As you may imagine, it’s normally very hard finding anything to say about most of the adverts. The editorial team had nothing to do with them and usually only saw them when the magazine came out. On rare occasions they struck chords which resonated with the editorial of the magazine — and this was such an occasion:

Circle of friends. Balmaha gathering. Brighten up the horizon, and bring hope for the future.

The Clan/Poizone group had a distinctive voice and vision which seemed to me to steeped in something deeper, older and more mystical than our own suburban ‘turn on, tune in, just skate’ mantra.

I also liked their stuff: one of the few items sent in for review which I actually wanted to keep was one of their super-tough tweed (!) jackets. Gavin got it instead, of course. Shortly afterwards he was wore it while walking home, drunk, from a party* along some railway tracks. On the way he managed to fall off a high bridge and would have been killed. He was saved, not by the jacket, but because he landed on top of another passing drunk on the road beneath.

By the time they got to casualty they were good mates. “Don’t worry about him,” says drunk number two, “he’s perfectly alright, I saved him.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” said the Doctor, pointing at Gavin’s bones poking out through the tweed sleeve…

* There’s a ‘skateboard trivia’ side to me which is sometimes cause for concern, but here we go. The party was hosted by Ian Gillan (as in Deep Purple and I admit this means something to me), linking Gavin back to the Scottish theme of this post.