When We Was Rad: Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

• Sick Colours!
• Melt Your Eyeballs!
• Bright and Sticky!

I hope Billy’s will forgive me if I dwell on the R.a.D Magazine sticker advert this time. This one honours the designer of the logo, and master of the spanked-up Xerox art, Nick Philip. That’s Nick’s face squashed on the photo-copier montaged in with the R.a.d logo.

After working on R.a.d Nick moved to California, where he has been involved in many wonderful things over the years. Right now he’s back with his roots, applying his special vision to clothing: in this case astonishing T shirts where the design covers the whole shirt.

Those who remember some of the early Anarchic Adjustment shirts, which covered your chest in so much plastic ink that they felt like a bullet-proof vest, will be reassured to know that these use a new sublimation print system which allows the broad canvas without making the shirt feel like it’s made out of sailcloth.

I love the caption on the picture here: “Birmingham Wheels’ Finest”. The endless fear of being rude about any skate spot, on the grounds that it might be all the local skaters had, meant that most of the time the Where? guide was painfully neutral. Not so the contributors. “Take a broom” says the comment about the old council skatepark in South Ockenden (which can still be read in the Knowhere version of this guide, even though the park is long gone.

This is the one part of R.a.D Magazine which lives on as more than just a memory. It moved on line in 1994 and can still be found at www.knowhere.co.uk although the content is very different now.

I see from the introduction that we introduced a new rating system with this issue of the magazine. There’s a wistful tone to the observation that few people would expect to travel more than 10 or 20 miles to skate, and that no ditch could ever rate 5 stars. In the old days (the old days then) some of us used to travel from one end of the country to another in order skate something like Monk’s Ditch. Or, more to the point, to skate with other people at Monk’s Ditch.

What would the skaters of 1988 have made of the situation 20 years later? What would the skaters of 1980 have made of it? I think only the skaters of 1978 would have dared imagine a world of mini-parks all over the place and mega parks dotting the land. We got what we longed for. How does it feel?

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.

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.