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Speed Freaks Video Advert 1989
The issue closes with a Speed Freaks video advert. At last. It’s been a long slog working my way through this fat edition of the magazine, and I’m starting to have doubts about the virtue of posting every single advert up here. For the time being I will carry on with the same approach for…
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Slam City: If They Have Time to Risk Their Necks…
This is one of my favourite adverts of all time. It produced a roar of delight when I first saw it, and it still does. One of the earlier publishers of the magazine complained of a Volkswagen advert offering free badges to people who might otherwise be inclined to steal them from cars that it…
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Bankead Skating Buckingham Palace
Own up! Who took this picture of Will Bankead skating in the Buck House Bowl? I wonder if we dropped the photo credit for fear of recriminations? The same skater and location appear in the elegiac sequence at the end of Ged Wells and David Slade’s “Mouse is Pulling the Key” — one of my…
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Clan and SS20 adverts and Gavin Hills falling off a bridge
As you may imagine, it’s normally very hard finding anything to say about most of the adverts. The editorial team had nothing to do with them and usually only saw them when the magazine came out. On rare occasions they struck chords which resonated with the editorial of the magazine — and this was such…
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Skater Owned Shops, Christmas 1989
The ‘Skater Owned Shops’ group got together to take a double page spread of adverts for Christmas and wen to town. Stampy’s was the famous Birmingham shop at the Wheels Park which went down in flames later, although some of the people who worked there went on to open the long-running Ideal in the centre…
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Angel Lights and Others in Small Ads
In amongst the usual suspects there are some intriguing rareities in this page of small adverts. The Angel Lights Planetary Skatepark was the wonderful (and infamous) indoor Glasgow park, more commonly known as “The Church”. It had a short but brilliant life and lives on in legend, but we never gave it enough coverage. Meanwhile,…
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Zebra Ramps and Skate Rags Adverts
Metal ramps were never my favourite thing, although I was over-enthusiastic about metal surface on wood construction at one point. This was at a time when local authorities were just starting to take a vague interest in providing facilities. Things have come on a long way since then. I’m still amazed and delighted when I…
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Bod, Backyard and Hastings Ramp Advert
OK. Step up to the challenge: what’s interesting about this page of adverts? For me: Bod Boyle skating the big ramp at Hastings makes the Backyard advert stand out. He doesn’t look too happy in this shot. As for the rest: MyCycles plugged away at it with an advert which looks like a faxed layout…
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Bod Boyle, fast high lines in Madrid 1989
On we go with more strange but true Madrid skateboard facts from the pen of Mike John. S.B.T. Fact 5 Street-style wasn’t a ridiculous collection of jump ramps, death walls and other nightmares — it was worse! The ‘course’ was just the four-sided fun-box thing and nothing else. Yup: no-thing else. Christian Welsh and co…
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Steve Douglas, Frontside Rock’n’Roll Madrid 1989
There’s an interesting insight into Tim Payne’s ramp building techniques on this page: build it in sections on the ground so that you can have several teams working at the same time without the need for ladders. This was at a time when ideas like that were not common knowledge. Only a few years earlier…