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.
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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).
unclesomeone responded on 25 Jan 2006 at 3:30 pm #
Without wanting to sound facetious, the best bit of timing in my life was the way the birth of R.a.D. coincided with my uptake of the creative medium I had been waiting for all along.
The demise of the magazine was sad indeed. And it’s difficult to imagine where it (and we) might be today had it survived in its proper form. But the fact that knowhere.co.uk lives on – in fact seems to have almost looked after itself – is obviously a great thing. And this is surely through the spread of some of the same ideas that informed R.a.D. magazine so well.
So one might argue that the evolution of this meme carries on, changing mode every few years, with scant regard for its caretakers.
Those Gullwing trucks had amazing copers; you could grind a dry stone wall with them (and I’m sure we did).