When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

“Made tough and comfy for nocturnal activities. A size guage or color or feel to compliment any occasion: Being a smart ass to a Dennys waitress at 4.am. Impressing your friends by sticking your left ear to a mega watt thumping Cerwin Vega. A neuron firing sugar rush from ten too many raspberry blowpops. Getting frisked by some over zealous renta cop. Winding down watching endless cartoons. Made in Los Angeles CA and available virtually knowhere.”

‘Clobber’ = not a good name for a clothing company in the age of Google, but probably fine in 1992, a couple of years before such considerations became vital when choosing a name.

More than this I cannot say. I have no recollection of who was distributing this in the UK. Can anyone add to the history, please?

Steve Martin did “The Jerk”
Eddie Murphy was “Delirious”
Richard Pryor didn’t know “Which Way Was Up”
but these orginal pranksters can’t come close to the new King of Comedy…

The Franz

Ronald “Franz” Knigge, touring in your home town soon…

This is a great example of a New Deal advert from a golden age. It took me a while to work out which company was running the advert. Which amuses me now, when I consider that I ended up working for them for eight years. But that was in the future when this advertisement appeared.

Move along now. There’s nothing more to be said here.

Yeah, right. Not a good start to this classic issue, but there we go. And I’ve only just now got the point of the headline. I don’t think I would ever have looked at it so closely when it first appeared!
I’m sitting here thinking if there’s anything to be said about this. And I’ve reached the conclusion that there isn’t.

Let’s move on.

Curtis McCann, legendary skater. The Shell Centre, legendary spot.

Coming up in this issue we’ll also see another legend, the Plan B video and also a few more infamous elements such as the experiments with early video-frame-grab technology and the free cover-mount R.a.D keyring. Including those three things in one sentence is some kind of joke. One of them was a world-changer, and it certainly wasn’t the keyring. Or the frame-grabs.

The cover lines for this issue:

• Curtis McCann on the Underworld
• New cyber style
• Tekno tv issue
• Fresh high speed sequences – frame by frame action
• Plan B Video review – best yet
• Holiday movies – North Wales, Scarborough
• Milton Keynes & Leigh on Sea comps
• Free lucky keyring

The strap line (not sure if this was the first appearance) was ‘Brain Food for Street Thugs’. But there’s also “Rebel Against Drudgery”, so this aspect of the cover was probably still evolving under the earnest guidance of Gavin Hills.

I’m glad that we’re finally able to go through one of the ‘larger-than-A4′ issues from the last period of the magazine. I really liked that era. The skating was pushing the limits in all manner of directions at that time and Curtis McCann was one of the defining skaters of the age.