I guess this was just an experiment. I can’t remember any good reason why we flipped this and ran it as a negative. I don’t think this was a mistake in repro: I would have remembered something as spectacular as this!
Captain Wager must have hated us when he saw it.
I’ve made a reversed normal version of it now, in an attempt to compensate…
Everything at Your Leisure were one of the pillars of advertising in the magazine for many years. Wheels and Waves were skater-owned (I think), but I don’t recall much about them, I’m afraid. USA American skates were the subject of some debate elsewhere on this site!
Photographs show Joe Millson at St Mary’s and two more views of the Great Bedwyn ramp.
POST SCRIPT
Death is a surprisingly ordinary thing, part of the every day routine for some people. The rituals, the routines, are tidily observed. Society exists to take care of these things. Bodies are removed, a bit of paper or two signed and that’s it. Nobody else had been affected by the security guard’s death. He was hardly a family man. There was nobody to care. He’d arrived in the town two days ago and his unfortunate departure was hardly noticed.
How different from the case of that boy. There hadn’t been a body to take away then, but his absence, if not his departure, had certainly been noticed. The police search had gone on for months but they never found a trace of him. It was as if he’d just faded away.
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Photographs show Martin Wager (not quite a local, I think) and overviews of ramps at Marlborough College, Joe’s Barn and Grant and Ross’ ramp. That last one an example of a traditional ramshackle home ramp… Overviews were important: facilities were rare and people travelled to skate these places — we needed to show what was there, we wanted to show examples for people to copy. Above all I took delight in the really dodgy ramps which had been slung together by people desperate to skate.
OK. He’d go outside and find the bugger. There was nothing happening out front. Then the guard heard the sound again: another clatter — yep, probably some young kid out late trying to learn something new on his own. It was coming from the side of the building where those long steep hand rails came down from the walkway. There it was again, and, no, he didn’t make that one either.
Right: time to give the brat a fright. (more…)
Pictures show Shane O’Brien skating Great Bedwyn and Joe Millson on one of his two ramps. Joe wrote the “The Bird, the Boy and the Bat” which apppeared in the Backdoor View feature in a later issue of R.a.D.
A bloke in a black T Shirt with ‘Preshure Empire’ on it had come into Macs and was talking with the skaters. The bloke was a hip-hop DJ and the skaters were asking when they were next playing because they wanted to go along and skate there again — something about Shove-it Kick- flips off the stage.
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Pictures this page are of Chris Summers and James (no surname given, can anyone supply one now, please). Not much more to be said today, except that the sun is shining and I’m off to continue walking round the Capital Ring with Simon Evans. All being well, today we cross the river into South London.
Zed had not been born in this town. His father worked for an electronics company and they had moved there when he was six. The whole area was booming. You could tell: (more…)
The M4 project was a follow on from the earlier “A1” feature (itself a sequel to “Northern Line”) — I’m serious! A1 had involved me and Simon Evans spending weekend after weekend travelling up and down the A1 documenting as many places as possible. To our shame, we only got as far as Washington — but I calculated that the money we’d spent on that article would have funded a flight to California by the time we were done.
“M4” was a much more modest affair. In fact it was really only about Newbury, but the working title stuck. I suspect it’s something to do with the way the M4 has played a major role in my life since 1976. I’m very tired of that road.
Pictures on this page show Leighton Dyer, Rob Blythe and Paul Freeman. The text was one of those dubious bits of fiction which we would occasionally run, just to try something different. I suspect most people hated them. Sorry! (more…)
Good to see an advert made specifically for the UK market, from the days before shoe adverts dominated skateboarding mags (and paid my wages for several years, to be fair). I also have fuzzy memories of the Airwalk’s hospitality at American trade shows. Does anyone know who took the picture?
This letters page is from the period when Gavin Hills was in charge. The fine art of winding up skateboard magazines by sending them letters designed for publication was practised on us as well as Skateboard! The source of one of these is fairly clear.
Meanwhile in an attempt to encourage people who weren’t quite so dedicated, Gavin had a go at summarising some points from other letters. There’s one in there from an “old” skater, aged 40 in 1989, which will strike a chord with many people reading this…
Hot Wheels stuck to their guns. Like Alpine Action trying to sneak skateboard adverts into BMX Action Bike, they ran their BMX adverts in a magazine which was crammed full of skateboarding. I admire them for it.
What could you get for your money? Complete bikes like a Skyway Streetscene would cost £199 and the most expensive thing on the page was a Redline F/S 25 at £245. They were also offering Mongoose Stylist at £179 and Mongoose Decade for £159 — this would have been about the time that they took over distribution of the brand which defined BMX here in the early days. There’s a full list of components and accessories: the complete service — and they’re still going strong to this day.