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- The Guardian, Monday May 22 2000
There was probably only one man in the wild west of UK publishing who could have pulled it off. Last week James Brown, the maverick editor who gave the world Loaded and new men the freedom to be lads, successfully floated his publishing company IFG on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) at a valuation of £10m, before so much as a single national title or website had been launched.
Down at the offices of the newly-christened IFeelGood Holdings plc, in Clerkenwell, central London, it's impossible not to catch the feelgood bug. The 24 hours since the company raised the £3.6m that it needed to launch its first three titles have been ecstatic, frenetic, surreal. There's been no time to celebrate in the traditional manner of an all-night bender - that's not the reason why Brown has a pair of dark glasses strapped to his face - but the goggle-eyed expressions of IFG staff say it all.
Brown was up at 6am to talk on the Money Channel about his flotation strategy. The phone has been going all day. Felix Dennis, the millionaire publisher who owns a 10% stake in the company as non-executive chairman, called to offer another £500,000, then there was a meeting with a top Hollywood fixer for Hotdog (IFG's first big launch, a magazine for movie fanatics, out on Friday) and there was just time to go home, change, "listen to Lou Reed and the Beastie Boys" and come back in.
Cavorting around his retro orange, green and purple offices ("Come on, let me show you around!") like Willy Wonka in his chocolate factory (his own analogy), Brown introduces his team of "geniuses" or "oompa-loompas" who are eating their way through a gift box of muffins. There's Paul Henderson, aka "the grunge", the art director who came with him from GQ; there's Ben Olins, the "mod", editor of Hotdog, formerly Guardian Guide editor; Neil Jeffries, contributing editor, aka "the rocker", and Brown himself is of course "the godfather of soul".
His role as CEO, editorial director and honorary "idiot savant" - a title bestowed upon him by Dennis who believes Brown has the Midas touch - will be "to give the company direction", to use those instincts which made IPC a lot of money back in 1994 when they took on a 26-year-old football fanatic with an idea for a fantasy men's mag, and just to "be James Brown", as he puts it.
"The general opinion is that to launch anything you need 99% straight guys and one maverick - well, I think it's the other way round," says Brown contentiously. Mavericks maybe, but his non-executive directors and financial advisers Chris Akers and Rodger Sargent knew exactly what they were doing when they advised Brown to go for an early float.
It looked like a huge gamble. Premature flotation proved a disaster for new media companies such as Lastminute.com and YesTV and if the shares had bottomed out, IFG would be in an untenable position right now. But to the chagrin of many rivals in the industry who were hoping Brown might get his comeuppance, it paid off - with a PR windfall.
"It wasn't just my reputation it was floated on," says Brown. "It was the reputations of Dennis, myself and Chris Akers" (who recently sold his Sports Internet Group to Sky for millions). "The beauty of IFG is that we have strong editorial talent and we can apply that to anything - content is king." The invitation to join the founding editor of Loaded and the publisher of Maxim around the table at a game of Risk proved irresistible to many City brokers, who were after all Brown's most loyal readership in his Loaded days.
With Hotdog, the magazine for men who've "been watching too many movies", Brown hopes to use his in-joke magic to give what is otherwise a highly commercial, tightly-niched film and DVD industry driver the feel of a national fanzine. Digital Home Video is the hottest spot in publishing this month with four launches in the sector. Hotdog is meat and sauce between two wedges of carbohydrate for the "staying in" generation.
The cover promises "Scandals, Starlets and Car Chases" and carries a drawing of Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, the anti-hero of Taxi Driver and movie buffs' favourite loony after Norman Bates. Inside there is a centre spread on the film - including a spoof interview with Travis - sizzler du jour Angelina Jolie in a surprisingly tasteful fashion shoot, and an investigation into the paranoia surrounding the Church of Scientology and its links to John Travolta's new movie.
"Travis said he'd only do the interview if he got the cover," quips Brown, explaining that "we wanted an icon. A character from a film that came out 15 years ago means more to me than a publicity stunt." It makes a change from the slavish PR agendas that mainstream movie mags follow. Hotdogmagazine.com, launched simultaneously, will have its own identity. Adam Porter, who as editor of UpLoaded brought in 1m visitors a month and also edits his own fan ezine, Year Zero, on the side, has been busy signing deals with cult short film production companies. And with columnists like Ivan Narge, better known as Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss's "minder", and Kerri Sharpem, who was head of Virgin's "exotic" publishing arm, the site could become Hotdog's red light zone.
