When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Every now and again I feel I should point people at some of the current work of the artist Simon Evans….

My goodness. What a dull looking page. Too many words again. But I always wanted to get so much in. For example, here’s a reference to Stacy Peralta signing the South Bank when he was on tour in 1978. He was on Blue Peter on that tour as well. I dare say a high-profile skate tour might attract such coverage again now, but in 1988 things were much quieter. It was still very much a ’skaters only’ scene back then and “skating not signatures were most in demand.”

So this page talks about the off-duty sessions which took place in the Midlands (I’m not sure if even now I dare name those banks), Meanwhile II and Stockwell. And the rain, which nearly wrecked the Latimer Road demo and meant that Stevenage was the ramp high-point of the tour.

It seems like a very long time ago, suddenly.

Too many words and not the right pictures. One of the curses of producing a magazine which could only have colour on some pages was trying to use the right pictures in the right place. So this page of the tour report is about the ramp session in Birmingham, but the relevant pictures are on another page — so they could be in colour.

What we get instead is a sequence of Steve Caballero at the South Bank’s wonderful wall. The one which the South Bank Centre’s management took so much trouble to spoil. Each time I wander past there I gaze on that wall and think of some of the things it witnessed.

This page also has a sidebar about the food and the weather. Which reminds me of another curse of the magazine: I could never cut anything out. I always wanted to cram in more and more stuff to try to give the flavour of these events to people who could never experience them for themselves. So there were always too many words.

I have the same problem today.

Dan Adams just sent me an email about someone selling a R.a.D window sticker on e-Bay for £5.50. Is that a little or a lot?

Top caption “On any bollard. Ollie 180 to Frontside Rock.” Bottom caption “360 Block from Vallely. Raging”.

The combination of South Bank murk and our even murkier black and white printing makes these hard to follow and leaves this as a very weak page. I wish we could have done justice to the skating.