When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

This was the Christmas issue, so advertisers splashed out on bigger-than-normal ads, or switched to colour. Bike City did both with this page which seems to have a touch of the M-Zone about it. The two shops were based relatively close to each other, on the southern fringes of London and must have been rivals to some extent.
I liked adverts like these which featured local skaters. Can anyone now tell us more about Andy, Simon, Brian and Jonah please?

There’s too many laws in freestyle. The idea comes across that if you’re a freestyler you have to skate on your own. You don’t use banks. Some people think you shouldn’t do Ollie tricks. All these rules come across.

Captions:
Sam Lewis materialised from Southend, did Varial Inverts and lots of other things, made it all look easy and surprised the lot of them

Does Darren Walker fall off skateboards? Infrequently. Moving 360 Finger-flip
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Chris Howell was a freestyler who organised events under the “F.I.S.T.” banner (Freestyle In Street Terrain). As the caption said:

On banks (good), Kick-flip Ollie (good), on a freestyle board (could you hold on while I take a quick attitude check on that please?)

This was a slightly uncomfortable period as people who had called themselves freestyle skaters (a very small band) suddenly saw their type of skating cross over into the mainstream, but under a different name and with a slightly different approach. Most of the photographs in the rest of the article place the emphasis on older-style freestyle, with hands involved as much as feet and wheels only to a lesser extent — but this one would fit happily with the sessions from the future.

Where did Fat Willy’s fit into all this? At the time their stickers seemed everywhere and therefore absolutely no part of the underground skate culture. Both this and the Boogie designs adverts may seem innocent enough now, but at the time they would have stood out like sore thumbs.
That sounds very snotty, but at the time these things mattered to us. There was a constant (amiable) struggle with the advertising department to convince them that we had very little to do with genuine surf culture, let alone the High Street variety. In this we were skate snobs, of course, and fighting a pointless battle.
The crossover and blurring of all these boundaries is now a done deed and it paid my wages for many years at New Deal. But there is a part of me that still clings to the notion that there was something special about the pure-skate companies.

Ouch! Something of a sensitive subject… Here’s an example of an early New Deal Skate advert from the days when the shop was in the “In Shops” near Harrow and Wealdstone station, before they moved to the skatepark. And, yes: they were doing mail order right from the start, although the “HSC” name came later.
From these beginnings grew the organisation which had such a dominant position in the UK skate industry ten years later and which imploded last year (2005) with much collateral damage — including me!
Ouch. But if that hadn’t happened, this would not be here.
There’s an irony in that New Deal’s beginnings were in retail, but it was the attempt to expand that side of the business (through the purchase of High Jinks and Skate of Mind) which brought about the end of the company.

We could run this competition for real again, since I have no idea who these smiling babies are. Each of them grew up to have a pro model on Death Box. No doubt Sean Goff was one, but who were the others, please?

Back in 1989 Airbourne Zorlac were premature in setting up their own distribution in the UK (run by the Abrook brothers). Now it’s becoming more and more common. Meanwhile those companies themselves are no-longer necessarily American owned as the skateboard business matures and goes global.
Other adverts on this page are from Rodolfos, USAmerican Skates and Wheels and Waves.

Shooting sequences under floodlight = never easy. But worth it sometimes. Party time wasting is so much fun.