James Brown has always disrupted things.
He founded the scorching zine, Attack on Bzag! as a teenager which caught the attention of the NME. They employed him shortly after and the enfant terrible of British media was born. He, notoriously, founded and edited Loaded magazine before a number of other high-profile assignments. Now a best-selling author, he still can’t quite give up his love of print media and is back with Zine Age Kicks. Our editor, Lee Kelleher, caught up with him for a chinwag.
Print media is obviously still really important to you. When did your love of it actually start?
When I was a teenager, I discovered music papers like NME, Sounds and the fledgling Smash Hits. I loved music and I liked the publications’ tones of voice. They seemed to reflect how I felt about music largely. That it was inspiring and totally important. The NME in particular seemed like the only place in the world I could envision myself working. Given there were no jobs on offer in 1984 when I left school there was nothing in the way of me trying to get a job there. And then I discovered fanzines in record shops and I started my own with some mates and they became an obsession for me and a way of getting my opinions about music across and eventually an entry point to writing for the music press.
What’s the story behind Zine Age Kicks?
I’ve loved music since I was a kid and I worked in magazines professionally since my late teens and being involved in both worlds meant I collected just loads and loads of stuff without even considering it a collection.
Set lists, interview tapes, demo tapes, photos, letters from artists, fanzines, magazine dummies, flyers and so on so I’ve combined images of them with images from some of my mags explaining how and why they worked. There’s about 7000 words of new writing on magazines and music and 164 great quality art pages of colour and noise and it’s gone down very well. I’m actually in Cambodia but my girlfriend has very kindly been interrupting her high flying career in fashion to take bags of envelopes to the post office every couple of days. Selling them directly myself through my insta has been a bit like doing my fanzine again.
What are your earliest football memories?
I was born in West London because my dad was working there and then after a couple of years we went back to Leeds and lived in a place called Collingham, where the footballers live and near where they train. So my immediate opposite neighbour was the Leeds and England striker Allan Clarke. My mum was friends with his wife and I was in and out of his house. I remember seeing him unpacking his suitcase coming back from the 1970 World Cup and sitting in his living room with his actual international caps out. He had them in a glass cabinet. I wrote a whole book about my love of football and playing 5-a-side called Above Head Height which did really well.
Do you think football coverage today (on social media, podcasts, YouTube) has lost much or gained something compared to the fanzine and magazine days?
It’s omnipresent and immediate now. On social media you are served goals, interviews, podcasts, photos of players when they were young or now that they’re old. So I think the main change is simply there’s loads more of it, the access is amazing and we consume all that as and when we want. So I think that’s a good thing.
How would you describe Loaded’s relationship with football when you were the editor?
The players loved reading it and wanted to be in it. It was the first time they were written about in the way the music papers had written about bands, with a balance of fandom and respect, and at length. The broadsheets rarely carried interviews back then and the tabloids were just disposable chip wrappings with novelty photo shoots. The men’s magazines before us might have had one interview a year with someone like Gary Lineker who was squeaky clean and quite bland then. It was the days when players were encouraged to not open up.
We coincided with a re-emergence of players getting marketing deals and having to do promos. John Terry was the one I remember first had a deal with King Of Shaves but at the very beginning of Loaded we would still have to pay to interview someone like Paul Merson. We paid Gazza in fifty family videos we blagged from HMV - he was delighted. But a lot of players like Gary Speed, Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman, Alan Shearer and so on were happy to be in it. Long, six-page features with decent portraits.
We wanted to put Eric Cantona on the first cover, but there were just no decent shots of him at all. Nowadays footballers are far more engaged in their own image, media and marketing opportunities.
We would have at least one major feature on football, maybe something in fashion, football manager games and so on and then at the back the lower league legends like Mike Sheron or Steve Bull. We understood that these goal machines were just as important to cover as the Prem stars.
Do you miss the rough edges - or has the game (and its media) just grown up?
I don’t think they are rough edges but I think a lot of the independent titles like Lower Block, for instance, are really good. They are driven by passion not an attempt to just get traffic.
