Elliot Moss
Welcome to the brand new season of Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss. Bringing the Shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today kicking off the season with a bang is James Brown, journalist, founder of Loaded, the men’s lifestyle magazine, and author most recently of his autobiography, Animal House. Growing up in Leeds with a passion for football and fanzines, James had, as he says, “a single-minded focus on writing for music mags as I felt it was the only thing I could do.” With success from his own fanzine, James was invited to write for Sounds magazine and then the MME, becoming Features Editor of the MME at age just 22. In 1994 he launched Loaded, the award-winning, hedonist genre and culture defining magazine – and a big part of my twenties – that captured the optimistic energy of the ‘90s and became the market leader in the men’s sector. But privately James was suffering. The impact of his mother’s tragic death and of James’ increasing drug and alcohol use peaked while he was Editor at GQ magazine. James found support, rehab and of course new creative endeavours. And we’re going to be talking to him about all of this and the impact on him of writing his very honest biography.
I know it’s a bit weird James but you might be a hero to a lot of people of my age because in the ‘90s life was good but stuff around, journalistically, was pretty dull, pretty middle of the road and conventional, unsurprising and then this thing comes along called Loaded. And for those of you that haven’t experienced it, weren’t around when it happened, go look it up and see what you can find online. You didn’t start at Loaded, you started much younger and the thing I want to talk to you about first is what you said about ‘I could only write, that was the thing I had to do’. Talk to me about how you discovered that you could write.
James Brown
I mean it was, it really was like a rock and a hard place, you know, I was, I was leaving school in 1983/84, there was mass unemployment in Leeds, in the country. I genuinely didn’t know anyone with a job. I know that sounds strange but my friends would either be going to FE college or trying to get into university but at that point it wasn’t also like today where nearly all kids seem to go to university. I had a mate who worked in a greengrocers, his dad’s greengrocers, and I had another guy who knew he was going to be a doctor and was kind of temping before he went up to Oxford and all I was really into was music and I absolutely loved to live gigs, I listened to Radio 1 from you know 8.00 till 12.00 most nights and I discovered the NME and Sounds and then when Smash Hits started, it was like a kind of a, a glossy, smaller version of the NME and it was actually created by the same people who’d been editing the NME around that time and I kind of just thought wow these people just talk and write about music in quite an irreverent way and the other thing that I realised when I was writing my book, what attracted me to the NME was, the tone of voice in there was the tone of voice I was kept being told to shut up at school when it was kind of loud, big-headed, irreverent, opinionated, knowledgeable about music and I used to love all of the inter-writer chat, the funny little lines under the headlines, what I now know as, they were called blurbs or stand firsts, the cover lines and it just seemed like a world that was very similar to what, how I was as a person but there rest of the world was saying you can’t do anything, you can’t, there isn’t going to be a job when you leave school. When I did the careers meeting at the end of the Fifth Form and I told them I wanted to be a music writer, they said, “Have you thought about printing?” So the expectations, I mean I was a bright kid, I didn’t concentrate very much and I didn’t work that hard but, and so when I discovered fanzines, self-made little kind of music magazines, I started my own and I realised I was quite good at promoting it and selling it and, and I originally started with a couple of friends and then after about three or four issues I was doing it myself and it just kind of opened the world, you know John Peel mentioned it, the NME reviewed it and then they came and interviewed me so, at that point, I realised that actually, putting my opinions down, what I thought about, about music and, and telling people about new bands that I’d found, was potentially the only thing anybody was going to pay me to do. I’d even, when I was playing football for the First XI when I went into the Sixth Form, I was playing football for the First XI, I can remember running out one day for a county-wide match and the PE teacher came out, he was called Mr McCready, he’s a groundsman at a cricket club in Huddersfield now, he said, “Browno, I hear you’ve got a job interview in London” and I went yeah and he went, “Who the hell is going to employ you?” and, and, and so that really was, he understood the same kind of how small the possibility of me getting employed was as I did and that, that was for Sounds, I’d seen an advert in Sounds and I went and sort of sent them some pages from my fanzine and I, and I went there and did the interview but I knew, I mean I was sixteen, I was like, I don’t think at that point I’d ever eaten anything other than fishfingers, chips, bread and peas, I mean I didn’t know how to do anything an adult would be required to do so I knew I was too young then but a couple of years later kind of they came back to me and said, “Do you want to do some writing for us?” and that was, that was the start of it but I, the guy that became the doctor, Jonathan Barker, he got in touch with me a couple of years ago or last year when my book came out, and we were talking about what life was like back then and he said “I just used to envy your focus. You just knew, and your drive, you knew what you wanted to do” and I think whenever people have asked me, they don’t ask me so much anymore but in the days of Loaded and GQ and so on, people say “what can we tell young people to do” and it was just, if you know something that you’re passionate about and you believe that’s what you want to do, just absolutely stick with it. That was the difference between me and my friends, I just knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to have my name in the NME.
