When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Lots of stuff about places to skate in this section. It was an obsession of a time when skateboard facilities were still very rare and just before the era when they would seem redundant. Now they’re everywhere, but necessary again when skateboarding is being forced off the streets. It all comes in waves…

LEICESTER

You can’t win. Leicester used to have a killer street spot at the Crown Courts until the council demolished them to stop the skating. At the time there was some talk of providing an alternative skate spot. Nothing much happened, but the council did agree that local skate shop, Rollersnakes could build a mini-ramp on a roller-skating area in the playground in Weston park. The result is a good-looking mini, with an interesting elbow quarter pipe off the side — and a chain across the flat bottom…
It’s insurance again. Continue Reading »

Vernon Adams, I salute you (and that’s him modelling the Hot Tuna beanie). The products page was always a difficult one for us. Most consumer magazines are all about selling objects of desire, but we were not. In the seventies Skateboard! magazine had set out down that path, with Dave Goldsmith writing technical pieces about urethane and so on. Steve Kane continued the tradition with the reincarnation of that magazine and when that came to an end the sacred Durometer actually passed to us. But it was the skating, not the equipment which really interested us and so we had a struggle getting excited about new graphics on decks. Vernon put a lot of work into each month, and we kept fiddling around with the format (colour this time), but the products page always seemed to stand out as different from the rest of the magazine.

1989 saw M Zone at the peak of their notoriety after the move from Croydon to Carnaby Street. The Lowndes Court shop and full-time party zone was the scene of many a celebrity’s debunking. The skater in this advert was Jason Lunn and he can also be seen wearing the Anarchic Adjustment ‘Freedom’ shirt in one of the shots. I’m not sure who did layout, but Dave Currey was living in the basement at one point, I believe.

NEASDEN GONE

London’s just lost it’s hottest unofficial skate spot. The empty open air swimming pool at Gladstone Park in Neasden has been filled. For years this huge expanse of smooth, smooth concrete was the ultimate semi-secret spot in the south. It’s fame spread throughout the world as visitors came, couldn’t believe their eyes, sessioned and went home babbling incoherently. Even now the pictures they took home are beginning to appear in American magazines.
As time went by the numbers skating went up and up, but apart from accumulating litter and one bit of graffiti which appeared late this summer, this activity was kept as discrete as possible. Relations with the parkies were just about workable: every now and again they would turn up and go through the ritual of throwing everyone out, but that was about it. Who knows? Maybe they recognised the positive side of a disused facility turning into one of the most popular attractions in the park?
Then disaster struck: a young kid drowned in the water which had accumulated in another empty pool (fat chance of that at Gladstone Park). Continue Reading »

This month we heard about Sean Goff getting involved in SS20, Jeremy Fox getting back into the USA and Andy Ruffell getting more involved in running big events — all omens of things to come. Closer to the time were hints about a skater-owned distributor setting up near Southsea (the Abrook brothers, I think) and references to yet more things going on in Dundee.

BSA AND SOS TIE UP ’90 SERIES

The Skater Owned Shops syndicate are putting their money where mouths are. They’re finalising a deal with the BSA to sponsor a series of vert competitions next year. There should be six events between March and November, each one at a ramp near one of the SOS shops. Clan will back one at Glasgow, Soul Skates and Off the Wall would go for Liverpool/Manchester (Danzi’s got the Docklands Comp ramp), Stampy would take care of Birmingham, and SS20 would bring the festival spirit to a traditional venue in their area. An event at Southsea could well be backed by a Skater Owned Distributor (!) leaving only Swansea to be sorted out. Continue Reading »

See what I mean? We got to run a good picture on the contents page… Jan Waage, in this case, courtesy of Claus Grabke.

FEATURES

• 16 DISCONNECTION
  One for Halloween
• 26 WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY?
  Attitude Adjustment
• 40 DUNDEE
  The Anarchy Jam
• 49 A GREEN ISSUE
  Eco Thrash at Crouch Hill
• 56 HOME MAD JAM
  Bikes bust out in Wath, not many dead

DEPARTMENTS

• 6 EARS
  Now with added product
• 14 LETTERS
  Points of view
• 22 SEQUENCES
  Arron and Wager
• 38 THE WALL
  Evolving slowly
• 46 WHERE?
  St Albans, for one
• 55 INTRO
  Captain Wager
• 60 ENCYCLOPAEDIA
  Back from summer break

Photo: Jan Waage, at Munster by Claus Grabke

This page is interesting for the list of contributors (some classic names there), alongside a couple of classic adverts and a nice shot of Ged Wells, but it also marked a break from the usual format.
We were experimenting with various different editorial and advertising configurations during this period. The flat-plan for the running order of the magazine was a very big deal to us. In this case we experimented with running two pages of advertising and then splitting the contents page up so that part of it ran on the left hand side of a spread. This gave us (the editorial side) a more interesting space for the contents page and the advertising team got to sell some adverts for more money because they were on the same page as editorial content.
Eric Snook’s shop was a skateboarding institution for many years. I remember their “Why pay mountainous prices?” adverts from the seventies when I was working for Alpine Sports and they were having a dig at us. Mycycles were also around for ages, another fixture from an age when anywhere selling skateboards was, by definition, interesting.
Picture at the bottom of the page was Ged Wells by Jay/Vernon with trademark Ian Lawson “broken plastic spoon and Indian ink” border.
There were some very interesting people working on the magazine at this point, so here’s the full list:
Continue Reading »

The skater part of me was gloomed by this film. It seemed so silly. The film studies part of me was intrigued by the fact that it was directed by Graeme Clifford, who was the editor on Nic Roeg’s “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Don’t Look Now” — but it could not have been more different.

There’s not very much to say about this which isn’t coloured by what happened later.

Arron Bleasdale featured on the cover of this issue, skating the pool at Rom.
Cover lines were:

• Eco Thrash
  Skating Goes Green
• Dundee
  Hardcore and Hooligans
• Attitude Adjustment

Cover price was £1.00 and for that you also got a free Santa Cruz sticker. We loved the free stickers, but the distributors always wanted us to find some other promo item. The stickers just didn’t deliver as far as the newsagents were concerned. Probably because a lot of them were nicked. These days there are books about skate stickers of course.