When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Nick Philip wrote this article of the “First Invert Series Bike Ramp Jam” at Chingford.

Something’s Happening, Bro’. It started at Crawley and it’s building up speed. The bike riders of this country are getting clued in. They’ve stopped expecting somebody else to organise their lives and they’ve started doing something for themselves. The Invert Series of half-pipe jams run by Tim Ruck and Greg Guillotte are already off the ground and there are more in the pipeline. Nick Philip went down to the Faze 7 ramp at Chingford to see what was going down. And so did a LOT of other people.

And away we go. To see what Nick’s up to now, take a look at these magical T shirts at the Imaginary Foundation.

There are some unfamiliar names in here. Which of these is still in existence? Add a comment if you know.

• Surf Ski, Coventry
• Gridiron, Nottingham
• Stamyps Skates, Birmingham
• Cheshire Skateboard Centre, Northwich
• Skate Zone, Torquay
• Mycyles, Malvern
• TnB, Tiverton
• Scotby Cycles, Carlisle
• Round Ocean, Doncaster
• Tombstone, Bristol

There’s also Matchrite, selling their jokes and someone advertising wholesale supplier of “Totally Radical Surf’n'Skate ‘T’ shirts now available!! Does anyone know who that was? Could it have been one of the great industry titans of the current boom starting business life in their back room?

Justin Ashby was a key figure in UK skateboarding throughout the period of R.a.d Magazine (and long before and since too, of course).

I was really pleased when I turned the page and saw this. Strangely enough I was talking to someone last night about the history of Livingston and explaining how it nearly didn’t have a flat bottom in that original bowl.

Places to skate feature prominently in this Intro, which must have been done just before the big ramp at The Level was built, or maybe just after: Justin says they’re “going to put another foot of vert on it”. He also cites the ramp at Bourges “10′ transitions, a foot of vert and about 50′ wide. It’s got 20′ of basic ramp, then there’s a 4′ channel, then there are escalators down on both sides for another 8′, then back up again. And on one end there’s an extra 2′ extension so it’s about 13 or 14′ high.

And the skaters Justin rates in this Intro match that kind of terrain: Jason Jessess, the Godoys, Steve Claar, Craig Johnson, Jeff Phillips, Lucian, Jamie Blair and Davie Philip. So does his raddest thing seen: “Jason Jessee’s Christ Air to Fakie”.

By the way: if you’re reading this and know the history of Pig City you might be interested in a comment posted in July 2009 about trying to get the Pig City Shop going again.

Interesting to notice that Fids nominated Stevenage as his favourite ramp even though he came from Ramsgate. That’s a sign of the times: he had to travel into London and out the other side to skate it.

His answer to the question “What would make skating better?” — “Better weather or more indoor ramps” touches on the same subject. We got the “more indoor ramps”, though never enough of them. The weather did not get better. Quite the reverse. This has been one of the wettest winters in a while.

And the thought I like best? “Carter doing McTwists” it makes me smile even now.

More about Bowes Lyon Skatepark in Stevenage.

In this selection of letters we have

• Mad Snoz and his cohorts writing about Dirty Ditches, but where?
• Livi Skates thanking everyone who came for Pure Fun
• Partying on the Isle of Wight
• Vallely on vert (lots of it) at Latimer
• A Picture of Don B
• and our email address from 1988 = Telecom Gold 72:MAG90459

I’d forgotten that we kept that old address going. I thought it had died out with BMX Action Bike.

Off Beat Sportz take the prize this time for their “We Like Cats and Dogs Price List” tag line. What was that all about, then?
Action Ramps deserve some other kind of prize for breaking down the humble jump-ramp into a whole series of components.
Meanwhile Youngs favoured the “long copy” approach, Split went for the big claim (but it was certainly true the time I went there) and Weston BMX and Leisure turned sideways to fit it all in.
Each of the shops had a distinctive style and a crew of locals to match in the days before chain stores sold skateboards!

At some point I knew I would run out of interesting things to say about “The Wall”. That moment has come.
It was intended as the Craigslist for UK skateboarding of its time and delighted me when it turned into Myspace. But I’m stretching things too far again. Time to shut up!

Interesting bits in here…

• The overview of what we described as ‘the streetstyle device‘: state of the art at the time was: ‘Bank, quarter-pipe and mini-handrail all in one unit.” Now you see things like that all over the place. They’ve become a standard item in public and commercial parks. In 1988 this seemed like a first to us: “You could do three moves in one hit.”
• Quote of the street-style event: “Oh well, I guess I’ll make up for that in my second run…” Mike Vallely after his ‘first’ qualifier. They had one run each.
• Stuart Dryden, from Southsea, who came over from Southsea and entered in the days when travelling to competitions like this was beyond the reach of most people.

These were the killer things which lodged in Shane [O'Brien's] memory. Gonzales’ Ollie Stalefish Method 180 and Railslide regular footed [we were amazed by switch-stance then]. Cab’s Backside 180 Ollies off the jump ramp. Vallely’s 360 Frontside Hand-plant on the double-sided jump ramp. And Hosoi’s Frontside Wall-ride when his back foot slipped leaving him hanging off the top of the wall with his front foot keeping hold of the board. After a few sweaty moments, he shuffled the board back up and rode out. Delirium

Oh dear. Back in the days before desktop publishing you did not know what things would look like until you got the magazines back from the printers. Unless you could afford proofs, which we could not. So the yellow tint behind some of this worked OK, but the magenta one makes it impossible to read the text. Such was life back then.

The sidebar at the bottom is about an incident I had long forgotten. On the day of the finals neither Christian Hosoi nor Eric Dressen showed up. Both were still asleep. Somehow someone woke up Hosoi and got him to the hall. Eric Dressen slept on. There were murmurs that this was because Hosoi was considered the bigger ’star’ by the organisers and the feelings came to head with a bit of a fight at the post-contest party.

What an amazing issue this was. So much stuff all happening in one month. This was the seventh Munster World Cup and Europe had never seen anything on this scale in the eighties. It would rate as pretty big even by today’s standards. And the quality of the skating would also stand the test of time, I think.

All the pictures in this opening spread were by Dobie.

Skating in Europe’s going mad. No doubt about it. Every year the competition at Munster in Germany gets bigger but this, the seventh one, was even better than everyone had expected.

It started out as purely European competition, but gradually more and more Americans joined in. This year there were dozens of them. The Munster World Cup was a world class event: the first real one since the Vancouver Worlds a couple of years back.