Martin Deeson Unloaded is the new podcast from Loaded founding team member and star writer Martin Deeson, interviewing the characters who made the 1990s the unforgettable decade it was.
Deeson sits down with the musicians, comedians, photographers, models, DJ's, actors and mischief-makers who lived through the decade that forgot to say: “No thank you, I think I’ll have a quiet night in.”
These are stories from the last great pre-social-media era — when what happened on tour stayed on tour.
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Données mises à jour le 26/09/2026
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Murray Lachlan Young walked off the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury to find himself on the front page of the Daily Telegraph as the poet who had signed a million pound record deal. It made him the most talked-about poet in Britain, and very nearly broke him. Includes three poems performed in full: Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine (with a brand-new verse), Don the sheepdog, and Everything's Under Control.
In the 1990s Murray Lachlan Young went from Sunday nights at Ronnie Scott's to EMI, Glastonbury and every chat show going, on the strength of a Noël Coward voice and a poem called Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine that caught the decade in a single, ahem, line.
In this episode he tells Martin Deeson how the 90s music machine really worked, how he had already written a university dissertation on stardom before he found it, and what happened when he did. He performs three poems in full, including Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine with a brand-new verse, and the conversation runs from Howard Marks, Orbital and Mary Berry to CERN, Mark Rylance's Globe, the Dalai Lama and a sheepdog who drove a tractor up the M74.
Murray Lachlan Young is the author of the collected poems How Freaking Zeitgeist Are You?, a long-standing poet on BBC 6 Music, co-writer of the film of Under Milk Wood and of Rehab: The Musical, and one half of Hartnoll & Young with Orbital's Paul Hartnoll.
Three things you will get from this episode:
How the 90s fame machine actually worked, from a man who studied stardom at university and then watched a record deal turn him from a working artist into a media story overnight.
A sharp take on why the 90s felt so different: the recession that cleared out the people who owned the 80s, and a country that for once wanted its people to succeed.
What is left when the ego crashes: stage presence, losing it, and why surrender is the moment you get back in the game.
In this episode:
Martin's memory of pulling Murray's demo tape off the pile in the Loaded magazine office one Saturday Sunday nights at Ronnie Scott's, on the same bill as a pre-Bush Gavin Rossdale.
Walking off Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage to a Telegraph front page, and the truth about the million pound deal.
The 90s as a big “why not”: the Spice Girls, Oasis as the Beatles, Brett Anderson as Bowie, Jamie Oliver as a famous chef.
Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine performed in full, with a new verse featuring Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz.
Born in Washington DC, and the US draft letters that followed him home.
School with Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, and their lockdown album The Virus Diaries: I Need a Haircut, Garden Centre, Bedtime.
Why lockdown gave Britain its last truly shared experience.
Japan's cleverest bear, and Don, the Lanarkshire sheepdog who drove a tractor onto the M74.
The Dalai Lama getting booed at Glastonbury.
Playing the exorcist in John Whiting's The Devils at the Edinburgh Festival, and the strangers who knelt for his blessing.
Being booed at the Globe, and what happens when the energy goes.
Everything's Under Control performed in full: the poem that came second in the competition.
Murray Lachlan Young and mentions: Murray Lachlan Young – https://www.murraylachlanyoung.co.uk/ How Freaking Zeitgeist Are You? – Murray's collected poems The Virus Diaries – Hartnoll & Young (Paul Hartnoll of Orbital and Murray Lachlan Young), 2021
Rehab: The Musical and Under Milk Wood (dir. Kevin Allen, with Rhys Ifans and Charlotte Church)
Sadie Frost on Pulp’s Common People, Dracula & the Primrose Hill Set
Saison 1 · Épisode 12
jeudi 10 septembre 2026 • Durée 48:50
She was 16, naked and sprayed gold in the Spandau Ballet video. A decade later she was pushing the trolley in Common People.
Sadie Frost has been at the centre of British popular culture since 1983. She was in the two music videos that define the 80s and the 90s, she flew to Hollywood eight months after giving birth to audition for Francis Ford Coppola, and she spent a decade as the most photographed woman in north London.
She is now a documentary director making a film about Quadrophenia with Pete Townshend.