The next two titles, a lifestyle magazine (target date December 2000 - Brown will not be more specific) and a leisure title (mid-2001), will be launched with sister websites alongside. The company's AIM admission brochure emphasises the increasing importance of online revenue streams.
Another central plank of the Brownian strategy is creative consultancy and content syndication. "I started IFG in the first place to harness my alternative revenue stream, I was earning money from talking to ad agencies about cheese and tomato sauce - and I needed a bank account."
There were other motivations, he says: "IFG was actually a mood. I didn't think about the James Brown thing until afterwards. It sounds a bit disingenuous now, but I was just feeling very good..." Last January he was offered the editorship of American GQ, which was hit by the laddish invasion force of US editions of FHM and Maxim. He was flown over and tempted with large amounts of money but turned it down because "it just didn't feel right".
Five weeks later came the infamous "Rommel incident", when Brown published a piece in GQ including the Nazi field marshal in a list of the 200 "style icons" of the 20th century. Si Newhouse, the Jewish boss of Condé Nast, was not amused. Brown resigned, having increased the readership by 20% but messed with the magazine's identity ("GQ didn't know what it was, anyway").
"I thought, 'that's it, then, I'll get on and do me own thing'," he recalls. "I got on the tube, went to Oxford Circus and instead of turning right into Hanover Square, I walked left down Regent Street" - away from Condé Nast's HQ and into the offices of the Leeds United fanzine. Within a couple of months he had ideas for three magazines and was putting together a team. Olins was one of the first on board. Brown was considering nominating him for a best editor award, and instead took him out to lunch and made him a proposal. ("Everyone I've hired, I've promoted. And it's a clean slate - they can do what they want.") Akers came next: "I knew then that it would happen. Chris is a smart guy."
The real clincher was getting Felix Dennis's backing: "Felix started as a maverick like us. We just went to see him, really. We showed Alistair Ramsay [Dennis's number two] the layouts for magazines, he really liked them, he said, 'let's do it'. Akers had a chat with Felix. That was that." He makes it sound like taking candy from a baby.
Allied to Dennis Publishing, IFG is more likely to be able to withstand the pressure from big publishers such as IPC, which showed in taking on Cabal that it has the financial muscle to smother independent launches with temporary "spoiler" magazines. IPC has just poured millions into revamping its music and sport department, to be led by Mike Soutar, and there are plans for several new men's lifestyle and leisure launches this year.
Brown is "not intimidated" but reluctant to criticise his old employers, although he admits he is "not exactly friends" with IPC, which took Loaded - the publishing sensation of the decade - off his hands in return for a mere salary. "Our policy has always been magazines produced by fans for fans. We haven't done this to take on the multinationals," he insists. He has so far resisted offers to sell off parts of IFG to companies who wanted the controlling share. "The way I see it, they are the Americans and we are the Vietcong."
The days of sleeping hungover under the desk and dropping "big tits" into every other sentence are gone - anecdotes for the historians of laddism. "I'm now trying to unite the disciplines I learned at Condé Nast with the editorial freedom of Loaded. And if you can bring those two things together you've got a very attractive proposition."
Later, down at a favourite King's Cross pub where he knows everyone from the barman to the guy at the door selling Locked In, a fanzine for heavy drinkers, Brown relaxes - over a bottle of water - and finally takes his shades off. He talks amusingly about his quasi-voyeuristic new-found friendship with celebrity club owner Piers Adam ("he reminds me of me at my worst. I watch him behaving at a splendid level of debauchery") and what keeps driving him back to men's magazines, especially when he has stopped reading them now they are all "identical, stale, boring".
"I like being positive about things and being inspired. Whether it's Johnny Vaughan, the Beastie Boys, or the Chapman Brothers, people making good art, good films - whatever. I like watching things where people have had fun producing them. And I'm good at it - the vision and the team-building."
He has spent the last six years of his life making money for other people ("Loaded was my life on paper"). Now, at 34, with a 47% share in his own company, Brown is taking orders from no one but himself. "In the words of the Beastie Boys, it's time to set the record straight."
