Tim Southwell has been described as a maverick, a madman and a genius.

He launched his first grenade into the media industry in 1994 as co-founder of men's magazine Loaded.

Eleven years later he has done it again with Golf Punk, a magazine aimed at younger players which has shaken up the golf writing market.

Golf Punk also marks the start of what could become a Southwell media empire.

It is the first horse in the stable of Tim's new Sussex-based publishing company KYN (Keep Yourself Nice - a favourite phrase of musician Paul Weller).

But Tim's career did not start with such a bang. After leaving school he was rejected from a series of media studies courses and ended up doing social sciences.

This slight detour did not stop him starting a fanzine with some friends, which covered music, fashion and sport and ended up being distributed nationally.

He went on to work as a freelance writer in the early Nineties, contributing to the New Musical Express (NME) among others.

The assistant editor of NME was James Brown, co-founder of Loaded. The pair's friendship and the future of men's magazines was determined by a shared love of football.

They are both Leeds United supporters and took a trip to Barcelona to watch their team play in a European Cup match.

Tim, 40, from Haywards Heath, said: "Walking down the street in the sun, everything just seemed beautiful.

"We decided there should be a magazine about feeling like this - the best goal you ever scored or the best holiday you ever had."

Conveniently IPC Media, which owned NME, had decided to launch a men's magazine.

They put Tim and James together to come up with an idea (a creative process which Southwell said involved a lot of practising putting and going down the pub) and were blown away by the result.

At the time the men's magazine market was dominated by glossies such as GQ and Arena, concentrating on fashion and aimed at men with money.

Men's interests were catered for by separate publications - if you liked football you bought a sport magazine, if you liked music you bought NME.

Tim and James's idea was for a far more democratic magazine which combined everything in one place - a radical idea at the time.

Tim said: "There was a feeling at the time that if you were a bloke who liked football and going out, you had to be a bit of a thug.

"People were ashamed of who they were. Loaded was a celebration of being a young man. There was a lot of empathy between readers and writers."

With IPC's MD Chris Ingrams behind the idea, the magazine took flight with James as editor and Tim as his deputy.

Tim describes his time at Loaded as a "crazy, successful ride". The first issue sold 59,400 copies and they broke the 100,000 sales barrier by issue nine.

The magazine was a phenomenon. It sparked the "lad and ladette" culture and made the market sit up and take notice.

Within eight months Loaded had spawned imitators.

FHM was its first big competitor. Bought and relaunched by EMAP, it had more emphasis on girls in bikinis than Loaded, a popular move which Tim said forced Loaded to respond in kind.

He has since said he deplores the way Loaded developed and the now ubiquitous semi-naked cover-girls - although this has not stopped him making use of features such as Bunker Babes in Golf Punk.

He left in 1997 to do some travel writing and penned a book about the launch of Loaded, titled Getting Away With It.

After James departed, he returned in 1998 as editor and stayed for another two years before leaving to take on the internet.

He launched switchto.net - a potentially brilliant concept.

Tim said: "The idea was to have a magazine which came to life. All our writing would turn into little cartoons on screen."

Thanks to the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the slowness of pre-broadband downloads the scheme failed after ten months.

Undaunted, Tim paired up with switchto colleague Ben Marshall to set up KYN publishing.

The pair's attempts to raise money for the company were paying off when the September 11 terrorist attacks sent many potential investors scurrying and KYN had to be put on hold.

They kept it going as a skeleton project while Tim went back to freelancing. They got back on track in 2002 with the idea for Golf Punk.

Tim had played golf for 25 years and interviewed Tiger Woods for the first issue of Loaded. But he had never picked up a golf magazine.

He noticed an influx of younger, funkier players and decided the time was ripe to hit the golf establishment with something new.

Golf Punk combines sensible features on improving your game with tips from the Golf Nurse and is remarkably similar in outlook, content and effect to Loaded.

Once again the key factor in getting it started was football.

Tim made friends with footballer Phil Babb during the Loaded days and the two remained in touch.

KYN was looking for £1.3 million investment for Golf Punk and Tim decided to pitch the idea to some of Phil's team-mates at Sunderland.

Tim said: "It was the night before a match and there was a lot of sneaking out of bedroom windows."

Five players decided to invest so Ben and Tim could start putting together a dummy copy.

They were still touting for money before the launch when Genesis Investments came on board.

The first issue came out last March and circulation is 18,000.

Like Loaded, the magazine has rocked the industry but Tim said he has never gone out to shock.

He said: "The market is all about cynical efficiency. You wouldn't get someone taking a risk on a magazine like IPC did with Loaded.

"Magazines like Nuts and Zoo are brilliantly successful but there is no way I would want to write for them.

"If Golf Punk fails, it fails but everyone here loves what they do."

Tim hopes to bring out more titles in the next few years and wants KYN to be able to compete with the big or medium-sized publishing companies.

He would like the company to be an innovative place where people can bring ideas.

Given his CV, it's odds-on those ideas will be interesting, probably involve football and possibly change the face of publishing.