She talks to Martin Deeson about Gary Kemp, Kate Moss, Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder, Jude Law, Jarvis Cocker, Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels, and about growing up in Primrose Hill long before anybody called it a set.
Why she was more nervous filming Common People than she was on set with Coppola, and the reason she couldn't work out how to push a supermarket trolley
The truth about the Primrose Hill set, from someone who was actually born there, went to the local primary school, and watched the tabloids invent a narrative around a group of twentysomethings
What happens after the crazy days. She gets up at quarter to five, goes to bed at nine, teaches yoga for free at the local community centre, and says something genuinely surprising about whether she ever enjoyed the partying in the first place
Also: the borrowed dress and the stuffed bra that got her the part in Bram Stoker's Dracula, being told at 23 that she was too old to act, the muntjac deer she put in her car, and why she is still waiting to hear back from Sting.
Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
01:07 Crazy Days
02:16 A sick child and a psychedelic father
09:01 Spandau Ballet, Gold, and meeting Gary Kemp
12:46 The call from Francis Ford Coppola
16:07 Common People and the Pulp video
19:10 The Primrose Hill set
23:12 Meeting Kate Moss
24:38 Getting sober, and never really liking the party
28:23 Yoga
33:00 Becoming a director: Quant and Twiggy
Katie Puckrik on The Word, Take That & Coining ‘Ladette’
Épisode 11
jeudi 27 août 2026 • Durée 51:42
The Word was the gateway drug to the 1990s, and everyone remembers Oliver Reed. Katie Puckrik was the one standing next to him, and this is the full behind-the-scenes story.
Katie Puckrik arrived in London in 1984 expecting the future and found powdered milk, orange squash and restaurants advertising the fact that they had ice. Within seven years she had danced with Michael Clark, toured the world with the Pet Shop Boys, and beaten five thousand applicants to become one of the faces of The Word, the Channel 4 show Martin Deeson calls the gateway drug to the 1990s.
She takes us inside the most notorious night in the show's history: Oliver Reed, a dressing room rigged with hidden cameras and stocked with booze, and Katie sent out to narrate it live while it happened. Her account of how he turned it around is not the one you have heard.
She also tells the story of the note Liza Minnelli sent backstage at Radio City Music Hall, the day she sat down in the middle of Take That and found they were considerably less gay than advertised, and the moment she reveals to Martin that she is the person who coined the word ladette.
Plus: she now fronts an Iggy Pop tribute band alongside the drummer from Blondie and the bassist from the Sex Pistols, and Iggy himself sent word back that he thought it was good.
Three things you will get from this episode
A first-hand account of the Oliver Reed night on The Word, from the presenter who was told to narrate it, and a reading of him that nobody else offers.
The story behind one of the defining words of 90s British culture, told by the person who coined it.
A working method for a life spent saying yes: how to walk into a room, distil yourself down, and get hired.
Chapters:
1:10 Intro
2:49 How to interview someone: part diplomat, part prostitute
3:38 An army childhood: Moscow at the height of the Cold War
5:13 Scoliosis, a metal rod in the spine, and the end of ballet
6:02 Michael Clark, Leigh Bowery, The Fall and London's mid-80s avant garde
Tracy-Ann Oberman on EastEnders, Doctor Who & Toast of London
jeudi 13 août 2026 • Durée 46:16
She killed Dirty Den and buried him under the Queen Vic. Then she ran Torchwood, got turned into a Cyberman, and lost a soap award to a small dog in a bow tie.
Tracy-Ann Oberman has been in more of the things you love than almost anyone alive. EastEnders, Doctor Who, Toast of London, Friday Night Dinner, After Life, It’s a Sin, The Witcher, The Sandman, Ridley Road, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the new Harlan Coben series on Netflix.
She joins Martin Deeson, who has known her since they were teenagers, for a very funny and occasionally jaw-dropping hour on fame, tabloids, antisemitism, Matt Berry, and why the best thing that ever happened to her career was being told she did not look right for the part.