Elliot Moss
Did you read a lot? I mean, I know you, obviously you loved music and then you started writing about music and you discovered that you could write about music but was there other stuff that went into James Brown’s head because the world you described of Leeds at that point and of the UK at that point and it’s quite a tight world of there’s no opportunity, there’s nothing going on. Where was that drive to…?
James Brown
Well my dad gave me one of Tom Wolfe’s books, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and that was just like an explosion of colour in my mind and then Hell’s Angels by Hunter Thompson and though what was known as the ‘New Journalists’, starting to read books by George Plimpton, Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, I just thought wow, this is amazing, I’d never read anything like that. You know, the only…
Elliot Moss
How old were you when you started reading that kind of stuff.
James Brown
About sixteen or seventeen and before that you know I’d read George Orwell and you know as part of my English O-Level course, Literature O-Level course but those books were just amazing, you know when you, you talk about a generation of musicians being excited by the emergence of the Sex Pistols or The Clash and the guys who were a little bit older than me, that was my equivalent in kind of terms of writing, reading those guys and thinking, what I realised was in the Great Shark Hunt which is a compilation of Hunter Thompson’s sort of political and travel writing, basically I realised he was really young when he was, the first pieces that are in those books, he was really young and that kind of gave me a little bit of inspiration as well but you know I wasn’t in the sort of financial situation to be able to go off and, and hang around in central America like he’d been doing but you know I was spending a lot of time travelling the country in the back of vans with bands and meeting people or there was a genuine underground then in mid ‘80s of fanzine editors and crashing on floors and sofas and seeing gigs and it was, that I had to leave Leeds to find that kind of community of likeminded music obsessives.
Elliot Moss
And were you happy to leave because thinking and reading about you, I was like, I kept going back to one of my favourite films, which is Cinema Paradiso and there’s this bit in there where the, the old man says to the young guy, “Don’t come back.”
James Brown
Yeah, you know I watched that this weekend funnily enough, yeah, I showed my girlfriend.
Elliot Moss
Do you know what it, do you remember the bit where he just says, “Do not come back young man.”
James Brown
Yeah, totally. But he’s so strict, I mean at the start of that film, he’s not been back for thirty years.
Elliot Moss
That’s right.
James Brown
So I was watching that and thinking how you know Toto is this kid who wants to do all sorts.
Elliot Moss
But the world gets bigger that way.
James Brown
Yeah, it seemed similarities. I mean I think the main thing was I would move for music, employment and sex, you know, being honest. I got, I got a girlfriend in Manchester and Manchester had a bigger music scene, you know, whereas Leeds would have pretty good, independent bands like the Three Johns and the Age of Chance and the Sisters of Mercy, The Wedding Present. Manchester had New Order, The Fall, Simply Red were just emerging, not really my sort of music but there seemed to be a higher level and certainly just a lot more people for me to write about, and a girlfriend there, so I’d just split up with my girlfriend in Leeds so that, so that was why I went there and then from there you know I lived in Manchester for about a year and a half and there was a lot to write about and then I just went to London from there but I was, by the time I was eighteen or nine… I mean I was skipping school to go to London. I remember a mate and I hitchhiking down, I’m in the Fifth Form or the Sixth Form, to go and watch The Higsons and Serious Drinking in Hammersmith at the Hammersmith Palais and I was thinking this, when my own son was sort of fifteen, sixteen, if he called me and said “I’m in Leeds”, you know, I’m going to live in London now, I’d be thinking what, so it’s sort of like…
Elliot Moss
But that’s what I want to talk to you about, education for a minute, because you are a, you know, your bank of work as it were is, is famous, you know you love what you do and people know what your passion is. The traditional education system, and I meet lots of people who have broken the rules, I’m not saying it’s broken but it doesn't always produce unusual, new thinking. So for you, if you’d have stayed in the track that your friend the doctor did and gone off and done something professional, what would you have done with all that?