Our app, Showboat, celebrates the art of collecting and football memories. Are you a collector yourself - programmes, shirts, tickets?
Yes I’ve got various bits and pieces from along the way. £25 for a very old Subbuteo bag I found at the school Christmas fair, quite a lot of old Leeds United things. A writer I know who wasn’t into football at all sent me an amazing deflated but fully signed leather football. All the great Revie era Leeds United squad, real signatures, but I was gutted to see they’ve faded off where I’ve had it resting on a shelf. I recently went on a late night coffer badge binge on eBay, spent about £300 just buying up these amazing old fashioned little metal badges. As with everything there’s a Facebook group full of collectors of all clubs’ badges there.
What’s one football item or memory you’d never part with?
I think David Platt’s goal for England vs Belgium in the 1990 World Cup finals. He had only just made it into the squad, was a sub, it’s the last minute of the game, Gazza charges forward at full pelt and is brought down and then chips the free kick in and Platt spins off the back of the defence and volleys the ball into the net. I was on holiday with four friends in a little town in France and we’d been watching the tournament between the little back room of the lady whose farm we were staying on and a bar in town. There were no other football fans around. That tournament was just full of trepidation where it looked like we wouldn’t proceed so that goal was just electrifying. I have loads of brilliant Leeds memories too, too many to choose just one, but I saw that goal on reels yesterday and it just reminded me how amazing it felt at the time.
What do Leeds United mean to you now?
Well how they are doing predicts my mood significantly. I’ve come to terms with accepting I’m powerless over influencing what they do but like all fans it can either put you in a massive high or send you into frustration and depression. All this season I’ve been suggesting he plays three centre-backs or five midfielders as we have more good players in those positions than decent strikers and then as it looks like he’s about to be sacked, he does it against Man City in the second half and again against Chelsea and Liverpool. We come out of those three games with four points, a positive goal difference and a clear route forward. Like all fans I think I know better than the manager.
Leeds were one of the pillars of my childhood. I doubt a day didn’t go by without my mates and I either thinking we were Peter Lorimer or Eddie Gray or talking about them. They were gods to a generation of fans and that just stays in you.
Having said that, it was also incredibly exciting when we started League One on minus 15 points and had a great season accumulating points and visiting clubs like Plymouth Argyle, Hereford and Yeovil I’d only ever heard of and not been to.
Favourite ever Leeds United shirt?
Yellow long-sleeve Airtex with blue and white stripes on the arms and the smiley badge. About 1974. There’s a great photo of our former manager Neil Redfearn wearing one as a kid. I hope one day my dad can find a photo of me in mine.
I read your book Above Head Height recently and the chapters on your friend, James Kyllo, really moved me. I know we’re a few years on, but how important is the ritual of playing football to you these days?
I love it. I’ve seen a video of me recently that my little boy has shot on his phone on a Friday night, an eight or nine-a-side game on his school Astro and I’ve realised now I vaguely look like the old guy who doesn’t run much but can see a pass and effortlessly score a decent goal. This shocked me because in my head I’m obviously still on a par with Cruyff or Bremner. My body seems to be having a say in what I can do now.
Has the game gone on or are you still as in love with it as ever?
The arrival of the VPN has meant I watch more games than ever but go to less live games now. I go to about fifteen games a season I would guess, but obviously it’s incredibly thrilling parking at the top of Beeston Hill and seeing Elland Road. The Independent took a great shot of me and my eldest son leaning against the red brick wall looking down on it about thirty years ago. If I see an amateur game going on anywhere - a park, a school pitch, a cage - I find it hard not to stop and watch to see who the good players are.
You wouldn't be standing for long if you saw Showboat play, mate. Thanks James.
Cheers Lee.
You can purchase a copy of Zine Age Kicks from James Brown directly on his Instagram page here. You can subscribe to the free monthly Showboat newsletter where we interview a leading name in the football or media space every four weeks and deliver it straight to your inbox.
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