In this episode:
Why the head of her drama school told her to change her name, and what she said back
Reading the Toast of London pilot script and immediately ringing her agent to turn it down
Matt Berry, Mrs Purchase, Clem Fandango, and why the dads at the school gates suddenly wanted to talk to her
Auntie Val, Friday Night Dinner, Auntie Val Core trending on TikTok, and the dog cage she refused to come out of
Ten days from audition to Albert Square, and the Selfridges spree with an unlimited budget
What Leslie Grantham said to her in the EastEnders chemistry test, and what she said back
Being told she was the Katharine Hepburn to his Spencer Tracy of Walford
Killing Dirty Den, burying him under the Queen Vic, and then acting opposite him while he was under it
Turning up to work on the Monday after a six-page tabloid expose of her co-star
The small dog in a bow tie that beat her to a Soap Award, and why she thinks about it more than a BAFTA
Russell T Davies, Dr Who, Yvonne Hartman, Torchwood, the Daleks, the Cybermen, and getting cybered
It’s a Sin, and the friend whose family burned the bed sheets and buried the cutlery
Ridley Road, Cable Street, and her great uncle put through a plate glass window by Mosley’s Blackshirts
Becoming the first female Shylock in The Merchant of Venice 1936
John Niven: Oasis v Blur, Coldplay and Kill Your Friends
Saison 1 · Épisode 9
jeudi 30 juillet 2026 • Durée 49:05
In 1997 a young A&R man at London Records opened the post and found demos from two unsigned bands called Coldplay and Muse. He listened, shrugged, and decided Britain did not need another Radiohead.
Episode Summary:
John Niven spent the 1990s inside the record industry at London Records and Independiente, and then turned all of it into Kill Your Friends, the novel that caught the decade's greed, cocaine and moral collapse better than anything else written about it.
In this episode he tells Martin Deeson about the demos he waved away, the American visitors his label laughed out of the building who turned out to be setting up Yahoo, the five broke years it took to become a novelist, the memoir he wrote about his brother's suicide, and why Oasis stitched themselves into the soul of the British people in a way Blur never could.
John Niven is the author of eleven novels including Kill Your Friends, The Second Coming, Straight White Male and The Fathers, and the memoir O Brother. His first stage play, The Battle, is about the 1995 Blur and Oasis chart war.
Three things you will get from this episode:
The best explanation you will hear of why Oasis became bigger than Blur, from the man who has written a play about that summer.
What it actually felt like inside a major record label at the peak of the money, from a man who was paid a fortune to be there and freely admits he was terrible at the job.
A working writer's account of how you get there: the discipline, the poverty, the seventeen rejections, and why the first draft of Kill Your Friends had to be thrown away.
In this episode:
Maria McErlane: The Fast Show, Eurotrash & Graham Norton
Saison 1 · Épisode 8
jeudi 2 juillet 2026 • Durée 47:38
She narrated Eurotrash, starred in The Fast Show, and has spent thirty years sitting at the next table to everyone - Nigella, Graham Norton, Cilla Black, Salman Rushdie.
But Maria McErlane didn’t come on to drop celebrity names; she came on to talk about how to actually live, and somehow we ended up discussing the two bottles of morphine in her fridge.
Episode Summary:
Martin Deeson sits down with Maria McErlane - Fast Show star, the unmistakable voice of Eurotrash, actress, journalist, Agony Aunt, and Graham Norton’s comedy partner on Radio 2, Virgin Radio and their hit podcast Wanging On.
What starts as a tour through 90s comedy turns into one of the most quietly profound conversations of the series - on fame, mortality, ageing without bitterness, and finding the joy anyway.
Three things you’ll take from it: how to develop a thick skin in an age that’s lost the knack; why “death is not a life ended, it’s a life completed” might be the most useful thing you hear all year; and how the people who treat fame as a licence to be horrible (yes, that story) always end up the loneliest in the room.
In this episode:
How Maria landed The Fast Show - replacing Caroline Aherne, recruited by Mark Williams
“I’m Not Pissed,” “Suits you sir,” and the secret-alcoholic sketch
The voice of Eurotrash - 16 seasons of Jean-Paul Gaultier, Antoine de Caunes and refusing to be cruel about Lolo Ferrari
Why the women of 90s comedy were genuinely frightened of Loaded and James Brown’s mob
Being a woman on the 90s circuit alongside Jenny Eclair, Jo Brand and Hattie Hayridge
Her book Bumps in the Road - and why it’s a book of philosophy disguised as a showbiz memoir
Rowland Rivron: The Young Ones, The Comic Strip & Soho
Saison 1 · Épisode 7
jeudi 11 juin 2026 • Durée 52:21
Rowland Rivron was there at the birth of alternative comedy, sharing stages and dressing rooms with Rik Mayall, French & Saunders, Alexei Sayle and The Comic Strip.
