Seek, find
Be yourself
Don’t follow the heard
Don’t repeat, in spite of ‘encores’
Have Fun. If not you’ll bore us.

One of Gavin Hills’ trademarks (apart from the spelling) was the quotation or aphorism with which he annointed each issue. At this point they appeared on the contents pages, but later they moved to the cover.

By this stage Gavin was one of the core team on the R.a.D, or rather “Vernon and Gavin” were, since they joined the magazine as a team and were usually seen that way by insiders. Ian Lawson was in charge of design during this period and was putting his own distinctive stamp on things. Mad Mike John and Paul Sunman were now listed as “Senior Photographers” while other contributors included Alex Baldock, Jamie Cameron, Claus Grabke, Dan Hollenbeck, Joe Millson, Shane O’Brien, Skin and Twiss. Vernon Adams does not appear here, but Jay Podesta does. Jason Snelling is credited as “Assistant Designer” — he was one of our rare college placements. Steve Douglas was firmly in place, as ever, as the American Representative and David Slade is listed as the Bike Correspondent. Billy Brown is treated with thorough respect as the real advertising guru amongst a much larger team which also included Andrew Bishop, Niki Michaelides and Max Jacobson. I suspect Niki would have been doing most of the actual work.
This issue of R.a.D was published by Deltamere Ltd, with Ben Lewis listed as publisher, but no mention of Antony Jacobson at this stage.

The staff and contributors list had been moved off the contents page to allow more room during this phase, so it shares space with a couple of adverts. Both are from key players at the time: Rodolfo’s in Amsterdam were plugging away at Vans, and Custom Riders were building their mail order empire. Both are still going strong at the time of writing (2006).