, the 25-year-old actress from The Darling Buds Of May, Splitting Heirs and anything involving period costume, who’s now darling of the tabloids and making a foray into the music business with a debut album and her first single.

We’re in the lounge of the extremely swanky Blakes Hotel, West London, huddled together on an expensive couch amid a forest of throw cushions. While she sips, I realise I’m guzzling the bubbly like it’s going out of fashion. It’s no wonder my mind’s gone AWOL.

She’s got this great way of looking drop-dead sexy while remaining charming and totally approachable. Her Swansea accent is soft and warm. When she holds her cigarette between her teeth prior to lighting it, you find yourself sighing like a lovesick chump. One flash of her feline smile and you’re mesmerized. One sexy wink and you’re winded for days. I defy any man to venture she is in any way less than marvellous. Anyway, back to the action.

“All I’m saying is, I just can’t stand an arse that falls out,” she says.

Tell me about it.

Ms Interesting

“I think the sexiest part of the body is the eyes. I can always tell a fella by his eyes. I sense their first reaction. Like if they’re green or brown I tend to go for you more. Bit like yours in fact. You gotta date tonight, darling?”

Oh stop messing about.

“I’m not talking about Mel Gibson eyes or anything, just a little twinkle or sparkle, someone you can look at and go, ‘Aaaahhh, yeah, I like you, you got good eyes’,” she adds. Ok. I hear you also like forearms. What makes for good ones?

“Well (she puts on a dirty old man-type voice), I like them not too hairy, but just strong looking. I’m not into bogus men who go to the gym, walking round all full of themselves declaring, ‘This is my hobby’ with their pumped-up bodies. It’s a bit pathetic.”

Makes you feel a bit inadequate as well, doesn’t it?

“Yeah, I work out and things but it’s not my life’s ambition. I see the same people in the gym all the time and I just think, ‘Get a life’,” she says. “It’s like seeing a little anorexic having a carrot hanging over her nose. It’s an obsession. I don’t like that at all.”

And so, into the questions proper…

Budding Potential

Is size important?

“What do you mean?”

Hehhrrr. .. hahhh, ahem, you know, the size of a man’s downstairs…

“What are you like? No, no, no, no, NO, not at all. It’s not one of my main things you know. It’s the sensuality of a man, not the size of his head or his dick or the size of anything else. It’s if he’s interesting.”

 

“It’s the sensuality of a man that matters, not the size of his head or his privates or the size of anything else”

 

Where’s the strangest place you’ve had sex?

“Aaahhhh, I’m not telling you. I can’t really. See, I still do it really frequently in the same place and people may find out.”

I figure, ‘Give a little, get a little’, so I attempt to lure Cath from her reticence with an anecdote involving Land’s End, a patch of heather and a cafe full of startled pensioners.

“No, I’m still not telling you.”

D’oh.

So what sort of music do you like to have sex to?

“I like big sweeping music, Wagner and stuff with a huge wave-crashing climax. Van Morrison as well, he does it for me. I love Van and… .” Hang on a minute, you like having sex while some bloke harps on about cleaning windows in the background? Surely not. “Well, maybe not that particular track. But the early stuff is very sensual.” New Order’s good for that sort of thing. “I’ll have to try it and let you know,” she says.

In the hot seat

Who is the sexiest person in showbiz?

“I think it has to be Jack Nicholson,” she says. “He drew up next to me in his car when I was in New York. I froze. The amount of concentration needed to drive in New York was bad enough, but then bloody Jack Nicholson pulls up beside you and starts smiling at you. I was like, ‘Jesus, it’s Jack bloody Nicholson!’ I didn’t even know where the gear stick was. I was just stuck there in the traffic after he’d driven off.”

What do you make of people like Sharon Stone and the whole Hollywood caper?

“I think we all have to know our limits – what we do and what we don’t do. I get her confused with photos of Madonna. This is what our generation is falling to – but it’s all the same to me. I’m aiming at a more independent market in America. It’d be very easy for me to fall into Jane Seymour character country, but I don’t want to become a mini-series actor.