James Brown
Well I wouldn’t have done. I mean, I wouldn’t, there’s no way I would have finished my A-Levels. I was already distracted, I was already going off and you know, I’d wake up on a school morning in Bradford or Hull or Sheffield because I’d gone to see a band and sit on my little fanzine, so it’s not something I’ve ever thought about. It’s more the other way of what would I, I don’t know what I’d have done, you know, sometimes I see the guys in the park on their little buggies and think I wouldn’t have minded doing that, you know, the gardeners and the park keepers but I think that was why I was so focussed on what I wanted to do, there just didn’t seem to be a great deal of options and there was no way I was following Barker to Oxford or wherever he went.
Elliot Moss
Lucky for us you didn’t. It’s James Brown, who is my Business Shaper. He’s the man behind Loaded and a bunch of other stuff too.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today if you haven’t been with me, and naughty you if you haven’t been, it’s James Brown, journalist, founder of Loaded, the men’s lifestyle magazine, and author of two books, his memoire on five-a-side football and most recently, his autobiography, Animal House. The bit I want to get to, obviously Loaded happens, it’s around ’96 I think.
James Brown
4.
Elliot Moss
’94 sorry, 1994.
James Brown
Thirty years ago.
Elliot Moss
Thirty years ago. I’m, I had just started work, I was living with one of my colleagues from work, another young man, and we were there and I can see it now, it’s the bunch of Loaded strewn across the little coffee table, which wasn’t a coffee table, it was just a small table that the landlord had given us.
James Brown
An upturned beer crate.
Elliot Moss
Whatever it was. And it was like you described one of the books that you’d read early on, I think it was the Tom Wolfe book as kind of this explosion, it was an explosion, it was an explosion of, of visual stuff, it was an explosion of irreverence, it was kind of capturing a naughtiness, a hedonism that, that as I felt then, I wasn’t experiencing, I was pretty straight bloke working in advertising, relatively straight, it’s all relative, right, but compared to you, you were in the epicentre of this hedonistic world, living the life and writing.
James Brown
Well…
Elliot Moss
That’s how it seemed, without, now I know more but…
James Brown
All we did was put all the things, the small team and I that I put together, we put all the things we loved in the magazine and I think that was the key to it that we took so many different subjects and put them together so I was actually looking, there’s going to be a documentary this year about Loaded on a really prestigious slot and we were looking, I was with the people making it, I was looking at the first issue this week and there was just so much in it. I think what it did was, it brought together a love of cult films, new, emerging sport stars, American comedy, football and just, as you said, a kind of a sense of hedonism. In the early ‘90s there had been a creative explosion in Britain. Ecstasy had changed the kind of the general atmosphere of the high street, of night clubs, football violence kind of disappeared and was kind of replaced by this glossy presentation on Sky so it became a much more palatable and accessible sport for people wanting to watch it, there had been a brilliant emergence of musical talent in the late ‘80s and through to the early ‘90s in the UK. So whether it was club music or the comedy scene that was fantastic or the arts scene, there was genuinely a kind of it was, I think it was a kickback against the hardship of the early ‘90s, you know if, if you think about 1984 that the dominant image was of a mounted policeman crashing a baton down on a woman trying to save her husband’s job and then you go forward four years and the dominant image was a smiley badge, you know, and then you come forward another couple of years and it’s Gazza on top of that bus with his fake breasts and so the UK got a lot more fun at the end of the ‘80s and the start of the ‘90s so there was nothing that I could pick up and read about all of this stuff so people that I championed at the NME, like The Charlatans or the Happy Mondays or the KLF or people like, comedians like Jack Dee or Vic and Bob who I’d written the first pieces on, these guys would never be any of the kind of fashion magazines.
Elliot Moss
Why? I mean that’s, but, but why not? I mean all that stuff because what you’re describing, I’ll ask…
James Brown
It’s just ordinary life.
Elliot Moss
Well you’re describing your life. You’re describing, your consumption in the same way though that when you, when you wrote the fanzine, it was your life.
James Brown
Well this comes down to the magazine industry. There was a perception that men wouldn’t read magazines en masse in the same way that women had. So if you back to the ‘60s, Michael Heseltine had a, had a magazine called Man About Town and then there were the American magazines, GQ and Esquire but they were very much focussed about the idea, you know the American idea that you know, man, man at his best, you know and…
Elliot Moss
It’s a Gilette, a Gilette view of the world.
