When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Simon Evans wrote this report on a competition in Goshen, and pointed out one of the favourite themes of Rad Mag: “the words are just a trick to make you look at the pictures” (to paraphrase David Byrne or Brian Eno).

Hello, and welcome to another comp report. I guess you’ve probably already had a look at the photos dotted around the page and now, in a fit of depression and despair, have decided to sit down and look at the boring part: the words. So let’s talk about the pictures instead.
You may have already noticed that although the comp took place at the Goshen Leisure Centre in Bury, there aren’t any photos of skating on the mini. Yep, something happened that hasn’t happened on British soil for a while: there was a vert contest.
The stage was set: Bury, indoors — on a very wet (hailstones) Sunday in March. There were two sections: the under 16s and over 16s. The surprise of the event was the under 16 class. Take a look at that picture of Sean Ward doing a rad fakie stand-up grind to fakie. Sean has to be one of the most dramatically improved skaters around, plucking amazing tricks from the air for his competition runs — trickery like fakie to nose-grind tail grabs, manual rolls, frontside one-foot tail grabs and lip slides. He skated really solid and certainly deserved to win.
What about that picture of Carl Shipman preparing to go to tail with this backside melanchollie to tail? Carl got second in the under 16. He skated really well, making fakie one foot tail-grab and alley-oop backside Smith, doing everything smooth and clean. In third place was Chris Hudson. He could have placed higher, but fell off a few times. From his bag of tricks came chink-chinks, melanchollies, Ollie blunts, ollie nose-stall tail grab and he came real close to 360° varials.
The over 16 section saw some real good skating, as you can probably tell from these photos. Some people didn’t do as well in the results as they did on the ramp, mentioning no names (Davy Philip). In the fine tradition of comp results, I’ll work through them in reverse order. Stuart Hoyle surprised everyone with his relaxed and fast antics, pulling newest deals, smith grinds, nose grinds and G-turn lipslides.
Check out that rad picture of Andy Williams doing the frontside nose bone. Andy had some real rad stuff, but couldn’t get it together at the end. But he still did some rad stunts like half-Cab Ollie blunts, nose grinds, feeble grinds, Madonnas and fakie 360° Ollies.
Justin Ashby does good relaxed frontside rocks. He skated fast, shooting around the masonite jungle. Oh yeah: everyone liked his shoes.

Spooky coincidence time. As I write this post the scandal about premium phone-in numbers being used for ITV competitions which have already closed was raging — hot on the heels of a similar fuss over at the BBC. Back in 1991 things were simpler and competitions like this were only just starting to appear. There weren’t millions involved (certainly not in the case of R.a.D Mag) then either. In fact I doubt whether anybody ever responded to these: they seemed completely out of place.

Having said last week that I didn’t really like the sequences, I have to eat my words. I like the style of this a lot. Jason Maldini was another South Bank stalwart who probably should have got more coverage than he did. Vernon took the pictures.

Simon Evans and Tony Luckhurst at Watlington and South Bank.
At this point we’re still burning real film for sequences. The video fuzziness was yet to come. The challenge of showing the trick was always hard enough — it looks like at this point we’d given up trying to describe them in words!
I think Vernon took the Luckhurst sequence, although he isn’t credited on this page.
Sequences were always a visual compromise. Give me video any day for this kind of thing. But we knew that people were really keen to try to work out how to do new tricks, even if a magazine page would never really help. So we did our best to oblige.