“I gate-crashed AI Pacino’s birthday party when I was in New York this one time. I get all shy and embarrassed around people like that but I had to take the chance to talk to him so I walked up and started stuttering, then I said, ‘Hello Mr Al… errrm… Chino’. It was completely embarrassing. Then I said to him, ‘I’ve really enjoyed your films over the years’. He was like, ‘Great, but are you having a good time?’ I said, ‘I’m having a really great time’, and he says, ‘Great, great!’ Then he grabbed this toy sword and went dancing off round the party performing like this hilarious madman.”

It’s all happening for Zeta-Jones at the moment. She’s doing a film with Matt Dillon and her single, In The Arms Of Love (it sounds like Cher meets Deacon Blue), looks set to crash into the Top 40. Also she’s just got engaged to Soldier Soldier actor Angus MacFadyen (the pair split 15 months later in 1996.)

 

“I was the girl with the tits and the thighs. So all the guys went, ‘She’s a bit of all right’, and all the big jobs in the West End are redundant as soon as you get typecast like that”

 

But where does she stand with the great British public right now?

“The majority of people who talk to me on the street saw me in The Darling Buds Of May. I’d be stupid to think they’re all middle-aged housewives who go and talk about me at coffee mornings. I know it’s mostly men who follow my career.

“Three years ago I was quite insecure, and reading stuff about myself made me a bit neurotic. Every little detail, like the size of my thighs or how I wanted to have my nose done. I had this terrible desire to be liked, you know? Now I don’t give a toss.

“I don’t think in this country I have got a reputation as a great actress. In America I have had a couple of things come out which have gone down really well. But here it was like, ‘Catherine’s a blow-out’.

“I was the girl with the tits and the thighs. So all the guys went, ‘She’s a bit of all right’, and credit-wise that doesn’t really say a lot. All the little jobs in the theatres and all the big jobs in the West End are redundant as soon as you get typecast like that.”

Cool Cymru

Do you still feel like everyone’s staring at you all the time?

“I always look at people,” she replies. “It’s very plain to see when a man or woman is undressing a person on the tube. But it’s not like women are some virginal little angels who come down to tend the wounds. They’re not. There are some dangerous women out there. We’re a species. We’re like cats. The female praying mantis – they bite the heads off their male lovers. That is the ultimate female statement.”

Hmmm, sounds like her old man had better watch his step. As should any sleaze who takes it upon themselves to try and touch her up on trains.

“This bloke on the tube touched me on the leg a while ago,” she says. “It happened a few times and it really pissed me off, this guy taking that sort of liberty. So I grabbed his hand, hoisted it in the air and shouted, ‘Who’s filthy?!’ I was swearing and going on and this guy was absolutely mortified, caught out and disgraced in front of everyone.”

 

“I’ve never touched drugs. I’ve never had a joint and I’ve never done a line”

 

It’s pretty clear Cath is not exactly your wallflower type. In fact, she may err on the bit bonkers side. Example: who else could possibly choose Roberto Baggio’s missed World Cup penalty for Italy as her favourite ever sporting moment?

And she holds grudges too. She won’t be inviting seasoned song-and-dance man Tommy Steele round for tiffin. When she was 16 and had endured a five-hour coach trip, he bawled her off stage at an audition because she didn’t have blonde hair.

She’s also got some pretty inventive ways of dealing with nosey door-stepping journalists. When news broke of her engagement to MacFadyen she had to be held back by her neighbours from spraying bleach into the eyes of a berk peering through her letterbox.

Such a crazy chick. She must have the odd dangerous rock ‘n’ roll habit then? “I’ve never touched drugs”, she insists. “If you have an addictive personality, which I know I do, then you can’t afford to. I’ve never had a joint and I’ve never done a line. I know what I’m like. I like my drink. I have a very high champagne bill.” Which is when the bill arrived. And my wallet exploded.

catherine the great

Soul-searching piss-ups, a quest to find Jesus and the world cups of crisps and breakfast cereal. Just some of the investigative journalism in the finest features from the magazine’s glory days.

