When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Sketchy Skates and Yah-Dude were two of the hard core of skate shops at this time. You’ll find their adverts scattered throughout the issues on this site. I’m struggling to remember what happened with Hi Ramp. Like all the companies trying to make skateboard equipment outside of the USA (or California, really) they would have had a real problem even getting a toe-hold in the market.

I wince when I look at this. You can scarcely see the pictures. Look at the results, though. So many names which still seem familiar: this period produced some legendary skaters.

My, Wingy has definitely improved and was skating really well. In the picture he’s doing a varial tail-grab. He did plenty more: mellies to fakie, long feeble grinds, big Indy air (wearing a big helmet).
Mike Manzouri skated fast and smooth with frontside rock-slide, backside lipslide, killer nose bones and, as you can tell from the picture, big melanchollies. Unfortunately Mike was so stoked by Jocke’s skating that he wacked the coping too hard with his board in applause and broke his truck. He had to borrow Laja’s board for the rest of the final. Mad. Neil Danns went very high and very fast and was very good. Frontside hand-plants, rad stalefish and this weird kind of Christ air to tail thingy. He got fourth place.
The picture I’ve chosen of Rocker is a 360° varial to fakie. He got a well deserved third. He did a lot of tricks, leaving you thinking “I didn’t know he could do that…” But he could. He did nose grinds, tail grabs, mute to fakie, fakie 360° Ollie one foot, mellies to fakie and a lot more.
Yeah: that’s a rad picture of Jocke. A backside nose bone, isn’t it? Jocke’s name was a name on everyone’s lips that weekend because of his big, big backside Ollie tail grabs, backside nose grinds and method air to fakie. And yes, he does McTwists. Jocke rules.
Pete Dossett won, and not a soul complained. He skated so well with mind and leg bending tweakness. He’s the best vert skater in England, easily stalling inverts for so long, tweaking airs this way and that, doing 360° varials, doing body varials, basically just doing so much. Oh my God: he nearly made a 720°, landing then falling off. So rad.
The competition finished, people collected the prizes Death Box had donated and even the mini was sessioned. Everything ended so fast. But so what? So long…
RESULTS
Under 16
1 Sean Ward
2 Carl Shipman
3 Chris Hudson
4 Dave Ashton
5 Warren McReady
6 Jock Milne
Over 16
1 Pete Dossett
2 Jocke Olson
3 Rocker
4 Neil Danns
5 Mike Manzouri
6 Wingy
7 Andy Williams
8 Stuart Hoyle

OK, so this time we got five pictures in there. Two scans, perhaps? It doesn’t really matter now, does it. Mike Manzouri, Jocke Ollson, Wingy, Stuart Hoyle and Carl Shipman deserve all the attention.

Economies of style? No: economies of layout. One of the spin-offs of experimenting with shooting high speed colour print film (instead of the transparencies normally used for magazine work in those days) was that we could take four of the machine prints from the chemists, stick them together on a bit of card and count them as one picture. So we could get four pictures onto a page using half our normal “two scans per page” allocation. Honest. Those were very different times.
Justin Ashby, Pete Dosset, Andy Williams and Sean Ward are the skaters featured here.