When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Centre spread picture (these mattered in the days when they could be pulled from magazines and stuck on the wall) of Warren Brown by Jay Podesta.

This was a golden age before the skateboard potential of the City of London had really been recognised. As its popularity grew, so did the busts. Perhaps somebody can remind us when the specific bye-laws against skating were introduced and when they started to really be enforced?
There was always a balance to be struck between showing rad spots and attracting too much attention to them. In the case of the City we came down on the side of giving it less prominence than it deserved. Such discretion was wasted, of course: the outcome was inevitable.

Weird caption: “Practice alone, Practice by night, with friends by day. Practice will make perfect”. More to the point: who are the skaters in the pictures? The first is at Harrow Skatepark, no idea where the second one is. No photographer is credited, which usually means that I took them, but the second one doesn’t like mine. Anyway… on with the instructions:

Day 28: Thursday, 18th July Off to Münster. On the journey play the cassingle (with it’s new “Black Arabs” B side) over and over again in your Walkman. Get those tunes in your head, know every beat.
That evening you will arrive at Münster. Go straight to the Sports Hall, then straight to registration. Münster is an all professional affair now. You are not a professional. You are not even an amateur. You don’t even receive stickers from your local shop. You’re just a guy with a goal. But no matter how rad you are, your goal will not be achieved unless you get to enter. Deception is called for. Continue Reading »

The most interesting of these, for me, is the Skate-shop Nini advert. Rollersnakes and Off-beat are still very familiar names, but what’s the story behind a shop from Belgium advertising in a British magazine? The geography of skateboarding was different then and there was even less of a notion of ‘Europe’ than there is now.

It would be interesting to know more. Perhaps one day someone will stumble across this and provide the history.

In which Gavin introduces “The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle” — another primary source…

Day 15: Saturday, 6th July Stop skating. Find a pool with water in it and swim a few lengths. Immerse yourself in the deep end, look upwards to the light or sky above and pop up for a deep gulp of oxygen. How sweet life is.
Go home: sit comfortably on your bed and think of what you have achieved so far, and prepare yourself for what is to come.
Day 16: Sunday, 7th July The tricks you have learnt so far are good, but not that good. You want to be top: silver’s no good to you. You will need three rad new tricks and two new dorky ones. Work out the rad ones first: write all the 20 tricks you can now do on small pieces of paper, throw them on your floor and then pick three of four of them up at random. Arrange them in an order that makes sense and play around until you have three new tricks. One must be for a handrail, one for a railslide and one for a bank or quarter pipe. These three tricks will be your golden tricks. Continue Reading »