1

Wine Tasting: Into The Valley Of The Ponce
July 1994

This was a high-minded investigation by Loaded’s staff feature writer Martin Deeson. (His first probing article in the magazine’s debut issue got to the bottom of the joys of hotel sex.) Two months later, he got away with proposing a feature where he investigated drinking. It led him to the Oddbins wine tasting of 200 wines at London’s Park Lane Hotel and the results surprised the intrepid reporter, who admitted he had been expecting ‘a quiet room filled with ponces in smoking jackets’. He was pleasantly shocked to see ‘prostate bodies lying in the hallways’ and debauchery. In a bid not to appear rude, he was soon knocking back Bollinger, lighting up cigarettes indoors and telling people if they bared their arses he’d include them in his story. They obliged. 

2

The Crisp World Cup
September 1994

An office dispute over the merits of Kettle Chips compared with Walkers led to Loaded’s inaugural Crisp World Cup. Editor James Brown, deputy ed Tim Southwell and writers Martin Deeson, Adam Levi and ‘Filthy’ Clark were the crisp connoisseurs with the task of determining the best. Early favourites for the final included Walkers cheese and onion and Pringles original. In the battle of the divisive prawn cocktail flavour, Tavern prawn cocktail triumphed over Golden Wonder – as they decided Golden Wonder’s fish option ‘smelt like shite and tasted worse’. After a tense tournament, the competition drew to a drunken close with calls being made to cab companies near crisp factories to judge who had the best answerphone (they couldn’t get through to the crisp factories.) McCoy’s crisps were named No 1. The decision was as much to do with Loaded’s tasting team deciding they were too off their faces and on the verge of puking to manage sampling any more varieties. 

3

Capital Punishment: By Drinking
April 1995

Martin Deeson was considered the best man to send to Dublin to attempt something not even Dubliners would try – drinking in 40 pubs in one day. Packing just a hangover, Deeson and a photographer landed in Ireland in a bid to complete what the woman in the local tourist office said would be “impossible”. They bumped into Paula Yates at the airport, missing a world exclusive in the process (News Of The World reported the day after Deeson landed she had split from husband Bob Geldof.) Deeson tried to take it easy – drinking half pints of Guinness in each pub. It worked and the fearless adventurer managed to hit all 40 establishments. Deeson vowed to complete the entire route in reverse the next day, before he passed out. That didn’t happen. 

4

Piss-up In A Brewery
June 1995

Somewhat predictably, the Loaded team once endeavored to discover if they could organise a piss up in a brewery. Turns out it proved more difficult than it sounded and they had to (yes, had to) go further afield to Prague to complete the mission. Highlights from their organizing of a piss-up in an actual brewery included a rejection letter from a Guinness boss. It read, ‘I can’t have you drinking near the copper barrels’.

5

The World Cup Of Breakfast Cereals
November 1995

Following on from the Crisp World Cup, Loaded set out on a quest to determine which breakfast cereal was the finest. Five members of the editorial team lined up 35 cereals for the competition. They took it seriously, with Coco Pops finding itself in a tie against Fruit ’n Fibre. The eventual final was between Ricicles and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, with Ricicles emerging as the controversial victor.

6

Caribbean Capers: Loaded’s Ladies Get Sizzled In Antigua
March 1996

This edition saw Jenny Eclair guest edit and the ladies of Loaded were dutifully dispatched on a “work” assignment to the Caribbean. Kathy Lloyd joined writer Barbara Ellen and a group of others for the trip. The plane had barely taken off when a staffer called Liz made her way to the cockpit and flashed the pilots. They clearly liked what they saw, and invited the group back in to the cockpit for landing. When they landed, there were frequent visits to a club named Fingers. Lloyd was, predictably, a ‘sitting duck for every dull, besotted would-be Romeo in Antigua’. Numerous ‘blow job’ cocktails later and having stripped and tied photographer Steve Perry to a bed, the ladies headed back to Gatwick, knocking back Bloody Marys and champagne on the flight.

