We clearly couldn’t make up our minds what to call this report on the 1989 skateboard competition at the Factory in Dundee. There’s a reference to jam in there (Dundee is famous for “jute, jam and journalism”) as well as yet another line from the film Performance (“time for a change”) and in fact the typesetting file contains several other variations.
Dundee has played an important part in the history of Scottish skateboarding and has a long tradition of BMX and skater-built facilities. The full history of The Factory Skatepark is a long and interesting one. This article is about a competition at the park when it was based on Perth Road in what has now become the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) centre. [No it wasn’t! See Rick Curran’s update below. I’m confusing this with a later competition — the one Simon Evans wrote about as “Dundee Cake” perhaps. This incarnation of the Factory was the one in Arthurstone Terrace.]
As well as the purpose-built indoor skatepark, Dundee also boasts a great outdoor skatepark these days. I was there at Easter this year and gazed on it in wonder and quiet delight. Back in the days of R.a.D we would never have dreampt there would be facilities like that popping up all over the place: Livingston was still very much a one-off. Enough of that. On with the story:
TIME FOR A CHANGE
THE ANARCHY JAM IN DUNDEE
Skate and MeditateSome people had the best time. Some people felt they’d been robbed. The outcome of the dundee mini-ramp and street contest was exactly the same as any other competition. But the event itself wasn’t. After this summer’s barrage of big time pro-shows something had to change and at dundee it did. Jay podesta was there.
Just outside the centre of Dundee a dusty old council owned factory sits. This conveniently large building supports one of the biggest mini ramps in Britain — 28 feet wide, with a spine, roll-through and a 10 feet wide high sections. The ramp sits in an area which could hold another two to three ramps of the same size, combined with a street area just as big — there’s thousands of square feet of floor space. Skaters have squatted the building for some time, building up the amount of obstacles inside, so locals Barclay and Craig decided that a fun competition would be best way to draw attention to the expanding facilities.
They had no big money sponsorship to attract a lot of different skaters, so the idea of team competition, with a slant toward local rivalries, seemed the best substitute. Each team consisted of five skaters, with the four highest scoring skaters counting toward the final team score. Street and ramp were the two events and Saturday was the day it all began.
Captions:
Chimp emerged the winner from all the mayhem. But the mayhem, not the winning was the point.
Lines counted for more than ‘tricks’ here, but Lonnergan’s frontside air from high to low would have rated anywhere.
9 responses to “Anarchy Skateboard Jam in Dundee”
Hi Tim,
It’s excellent that you’re getting all this stuff online, I have loads of the original mags (thanks to a big bundle recently given to me by Alyn Jones!), I’ll have to take some time and have a good read of it all.
One thing though, you say in Part 1 “This article is about a competition at the park when it was based on Perth Road in what has now become the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) centre.” This is actually incorrect, the DCA Factory was the 2nd Factory which happened 2 or 3 years on from the time of this comp. The comp in the article took place in the first Factory up on Arthurstone Terrace / Erskine Street in the Stobswell area of town. It was the first of two comps that took place in the first Factory.
I hope you don’t mind me correcting there!
Keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Rick
Corrections are very welcome. That’s why I far prefer online media to the printed stuff.
These magazines have sat in unopened boxes here for a long time now and I’m looking at this material for the first time in many, many years. I often find myself no longer able to work out what we were on about, or confusing different stories about the same place.
Thought i’d post up a related video …..
http://vimeo.com/3043806
I filmed this for friends in Team Warts’n’Boils (Newport&Wormit team) back in 1989 and overdubbed Jesus Jones “Liquidizer” album over it.
You get to see quite a lot of the Factory, this was shot when the ramps were down the bottom rather than up at the courtyard&gate end. So I guess this was after the competition mentioned in the article above – that was when the ramps were up the top, eh?
The video also shows how everchanging the Factory was, with wee ramps, flyoffs and grindrails being built adhoc hehe.
Enjoy
Let’s see if we can embed the video here as well:
FISH HAE GILLS! KEN WHIT EH MEAN? from konspiracy on Vimeo.
great wee video brings back memories lol i used to go to the factory there alot there was 3 or 4 of us use to come through from cupar is that blair in it he was tiny when we used to go lol him and his big brother. very nice
It is brilliant to see this again. I was a grommity 13 year old from Carnoustie when I went to this comp, and I still dream about this and the other Factory.
Has any coverage of the Factory comp with Curtis McCann been put up here? I can’ t find it.
@BenjaminPask: no, I’m afraid that isn’t here yet. And at the rate that I’m adding stuff at the moment it will take a long time to appear.
By a strange coincidence I will be in Dundee at the end of the week.
Who knows? I might even end up at DCA, treading on sacred skateboard ground.
You don’t happen to have the article on the comp from factory 2 that you could put up at all do you mate ?
Sorry, but my earlier comment about the rate at which things appear on this site was horribly accurate. I can’t help with this at the moment.