I always was a fan of the Simon Evans currently known as an artist.
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Don Brider, Dirty Ditches and a 1988 email address
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.
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Back in the Day: vintage skateboard shop adverts from 1988
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!
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Simon on Chrome Ball Incident
God bless Google alerts for bringing a smile to my face today: good to see so many people remember Simon Evans on Chrome Ball Incindent.
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Free skateboard classified adverts from 1988
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!
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Street Contest from Munster 1988
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
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R.a.D Sticker Rides Again
Somebody sent me a link to a picture showing Tony Hawk at a 2008 Retro-contest, complete with a R.a.D sticker on the ramp and Mike Manzoori filming in the background. But I can’t find it now. Most strange.
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Eric Dressen, Tommy Guerrero, Jeff Hedges: Munster 1988
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.
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Munster Mash. Europe’s Biggest Skate Comp (1988, that is)
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.
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R.a.D Magazine Stickers and Billy’s of Cambridge Advert
- 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.
