When We Was Rad

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.

I challenge you to follow this: two sequences, one running round the other on the same page. In fact it works quite well: we were always trying to get a correct sense of movement and direction into these things.
Fakie 05/05 to Fakie and Backside Lipslide, courtesy of Arron Bleasdale at Kings Cross ramp (just down the road from our offices at the time).

I guess this was just an experiment. I can’t remember any good reason why we flipped this and ran it as a negative. I don’t think this was a mistake in repro: I would have remembered something as spectacular as this!

Captain Wager must have hated us when he saw it.

I’ve made a reversed normal version of it now, in an attempt to compensate…

Lincoln Blacksley was the featured rider. He was also able to describe how to do it in slightly more detail than was usual, as well as suggesting how it could be built into a sequence of tricks.

“Approach the object at a moderate speed.” The classic skate how-to opening! Writing trick tips can be a real struggle. Shane O’Brien obliged at the Shell Centre.