7

Dodgy Business In Jamaica
August 1996

Journalist John Perry and photographer Lawrence Watson were faced with the not unenviable task of spending four days in Jamaica with Dodgy on their latest video shoot. After a strenuous day filming by a swimming pool, the group found themselves at a Jamaican petrol stop, where they discovered you could buy drugs. The piece said, ‘We end up paying an outrageous amount for something you can’t usually buy at a garage. The result? A posse of Sambuca’d-up white boys, staggering around grinning like loons, showing their arses and pissing on the side of a garage covered in Yardie death threat graffiti’. Surprisingly, they made it back alive. 

8

Loaded: Anarchy In The UK Tour
February 1997

Four members of the editorial team set off on a promotional tour of the UK to speak to readers about life at the magazine. Things proceeded as one might have expected, with Martin Deeson ‘embarking on a week long bender that took him from Dutch courage to double Dutch’ in preparation for the tour. Luckily for the half-cut journalists, Kathy Lloyd and Jo Guest had agreed to go along for five nights and entertain the punters. Bez also agreed to go along, joining ‘a tourbus that was already so laden with loose cannons it made the cast of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest look like The Brady Bunch.’ The account of the week-long tour concludes with the mention of additional reporting, ‘by anyone who could remember anything in the office’.

9

Jesus – Look At That…
January 1996

Three ‘not very wise berks’ were sent to Bethlehem to track down Jesus. Loaded’s trio ‘ran around the most sacred sites in Palestinian head gear shouting, “Oi mate, have you seen Jesus?”’. The threesome wound up staying in a convent in Bethlehem, before having a random encounter with The Devils director Ken Russell at The Church of the Nativity. When an earthquake struck, the reporters decided it was God warning them, ‘Loaded, go home’. They obeyed.

10

Drinks For The Board
February 1996

Loaded had the ingenious idea to take to the streets of London on a Monopoly Pub Crawl – a challenge that would involve visiting 26 pubs in 12 hours. Remembering he was on a work expedition during the challenge, Martin Deeson requested a receipt from the barman in Old Kent Road for expenses, only to be told, “Yeah, I’ll write it on your bollocks”. The evening concluded with a cab driver telling Deeson, “You want to get a proper job, mate”.

loaded magazine: the finest features (part one)

Getting drunk with Tony Blair, taking heroin because a pair of dice said so and a Heather Mills Pornalike. We conclude our looks at Loaded’s finest features.

1

Gambling With Grannies
June 1996

The headline pretty much says it all. The idea was born after someone in an editorial meeting declared “Bingo is the new rock and roll”.

Writer Roger Morton ventured out to investigate. He noted in one bingo hall: ‘You can see why people keep their eyes down. The décor in the main hall is kind of vom-spatter pastels’. Morton and his photographer pissed off 1,400 women in one of Britain’s biggest bingo halls after they started to Tippex numbers off their bingo cards. They were ejected.

The magazine decided bingo was more hardcore than poker, with the score Grannies 1 Loaded 0.

2

Loaded Goes Barging
November 1996

Martin Deeson and a team of Loaded writers embarked on a three-day barging journey complete with ‘big poles, wet, dark tunnels, fishy smells and a life ring the size of Cheshire’. Deeson mused, ‘Drive long enough on the canals and you always end up where the fish have two heads.’ He also warned, ‘If you are going on a canal holiday looking to get laid, then you’d better take a bird as we saw no women in the whole of our three days’.

The company who lent Loaded a boat must have been thrilled when he concluded, ‘Canals are great if you’re the sort of person who likes drifting along with only, “How far it is it to the next pub?” to worry about. But for some people four miles an hour is the equivalent of living death, so you’d be better off getting a dirty great outboard motor, slapping it on the back and really making some waves’.

3

Getting Pissed With The PM
December 1996

Martin Deeson was dispatched to the Labour and Tory conferences in 1996 to seek out answers to pressing queries including: will there be 24-hour licensing before the year 2000? Deeson was again only armed with a hangover – and a photo pass – as he set off to give Jeremy Paxman a run for his money.

