When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

I don’t have any disks containing text this old. They survived for another ten years, but were destroyed in the New Deal fire. So we’re mostly going to have to do with scans for this issue. I’m trying to use OCR to extract the text, but it’s very patchy.

I can’t get the credits out of this page, for example, which is a shame. One of the notable mentions there is Derek Westwood, who is credited as “Designer in Body”. Derek sat in during the transition period between the reigns of Nick Philip and Ian Lawson. That’s not an easy thing to do. Derek never got the chance to experiment as freely as most of our designers.

The Steve Caballero Ollie Indy Footplant gets a reprise in sequential form. Not the exact same one obviously: Fuji 50 sequences in the dark of the South Bank? I think not.
FEATURES

NIGHT OF THE LIVING SKATE
ZOMBIES ………………………… 10
In the Limelight
LAID BACK IN LlVl ………………..1 6
Stress free pool contest
POWELL TOUR ……………… . …… 22
The official demos, and the other
stuff too
MUNSTER MASH …………………. 40
Europe’s biggest competition.
Part One
INTRO …………………………………. 47
Justin Ashby. Mark Findlay
RIDE IF YOU WANT, HOW YOU
WANT …………………………………….. 47
Stress free bike contest

DEPARTMENTS

EARS ………………….. .. ……………….. 4
Inside Knowledge
Xs ……………………………………………… 7
Mixed Doubles
STEVE DOUGLAS …………………… 9
Seattle Comp!
HORACE THE HIPPY ……. 13
Builds His own board
CALENDAR 88 ………………………14
Dates for your diary
WHERE? …………………………………. 36
Back down South
THE WALL …………………………….44
High pressure sales
LETTERS ……………………………….46
Words with you
PARAPHERNALIA ……………….. 54
Those who flow shall be rewarded

CARTOONIST:
Graham MacEachran

Cover: Steve Caballero, Ollie
lndy Footplant, South Bank.
PHOTO: Dobie
This page: Let’s look at that
again …

At first I wondered if there was anything particular to say about this Slam City Skates advert, other than that it features Ken Park at the wonderful Latimer Road ramp, and that the un-credited photograph would almost certainly have been taken by Paul Sunman. Then I noticed that it listed the famous shop in Covent Garden as “opens September”. So this issue dates back to the days when that London skateboard institution was just a gleam in Sunman’s eye.

I can remember being astonished at the time by the thought of a skateboard shop in such an expensive location. It’s true that my own career had begun behind the counter of a skateboard shop opposite Harrods. In fact those premises must have been even more outrageously expensive: we had 4, or was it 5, floors complete with an indoors quarter pipe in the back, but only one floor was open to the public. But in 1988 that was 10 years ago. 10 years in which skateboarding had been so far underground that less than a handful of shops had been able to pay rent of any kind — all of them in much, much, much cheaper locations. And all of them keeping going only by selling things like BMX bikes, or rollerskates. Those were very different times. So a skateboard shop in the heart of one of London’s prime shopping areas seemed an outrageous thing to try.

History proved Slam City very right indeed. That shop defined skateboarding in London for decades to come. Its influence on the course of skateboarding in the UK outweighed any of its predecessors and certainly shaped the skateboard culture of the R.a.D Magazine generation. But at the time that this magazine was published, all that was yet to come. It still seemed an outrageous gamble, just like the survival of skateboarding itself.

Time for a look at 1988… Flipping through the year, this cover caught my eye as redolent of the time. The Powell Tours help defined that era and provided a focal point in an age before stadium skateboarding even seemed a possibility. But I note now that one of the cover lines reads “hot street sequences” and the Munster competition coverage is advertised as “Monster Street”, suggesting that the rise of street skating was well and truly under way. There’s BMX coverage in this issue as well and, perhaps best of all for me, a big report on a sunny pool party at Livingston skatepark.

The cover picture also makes me smile. I can remember that very well indeed. We were all down at the South Bank with the Powell Team in one of their semi-off-duty moments. I was trying to take pictures and having a real struggle with the conflict between trying not to intrude but also cope with the challenges of the gloom while trying to keep an eye out for who was doing what and where.

Then Dobie wandered over, “lend us your camera, Tim”. So I gave it to him. He sidled over to one of the little pillars, took this one picture of Caballero, gave me back the camera and carried on just hanging out.

Well, that’s how I remember it. Perhaps he actually took a couple of shots. But in my memory Dobie had spotted what was about to happen, wandered over to the exact spot, taken the single shot with a borrowed camera and then given the camera back knowing that he’d got the best shot of the day. Meanwhile I carried on sweating away, working at it until everyone had stopped skating.

By the way, if you like this, you might well want to take a look at Steve Caballero’s blog.