When We Was Rad:
Skateboard History from UK Vintage Magazine

Steve Keenan took the pictures and Steve Douglas wrote the story about the 1987 Labor Day competition at the legendary ramp at Raging Waters.
These were some of the most exciting pictures seen at the time.
Rumours had been flying around about Raging Waters, but this was the first time we got to see it, although there had been glimpses in the American magazines. Caballero won the highest air (as you can guess from the picture), (more…)

“Xs” was the name of the slot for a single page stand alone picture. It followed on from BMX Action Bike’s “Radness Unlimited”. We felt unhappy with the Action Bike name and came up with something equally bad. The main point was that it was meant to be the first powerful hit in the magazine. Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn’t. In this case Xs featured Craig Campbell, which means that it was.
As the caption said: (more…)

I have no idea why the coverage of this ESA competition at Preston was slotted in to two pages of “Ears”. Perhaps we didn’t have enough space anywhere else for it?

The Preston ramp was another ramp in a roller-rink from the same people as the legendary Warrington. Paul Duffy’s picture shows Mark Van Der Eng. The A Group result is described as “surprising” (more…)

The team referred to the news pages of the magazine as “Ears”, but the tagline “Communicating Knowledge” was more prominent.

It was always a real struggle assembling the content for this section. Endless hours were spent ringing round to try to extract information from the skate world at large in an age before email, text messages or even widespread use of mobile phones. Communication then was much more painful: it was a relatively closed world.

“Knebworth to Go” was the first story, on the perennial theme of the lack of places to skate. (more…)