James Brown
Yeah it was and it was kind of like about suits and expensive restaurants and how to play, how to play Bridge and you know reviewing port and it was just nothing, it was a world away from, you know you could pick up a GQ in the early ‘90s and actually Heseltine would be on the cover or you’d pick up Arena and they’ll have six pages feature on Tefal, they were very much about design and about being cool and actually, the emergence of the Manchester music scene, Gazza being the best footballer in the early ‘90s, best British footballer, and then kind of like the drug explosion, you know you referred to it as the sort of hedonistic lifestyle. None of those things was…
Elliot Moss
Good euphemism, wasn’t it.
James Brown
Yeah but none of those things were studied.
Elliot Moss
No.
James Brown
They weren’t about elitism and they weren’t about cool. But they were accessible, they were fun. If you read the magazines like Blitz and The Face that came before Loaded, a lot of the content was about a fairly small clique of people based in Soho, London, you know around the Wag Club and the Bar Italia and you know drinking Perrier and it weren’t about, you know, kind of let’s say like a gang of weed smoking surfers down in, in Newquay or it wouldn’t be about a load of guys you know running clubs in Nottingham or Manchester or like something like Back to Basics in Leeds. You mentioned at the top of the interview, there was just, there was nothing there so it was like virgin territory and how Loaded had come about was, you know, I’ve been asked to go back and consider being the Editor of the NME and during those conversations they’d said “have you ever thought about doing your own magazine?” and I said yes. Arena edited by Hunter Thompson, with male cover stars who were either knackered and past it with great stories to tell, so people like Hurricane Higgins, Oliver Reed, Jimmy White, Peter O’Toole, people like that, or an up and coming and young and dangerous, so people like you know, a lot of the people that we had in Loaded had never been on magazine covers, so Prince Naseem Hamed for instance, world champion boxer, amazing character, a colourful, flamboyant. You wouldn’t see him on the front of a, of a kind of a men’s magazine and I felt that men would read magazines because you know I read my girlfriend’s women’s mags, especially those multiple choice “Are you a good lover?” questionnaire, which as I’m sure anyone who is of that age would remember. You only had to look at the back and turn the page upside down to get the correct answers that they wanted to read, so you could fill them all in and I think one of the most pertinent things said about Loaded was, I think it was the woman who started Cosmopolitan, is it seemed to be doing for men what she’d done for women in the early ‘70s because before Cosmo, apart from maybe Biba, there were no magazines for women that reflected what their lives were really like, it was, they were magazines for housewives, they weren’t magazines for women having careers or fun or anything.
Elliot Moss
And that’s what Loaded was and we’re going to come back to that because what lives were really like is I think the key to the significant commercial success which happened I think, it was pretty much profitable after about three editions is what I read.
James Brown
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Amazing stuff. Behind the story, and there are millions of stories James and you know that’s, it’s going to be hard to cover them all before 10 o’clock, but behind the story, you’re running a thing called a magazine, you have journalists, you have budgets, you have an office, you have deadlines, you have photographers, you have a whole commercial set of stuff to do and at the same time, according to you, you may have well been, you know, inebriated, you may have well been out late at night, there’s a whole bunch of serious stuff going on and you’re literally flying at stuff, by your own, you know not just your own admission, you have shared that. How, looking back, do you think you managed to hold it together for as long as you did?
James Brown
Well initially, the excitement of having this opportunity, not only to create the magazine but to build the team, so being able to bring people I even knew who were mates or people whose work I’d admired, having a kind of a vision that it shouldn’t be the same old names who’d been in publishing for years, wanting to find new talent and just having this open space meant it was totally and utterly all consuming, it was a brilliant magazine to work on. But we made it look very much like it was a like a loud, wild party but we worked incredibly hard, the team was only a very small team. The company didn’t think, they’d only budgeted for three issues, so we were all on sort of twelve week contracts and my feeling was it would either be a pretty good success, we’d sell like a 100,000 copies or we’d sell like 10,000, I didn’t think it would get to 600,000 in four years and create a template for a market that rolled out around the world but yeah, I mean pretty much I went from being the guy who was riding round the development office on a bike with a golf club in one hand and a big, pure grass spliff in the other, to being the head of the creative end of a multi-million pound business and the financial target was, we were supposed to make our first pound of profit after 36 issues and we, we made it after twelve weeks, after three issues, and the thing that told us that this was going to be a hit was about three weeks into the second issue, the post boy arrived with three enormous fabric sacks, you know like grey, you know what post, you know office post bags used to be like and he went, “sigh”, he said, “We’ve been looking for you everywhere” and we said what’s that and he said, “That’s your post” and he said, “I’ve got another two bags downstairs” because we were so, we were such a small part of IPC’s outlook that we didn’t actually have a, we weren’t on the office plan of the building and they didn’t, I mean the publisher, Andy McDuff, and I should say you know my idea, the team I put together, was fully supported by a big company, that made a big difference, IPC who’d, which I’d worked for, for NME, Andy had a, Andy was the publisher and he had a framed certificate from other publishers at the company awarding him an award for the title ‘Most likely to lose in his job’ and there were people queueing up in the publishing world, from other titles, in newspapers, I remember the Evening Standard running a full page, people were just queueing up saying this will be a failure.
