When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Subscription adverts were always a weak spot in the magazine. They were more the publisher’s thing than ours. But we had to come up with some comment. This was my favourite one because it combined two things: the feel of a suburban room full of magazines, stickers and posters and another attempt to explore space and perception with a camera (just waves in space). The idea was based on David Hockney’s ‘joiners’ – which had and have huge resonance for me. The room was Simon Evan’s home in Morden. From left to right are Marc Bultitude, Simon himself and Matt Stuart. And now these days Matt Stuart’s pictures also have huge resonance for me. And so do Simon’s (Check these earlier Simon Evans pictures too).

Now we get down to some words, at last. In this case I can’t be quite sure who wrote them. Probably me, but I’m not quite sure. The theme of ’space left over’ by the planners is one of my pet themes, but “you get the feeling that you’d be mugged by the environment before the human villains got to you” reads more like Gavin. The captions certainly look like Gavin’s work — but they would have been done separately, and often in desperate rush by anyone who could be press-ganged into doing it.

Prince Charles is probably bumming and so are the skaters: they have enclosed part of Birmingham’s Central Library Square and built a poncy modern shopping precinct. Whether the architecture fits in with the Victorian surroundings is debatable, but there’s no question about the skate effect: that area is wrecked. Continue Reading »

Jovial Jagger, Crucial Christian, Bustin Benny and… who? After all these years we’ve corrected the missing name-check for Egan on the last page, courtesy of Jagger. Who can help out with the skater featured top-right here, please?

These are the features which mattered most to me. My obsession was always with getting out into different places and covering different scenes. The roots of R.a.D magazine date back to when I was working in a skateboard mail order company and dealing with skaters scattered all over the UK — often in the remote places (Tayvallich…). Out of that came the guide to skateboard places which started in the seventies and lives on in Knowhere and out of it came Radmag.

Another Scene Birmingham Days

This month we went to Birmingham and found a bustling street scene and radical sports. Look on…

As I glance at these adverts I realise how little interest I had in the equipment, even though I was surrounded with it for most of my working life. Instead I find myself contemplating the technology which was used to produce pages like this: the effort which a shop would have had to put in to manage such a process when desktop computing was relatively new and desktop publishing still just round the corner for small companies.
My view of this period is very different from the collectors of equipment, I’m afraid. I realise it must be very frustrating. It was always the skating itself and the skater’s attitude to life for me; not the equipment and not the clothing.