When We Was Rad

I’m taking a couple of weeks off now. In the days of the magazine I would have had to prepare a load of stuff in advance in order to be able to take a holiday. I found myself thinking that I ought to do the same with this blog. Then I thought “that’s too much like work”. And this is not supposed to be work…

The curse of captioning strikes again. That doesn’t look like Birmingham to me. But maybe my eyesight is failing!
This page marks the end of the monster coverage of the Powell Tour of 1988. Looking back on it, I think we went over the top: there’s 11 pages of it. That was huge amount in the days when the magazine was only 56 pages thick. But we were into this kind of thing. It was exciting. It was an event in the days before there were any stadium-type skate events in Britain.
It also involved getting out on the road and sharing in the atmosphere at a whole load of different places. That was very much more a R.a.D mag type of thing than any big centralised competition.

The shot of Mike Vallely at the South Bank skating in a R.a.D shirt certainly catches the eye… Those T shirts were completely over the top.
But the PC’s Skate shop advert is significant too. I think there was some fuss over the use of the ‘Pig City’ name in this context, but it’s a very dim memory. What’s nice now is to look back at these pictures of Mark Collins, Justin Ashby, Andy Binns and John Mitchell. Brighton was and is a very special place.

The words on this page are about the rain that plagued the Latimer Road demo, but the pictures are of blue sky and sun over Southsea Skatepark as Steve Caballero makes excellent use of the tombstone on the ramp. Photo by Paul Sunman — who took time out from Slam City to act as the driver and coordinator for the whole tour.

Two of my favourite skaters grin out at us from this Zorlac advert.
Mark and Barry Abrook were at the heart of British skateboarding right back to the Andover days. In fact, I think that should be “Thruxton Days”, but that was before my time. They go right back.
This advert was to promote their joint (I think) signature model “Limey Bastards from Hell”. Someone let me know, please: have I got that right?

Oh dear: I never could bring myself to cut down the words. So here we have a page almost solid with text. It’s all here: references to Lance Mountain’s South London connections (his grandmother and skating at the Mad Dog Bowl with Seth Parker), sly digs at request for “professional” bank tricks, and endless trick lists.
There’s no way I’m going to type all that for the second time round. Sorry.
I believed these tours were hugely important at the time and so we gave them vast amounts of space. Times have changed now and skating is in a different world where such things no longer stand out as exceptional.

I have a pet theory that the entire development of skateboarding was changed by the introduction of affordable video cameras around the time of the first H Street video. So I was really excited when I came across a short skateboarding video clip in high-speed high-definition, shot on Red cameras: skate - shot on red - 120 fps from opus magnum prod. on Vimeo.

The thought of the security guards at the Edinburgh Virgin Megastore only letting skaters in 10 at a time makes me smile. They must have wondered what was going on. Back in 1988 skateboarding was only just emerging from the underground.

This demo took place just after Livingston had been resurfaced and coping had been added and the Caballero picture on this page stands out as a fine display of the benefits.

The Powell team flew to Edinburgh for the day and the rest of the tour was confined to the midlands and south of England. So this would also have been the best chance for skaters from northern England to catch the tour. I suspect people like Michael O’Brien would have been in the crowd that day. It’s hard these days to imagine the intensity of sessions like these: Livingston was the only park in the UK of that quality and people travelled from all over the place to cram in to the tiny space around the lip.

This picture by Dobie certainly brings a smile to my face. The skatepark at Bowes Lyon House saw many interesting scenes of one kind or another over the years, but for pure skateboarding the Powell Peralta tour of 1988 must have been one of the greatest. I really like this picture: it seems to me to be a classic of that era.
Footnote: in 1988 the ramp skating climax would have been expected to take place at the monster ramp at Latimer Road, in London. But rain put the dampers on that day. So Stevenage took the honors for the vert-ramp session of the tour.

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