When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

• Grentec Coyote
• Greve, Soren
• Grind
• Grind King
• Grindmaster
• Grip Tape
• Groholski, Tom
• Grommet
• Grosso
• Guerrero, Nicky
• Guerrero, Tommy
• Guildford
• Gullwing
• Guy, Ian ‘Gooey’

The R.a.D Encyclopaedia was a project which was never completed. It appeared on and off during the course of several years. Some people on the editorial team disliked it — a lot. Perhaps they confused it with one of those glossaries of skateboard jargon which would sometimes appear in the conventional media?
I’d like to think of the project as a skateboard Wikipedia just waiting for the right technology.
The Encyclopaedia also provided an occasional opportunity to include some interesting material from an earlier era, such as this photograph of Doug Cameron at the original Guildford Skatepark back in 1979 and other oddities such as the long-lens shot of Nicki Guerrero at the Rom.
Items in this edition included:
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Gullwing Phoenix: now there’s a name with history. In my case the history dates right back to working for Alpine Sports in 1978 and having to try to shift thousands of the original Phoenix and the earlier split axle Gullwings after the collapse of the first British skateboard craze. A lot of that was done by mail order — and out of the correspondence with mail order customers all over Britain came the realisation that UK skaters needed some form of channel for communication.
So the price list morphed into a newsletter and started printing lists of places to skate. The whole thing started there.

That information about places to skate, for example, migrated from computer system to computer system, from publication to publication, and still lives on as skateboard.co.uk or, rather knowhere.co.uk. The worst bit of timing in my life was the way the demise of R.a.D coincided with the mass uptake of the communication channel I had been waiting for all along (trivia freaks please note: BMX Action Bike was publishing an email address for correspondence in 1985).

Commercial ramp builders were beginning to emerge at this point, but they were all struggling to persuade the councils to listen to them. The real expansion of public skateboard facilities was still a long way off in 1990. The bloke behind the Rareunit ramps was more in tune with the skate scene than some and suitably laid back, even though the metal surface on these ramps was not 100% popular. This was a very generous prize, but it also presented problems — the winner would have to have a suitable site for it. I can’t remember what the outcome of this was.

The picture is by Steve Keenan and shows Eric Dressen at Stone Edge Park in Florida.

News In Brief

• Grosso’s moved up to San Jose.
• Christian now has a ramp in his garden right in the middle of gnag-land LA. When Tim Payne was building it there was a drive-by shooting.
• Joe Lopes is ripping real hard again and is now riding for Airtool.
• Ross Goodman has just placed first in the Western Regionals amateur while Justin Jerrard got first in the street.
• The Pro Finals are going ahead atSt Petersburg, Florida on Decemebr 16th and 17th.
• San Jose is meant to be getting public parks and Mike McGill has just opened up a park in his home state of Florida.
• To end a few rumours, Christian Hosoi is still with Santa Cruz, Danny Way is still with H Street and Circle A have a new backer and are still in business.

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An interesting selection of letters this month. Nigel Bond from St Albans taking Sean Goff to task over some comments about coverage of non-Uk skating in British magazines. That’s a debate which is still going on to this day. Nigel’s in favour of coverage: “I rely on mags to fill me in on what’s going on all over the world and England, and yes I buy R.a.D every month and if it has foreign skaters in it I don’t mind, especially when the tricks they are doing are the tricks we learn to push our standards up.” Continue Reading »

Split Skates was a skateboard phenomenon for a while around this time. Their aim was to have the biggest range in stock and a glance at the wall of their Manchester shop suggested they’d hit the target. Despite the size of the Manchester scene, the city never got enough coverage: Warrington or Goshen always seemed more tempting. But I can certainly remember a guided tour escorted by Split, plus baseball bat and warnings about that it might be necessary in some of the spots.

This Billys’ advert features their Fab Feb Sale with Blanks at £19.99 and various “surplus” decks at £29.99. Free griptape and Powell rails (or similar) with any deck over £40. “That’s about 13 quidsworth free.” They were also selling skate T-shirts at £9.99 which sounds more like the death throws of HSC in 2005.
I’d always associated blank decks with a slightly later stage in the skate market, Continue Reading »

Media Watch

We’re used to seeing skaters blamed for everything in the papers — most of it total fiction — but the strangest ‘skate rats’ clipping of recent months has the ring of truth. It’s from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’ and begins “Up to 5 car burglaries on recent weekends may have been the work of teenagers who scooted through underground sewers on skateboards, popped up through manholes and pilfered items from unlocked cars.” Police had spotted two kids climbing out of a manhole, collared them and found a collection of items and two skateboards Continue Reading »

Santa Cruz adverts ran on the back of R.a.D magazine for most of its life, but this one, featuring Rob Roskopp montaged onto a picture of some surgery, was hidden away on page 10. That would almost certainly have been because of a fuss over another Slimeballs advert for Vomit or Spewage wheels which showed someone appearing to throw up. Complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority, or maybe the magazine distributors, on the grounds of “bad taste”. I’m still astonished that anyone could really have been so upset by something so tame, but somebody was and so the wheels were set in motion. I suspect moving this advert to the inside of the magazine would have been the only practical outcome.