When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Rare that we were able to devote so much space to one story, but the extra advertising in this Christmas issue allowed up to spread out a bit, and this feature certainly deserved the space.
Captions: Will you Follow?
Wurzel’s second visit to Ireland. Antrim.
One of the skaters featured here had appeared on the cover of those early U2 albums as a little boy. I assume the “will you follow” caption is a reference to that, although that aspect of his life was played down at the time.

The picture at the bottom right shows an army patrol in the background of an otherwise typical scene: skaters using any shelter they can find to session in the rain.

Then within five minutes the heavens opened and down poured a man’s rain. We retreated beneath a small bandstand since the situation was hopeless and opted to hold a flat-land comp on what was the only five square feet of dry land in Northern Ireland. So what was probably the most insane comp I’ve ever attended took place on a couple of paving stones.

At this stage I must apologise for my judging during the middle of the competition as my eyes tended to wander as the R.U.C. and gun-toting paras arranged themselves in the background. This was ‘just routine’ (unlike the comp) and the locals were oblivious to it.
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Think Extreme Games, Brummie Style. Or even Urban Games. These people had the right (or wrong) idea, but a few years too soon. I can remember shaking my head privately over a similar event in the London Docklands and thinking “it will never work”. Just shows how little I knew then! I always seem to turn and walk purposefully away from such things, opportunity or not.

The “never play near parked cars” caption was a reference to a world in which they sometimes exploded.
Captions: Never play near parked cars, and certainly don’t do Ollie Blunts like Geegee outside Clive’s
Gene Ollies at Clive’s ramp.

Only the double act of Vernon-and-Gavin could have handled this for us. Gavin seldom got the chance to address his bigger themes head on in R.a.d, though he was always true to them whenever he could sneak them in. There is nobody else I would have trusted to attempt this — certainly not myself. Sheryl Garratt once wrote of how she would struggle to keep Gavin from quoting William Blake in The Face; on this occasion he managed to get Yeats into R.a.D

IRELAND: IN A SENSE ABROAD

by Gavin Hills

“The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time.”
W.B. YEATS

NORTH

Someone once mentioned that everything in Ireland is a lot greener. I certainly was — me, along with the rolling hills and sheep-clad fields. To travel to Northern Ireland is to travel through history, and history in this case is a nightmare they are all trying to awake from. Continue Reading »

No idea who Krakatoa were, but that’s certainly Wurzel. I’m not entirely convinced that I have the location correctly identified as Meanwhile Gardens in its original form.

Essjays and Cromer Sports were long-term advertisers. Essjay is still around (I believe and hope), but what of Cromer?

The advert that stands out for me in this lot is Custom Riders with their prophetic “we’re not just for Xmas” line. No, indeed: they’re still around 17 years later, when many others are history, like the magazine itself. But oh, what a different time that was. Simpler? More authentic? Or were we all just starting out?

The conluding page of this story about the meeting point between freestyle and streetstyle skateboarding includes the plea: “How’s the public going to accept us when most skaters won’t even accept a form of skating?” But who wanted to be accepted in the first place? The divisions within skateboarding are just as much about establishing personal identity as the desire to identify with other skaters.

You do a 360 Shove-it to Fakie at South Bank and they don’t really accept it as a proper trick because you’re on a freestyle board, after all. I do a Blunt on a freestyle board and they say ‘What’s he doing that for? Freestyle boards aren’t for that.’ Skaters say ‘the public should accept us’ How’s the public going to accept us when most skaters won’t even accept a form of skating?

This was the freestyle aspect of F.I.S.T in evidence: the type of thing which disappeared from view over the next few years. Hands involved, not just feet. Taking in the longer perspective, from the seventies onwards, that seems to have been one of the fundamental movements in skating. Hands gradually stopped being used to hold on to boards, to drag on a bank or plant on ground or coping — but it was a very gradual move and for all I know hands are back.

Caption: Sam Lewis: Handstand Varial to Caspar 50/50
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