Elliot Moss
But from, and just, I’m conscious of time but I really want to do this, outside of all that, so I’m looking in and I see Loaded, like hundreds of thousands of other people, but for you personally, you know there’s a lot going on, you’re drinking heavily, you’re you know doing all sorts of stuff.
James Brown
Yeah.
Elliot Moss
You’ve talked about that, you’ve talked about what was going on for you personally. Right now though, people talk about mental health, they talk about addiction.
James Brown
It was difficult.
Elliot Moss
Totally, I mean how did you personally get through that, James?
James Brown
Well nobody really knew anything about what had happened and my mum had taken her own life two years before Loaded came out. So six months before, I was asked if I wanted to do my own magazine and there was nothing. It wasn’t like there were adverts everywhere for Calm like that are there are now, it’s not like people would make documentaries like Professor Green did or that there are books or, or podcasts about things like this or magazines so I just medicated myself with grass and drink and so when the magazine came along, the opportunity to do it, that consumed me and then I think, you know, the legendry tales of which my book is full of and which we eventually started writing about in the magazine of excessive consumption, that kind of came more a few months into doing it because as I said, we didn’t really know when we started, we were producing the first issue thirty years ago today and we would have been in on Saturdays so we were, I had a very small team, we didn’t have the logo until like weeks before, I still got like development you know work and dummies and promotional postcards with an earlier logo on and it was very much just you know, a spur of the moment, let’s put all, everything in together but because I’d worked on the NME which was a brilliant title and was a weekly, the idea of having four weeks to put an issue together didn’t seem a problem and so I ran Loaded and on those first three years when I was there like a newspaper or like a weekly, you know, we would, we ran the first piece about OJ and the Guardian had a piece after the murder on the Monday and on the Friday, I’d already had a request from an American writer to run the piece and nobody knew who OJ Simpson was in the UK apart from as a supporting actor in Naked Gun, you know, his story of being an American football great, there was, you know this was before Channel Four used to show American football I think and so you know the ability to be able to pull things out and drop other things in meant that I was perfectly capable at that point of having a fairly hedonistic lifestyle but my…
Elliot Moss
And managing to put the magazine to bed and I’m just wanting, we’re going to come back, we’re going to come back for our final chat with you. It’s James Brown and we’ve also got some Little Richard, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
James Brown is my Business Shaper just for a few more precious minutes. So, your own health then, you talk about it in the book a lot, you talk about addiction, you’ve been 26 years clean, is that the phrase that you use? You say you…
James Brown
Yeah, clean and sober.
Elliot Moss
Clean and sober, which is extraordinary.
James Brown
It is.
Elliot Moss
And, and we talk, people talk a lot and you mention now, people talk a lot about addiction and trauma that affects addiction, you’ve mentioned your mum’s obviously ill health and then her early death. What do you say now to people that are struggling when you meet them?
James Brown
I talk to a lot of people about it and you know one of the reasons that I’m kind of, the main reason I wrote about it in the book and why I’m happy I’ve done a couple of interviews about it over the years is that at Loaded we flew the flag for alcohol and cocaine consumption and you know having got to the point where I was a fully functioning alcoholic at GQ and then them paying for me to go through rehab, I was incredibly appreciate of that and a lady called Susannah Amoore who was the HR lady and Jonathan Newhouse who ran Conde Nast, they you know sanctioned me getting you know paid for support and so, not everybody has that, so I go out of my way to just, to talk to people, you know point them in the direction of the rehab counsellor I used or just sit down you know, I’m always quite happy to just go and have a cup of tea and listen to where people are and just, and really about you know if my life can be about attraction rather than promotion, the idea that you can have a more constructive live, you can have a fun and interesting life, that’s what I thought, I thought if I stop drinking, my life would be boring but it was far from it.
Elliot Moss
And also, the other thing I thought again, you’re, you’re incredibly honest, you talked about the cockiness, the James Brown like you walk in the room and you’ve got the swagger and it’s in your face, it’s the Don Revie reference which is, you know, the best form of defence is, is attack and that’s what you did and you know, I’m sure we’ve all done that, I mean but you were probably the personification of that. Now, the person I’m meeting in front of me is not that at all and I don’t mean that, that’s just an observation.