In this episode he reveals what Soho was really like during the wild 1980s and 1990s, from The Young Ones to the Groucho Club and beyond.
Episode Summary / Bullet Points
In this episode of Martin Deeson Unloaded, Martin sits down with comedian, actor, writer, musician and broadcaster Rowland Rivron.
Long before alternative comedy became mainstream, Rowland was part of the scene that transformed British entertainment.
From living with Rik Mayall while The Young Ones was being written to performing alongside French & Saunders, Alexei Sayle and The Comic Strip, he found himself at the centre of one of the most influential cultural movements of modern Britain.
The conversation also explores the legendary excesses of Soho, the Groucho Club, television in the Channel 4 golden era, life on the road with Jools Holland, and the infamous Loaded magazine Christmas stunt that left children convinced Father Christmas had been killed.
Topics include:
Rik Mayall and the creation of The Young Ones
The Comic Strip and the birth of alternative comedy
Working alongside French & Saunders
Alexei Sayle and the early comedy circuit
Jonathan Ross and Channel 4’s golden era
Jools Holland and life as a touring musician
The infamous Loaded magazine drunken Santa stunt
Wild nights at the Groucho Club
What Soho was really like in the 1980s and 1990s
Why comedy, music and television were changing Britain
James Brown changed British culture when he launched Loaded magazine in the 1990s - and changed Martin Deeson’s life along with it.
In this hilarious, emotional and frequently chaotic reunion, the founder of Loaded sits down with his former star writer for the first time in years to talk about magazine wars, addiction, creativity, grief, comedy, the Beastie Boys, Keanu Reeves, Irvine Welsh, Hunter S. Thompson journalism and the wild rise - and fall - of 90s culture.
This episode is part reunion, part argument, part therapy session.
Martin and James interrupt each other constantly, disagree repeatedly, laugh hysterically and revisit the stories behind one of the most influential magazines Britain ever produced.
Topics include:
The real origin story of Loaded magazine
Why the 1990s felt radically different from the 1980s
The explosion of comedy, music, rave culture and laddism
James Brown’s years at the NME before Loaded
Discovering writers, bands and cultural movements
Hanging out with the Beastie Boys and Keanu Reeves
Why Loaded connected with ordinary young men
Addiction in 90s media
The emotional toll behind the chaos
The infamous GQ champagne bottle incident
Howard Marks, Damien Hirst, Vic Reeves and Hunter S. Thompson
Why James eventually got sober
The strange legacy of Loaded today
Plus:
Stephen Fry airport chaos
Cannes Film Festival disasters
Nuclear war paranoia in the 1980s
Stringfellows stories
Terrence Stamp telling Martin to go away
Why James thinks Martin was the funniest travelling companion imaginable
Keith Allen: Gazza, Prison, Groucho Club Chaos & Vindaloo
jeudi 14 mai 2026 • Durée 01:04:39
Keith Allen joins Martin Deeson for a wild, funny and surprisingly moving conversation about punk, prison, Gazza, The Comic Strip, alternative comedy, World In Motion, the madness of 90s Britain and what it really felt like to live through the cultural explosion of Channel 4, rave culture and Cool Britannia.
From opening for The Clash and Dexys Midnight Runners to smashing up a members club, going to prison, writing World In Motion with New Order and accidentally giving Rik Mayall a criminal record – this is Keith Allen at his absolute, outrageous best.
In this episode of Martin Deeson Unloaded:
Keith reveals the chaotic true story behind World In Motion
Gazza “rapped but you couldn’t understand him”
The birth of alternative comedy and The Comic Strip
What Channel 4 was REALLY like in the 1980s
Squatting in London during the punk years
Going to prison after smashing up the Groucho Club
Opening for Dexys and The Clash
Working with Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle and Ken Campbell
The Hacienda, Tony Wilson and the Manchester explosion
Fat Les, football culture and 90s Britain
Why Keith believes institutions can be “fun”
Growing older, fatherhood and staying creatively alive
Plus: Stephen Fry, Damian Hirst, Alex James, Irvine Welsh, Derek Jarman, Michael Barrymore, Robbie Coltrane, New Order, Trainspotting, Twin Town and much more.