His first observation at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool was that the people at the Labour Party Conference were ‘very, very ugly’. Before long, Deeson felt at home, noting, ‘The MPs and delegates, journos and party workers booze it up so much it’s like being on tour with Metallica’. One drunk MP, who insisted on anonymity, said the main differences between the Tory and Labour conferences was, “At Labour we get drunk. The Tories have sex and the Lib Dems talk politics”.

Upon finally meeting Blair, Deeson decided he had ‘all the charisma of a nervous hairdresser and the perma-smile sincerity of a toothpaste model’. Cornering Prime Minister John Major at the Tory conference wasn’t much easier. Deeson ended up chasing him down a street after watching him blag a free meal at Harry Ramsden’s.

4

The Dice Man
April 1999

Taking inspiration from Luke Rhinehart’s cult novel imagining a life’s choices decided by the roll of a dice, journalist Ben Marshall decided to follow suit. Unfortunately for him, after just two rolls of the dice he landed on instructions to, ‘Work on a heroin habit’.

He wrote, ‘Heroin didn’t frighten me. Not much, anyway. The people who sell heroin, on the other hand – they scare the shit out of me’. After trying heroin laced with speed while holed up in a dingy boozer, Marshall started suffering panic attacks, followed by a huge comedown.

He resolved to be ‘a little more sensible’ with future dice rolling. He wasn’t.

Grist to the mills

5

The Dice Man
July 1999

Having arrived in Hollywood with his girlfriend, Ben Marshall once again scribbled out six choices on a notepad and vowed to live his life by rolls of the dice. His first roll Stateside was saw him having to hang around a gay bar and hit on some punters. It was only when girlfriend Nikki joined in the dice game that the wheels began to come off.

Her first throw resulted in her auditioning as a stripper, taking off her clothes during a dance for a man named Emilio and getting the job, leaving Marshall feeling ‘truly sick’ at the thought of his beloved’s new occupation.

6

Dice Man Versus The Pope
November 1999

Ben Marshall had to go to confession to tell of the most disgusting sins he could could dream up. After concocting a story about how he’d shagged his dog, the dice led him to a Catholic church where a priest gave him six forms of penance for bestiality.

7

Killer Commute
March 2015

Loaded got more serious in 2015. Scourge of the football hooligan Donal MacIntyre revealed the average person brushes shoulders with six murderers on their way to work each day, with 20,000 killers walking Britain’s streets. The TV investigator claimed you are never more than 400 meters from a convicted killer in London.

8

Loaded Regulars

Among the other regulars from Loaded’s 21 years, favourites included the Greatest Living Englishman. It anointed men including Oliver Reed and the it-turns-out-now-he-was-not-so-great Stuart Hall as Britain’s best.

Platinum Rogues – The ‘Premier League of Bad Behaviour’ column nominated the most glorious bad-lads of the month. Dennis The Menace appeared in November 1994 for ‘smashing windows, hitting people on the back of the head with pea-shooters and nicking pies’. Serial rogue Peter O’Toole landed the top spot in July 1996 for turning up on the David Letterman show astride a camel, telling the host, “You must excuse me while I water my noble transport”. Rod Stewart also showed up after revealing The Faces would have shagged “anything with a pulse… anything that hadn’t been dead for more than 24 hours”.

Loaded’s co-creator Mick Bunnage gave some not exactly helpful advice as Dr Mick, where readers sent in their queries ‘for a caring, compassionate reply’. Most of the time he wasn’t arsed with empathy. Bunnage also created the Office Pest cartoon series in Loaded with Jon Link. The pair went on to create a website called shitflap.com in 2003 before creating the Modern Toss cartoons.

Charlie Brooker’s TVGoHome spoof telly listings was where Nathan Barley first appeared. The Hedonist’s Handbook carried Britain’s funniest club and pub reviews and Sophistication Station took the piss out of the month’s cultural offerings.

Pornalikes was another Loaded staple which saw readers send in images of porn stars who looked like celebrities. June 2008 saw a ’50 Funniest Pornalikes’ feature in the issue, with appearances from ‘Sir Alan Sugar’, ‘Jim Davidson’ – and a one-legged ‘Heather Mills’.

loaded: the finest magazine features (part two)