James Brown
No but I’m, I’m 58, I’ve got kids, I don’t take drugs or drink anymore and I don’t have like a super high impact, high demand job, so life’s a lot more relaxed now and I think what…
Elliot Moss
Do you like that though? Is this the good chapter in the James Brown life?
James Brown
I miss the, I missed some of the action and excitement. It’s a pity the magazine industry doesn’t really, isn’t in the same place as it was, you know, I really think that I was in the last Golden Era of print.
Elliot Moss
Well, I mean that’s sort of the, almost my final shot. The industry before 1994 was not the industry it was after that, there was a looking glass moment and it was, I think it was Loaded.
James Brown
Yeah, I mean, you know for thirty, I did 36 issues, thirty of them had men on the cover and I mean that’s something that has been a challenge, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to write the book and say in the book that they way those mass market men’s magazines went where every cover, whether it was a GQ or a Arena, Esquire or a Nuts, a Zoo, FHM, Maxim, those type of magazines, they all just had the same cover, they would have a girl in a bikini, or maybe not even a bikini top, and you know I’ve spent a lot of time having to answer for that and it’s like being blamed for the people that buy your house off you, you know it’s kind of like a, you know the reality of it is you know I was putting guys with great stories, you know Suggs from Madness, Will Carling, Vic and Bob, Irvine Welsh interviewing Noel Gallagher and there were so many people at that time and people who are still household names now, you know Frank Skinner was one of my favourite covers, Gary Oldman is obviously, that was the first cover, he’s thriving in Slow Horses and before that Batman and so, a lot of my heroes and the people that I loved writing about and the team, I had a brilliant team at Loaded that they loved writing about, weren’t getting coverage then and they do now so you know if you think about Shaun Ryder and Bez, they’re like mainstream, TV, household names and…
Elliot Moss
Let me ask you because we’re going to run out, just before I ask you your song choice. So it’s been, it’s been, honestly, a treat for me, more than I’ve shown, James, because we just keep things under wrap, under control over here. The focus that your life started with, James Brown focus on writing.
James Brown
Yes.
Elliot Moss
And that took you through, took you on an incredible journey. What’s the focus now? What are you looking to, if there’s anything, to fix or address? Where does James Brown spend his time?
James Brown
I have got an idea for a new business and it’s taken me quite a while to work out and I’d love to edit a magazine again but it’s not, there just isn’t the audience to have the sort of size of numbers that I’d like to deal with but I’ve got an idea, there’s going to be some screen action about Loaded, about my book, about Animal House, so that’s interesting, having meetings with people who want to make dramas and films and also, as I mentioned, somebody wants to do a, you know kind of really…
Elliot Moss
I get all that but is there a bigger focus that says when I was a kid I wanted to write and I kind of look back now and wow, and now in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years…
James Brown
I kind of… I don’t know, I mean I like being a dad, you know, I kind of, I’m second time around really on that and that’s probably the most important thing to me, to you know sort of improve as a dad for my younger son but also have a good relationship with my elder, my 22 year old son. I’d like to keep playing football. I mean it’s kind of weird when you, I feel a little bit like my career is like a footballer’s, you can, you kind of get to your late thirties and then the magazine has ended so, you know I’m a big fan of things like, you know there’s, I think we’ve got some brilliant media institutions in Britain, I read The Times every day, Sunday Times, so you know I still consume it all but I think I’m going to create something that will apply to my generation in the same way that Loaded did but it won’t be purely just a print project, there’ll be something like that in there.
Elliot Moss
James Brown’s going to keep creating, that’s good news. It’s been really great talking to you, thank you. Just before I let you disappear into the sunset, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
James Brown
Move on Up.
Elliot Moss
Curtis Mayfield.
James Brown
Curtis Mayfield. It’s one of the few songs that it’s impossible to hear and not just feel upbeat and, and excited by.
Elliot Moss
That was Curtis Mayfield of course with Move on Up, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, James Brown. He talked about the importance of doing something you’re passionate about, he was utterly passionate about writing and about music and guess what, that’s what he did. He talked about the importance of focus and he was focussed from a very young age on doing the thing that he loved and making that the foundation of the rest of his life. And finally, he created something which broke all the rules of the men’s sector, he wrote about what was actually happening in people’s lives. Fantastic stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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