When people talk about 90s ladettes, they usually think of Sara Cox, Denise Van Outen or Zoe Ball. But before them came Jenny Eclair: PVC-clad, vodka in one hand and fag in the other.
Before Jenny Eclair became a beloved comedy veteran, novelist, podcaster, artist and national treasure, she was one of the defining women of the 1990s: loud, filthy, funny, fearless, and right there at the start of the ladette era.
In this episode, she joins Martin Deeson to look back at when she was guest editor of Loaded, on winning the Perrier Award, on fame, hangovers, reinvention and the complicated legacy of a decade that was enormous fun – until it wasn’t.
Jenny Eclair is one of Britain’s most distinctive comic voices: the first woman to win the Perrier Award, star of Grumpy Old Women, author of novels and memoirs, podcaster, performer, and one of the few people who can talk about shame, sex, ageing, ambition. dog castration adverts and blow jobs in the same breath.
In this funny, filthy, sharp and surprisingly revealing conversation, Martin and Jenny revisit the 1990s from the inside: the Loaded years, the ladette label, the pressure to be outrageous, and the emotional bill that went with it.
In this episode:
Jenny remembers winning the Perrier Award – and why the morning after was anything but glamorous.
Martin and Jenny revisit her infamous guest-edit of Loaded magazine, including the bondage photo shoot in which she trussed him up like a chicken.
They discuss the original ladette era, why the word was both powerful and a millstone, and how much of it was performance.
Jenny reflects on being clever, funny, reckless, ambitious and sometimes deeply uncomfortable in the persona she had created.
Martin and Jenny talk about the Loaded live tour, lad culture, the BBC documentary, and where the magazine’s legacy became more complicated.
Jenny explains how she moved from PVC trousers and filthy stage persona to novels, Radio 4 monologues, Grumpy Old Women, podcasting and later-life reinvention.
They discuss ageing, family, work ethic, addiction, anxiety, writing, performance, and whether it is ever too late to do your best work.
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Present Laughter tickets - Theatre Royal Bath, then touring to Cambridge, Cheltenham, Malvern, Liverpool, York and Chichester: https://linktr.ee/PresentLaughterTour
The Loaded job John Niven applied for and did not get, and the letter James Brown almost certainly binned
Cocaine on the desk: why the music industry and the magazine industry behaved identically, and why only one of them was making real money
Kingsley Amis on the moment lunch becomes dinner
The truth about turning down Coldplay and Muse, and the photocopy of a photocopy line that ended up in Kill Your Friends
Take That, East 17, Boyzone, Westlife, and underestimating the public's appetite for the same thing again
The American visitors to London Records in 1994 who described streaming, wireless listening and the death of the CD, and got laughed out of the office
The £50,000 investment London Records turned down, the second Menswear album they made instead, and the Yahoo fortune that got away
Giving up the company car at 30 to write a novel, and being turned down by seventeen publishers
Music from the Big Pink, drug dealers, private jets, and why that particular life curve rarely ends well
Why the first draft of Kill Your Friends was unreadable until Steven Stelfox took over the telling
Paul Schrader writing Taxi Driver on bourbon and cocaine, Bruce Robinson typing with his nose, and why John Niven could not write with a hangover
Straight White Male, Irvine Welsh, and inhabiting men you would not want to be in a room with
The Fathers, Dan and Jada, and the two versions of John Niven's own life
O Brother, his brother's suicide, and the median peak age for male suicide
Why books, films and music can be a lifeline for men in middle age, and what happens to the men who never had them
The Battle: John Niven's play about the summer of 1995, Country House and Roll With It
From Damon Albarn saying it should have been shared with Oasis at the Brits in February, to Noel Gallagher's AIDS remark by July
Why the 90s revival has arrived exactly on schedule, thirty years on, just as the 60s did for the 90s
80,000 people at Wembley knowing every word, the magnetism of Liam Gallagher, and the Lennon and McCartney comparison
This is a conversation about the 90s as they really felt from the inside: hilarious, excessive, clever, frightening, liberating, embarrassing and unforgettable.
