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.
-
Powell skate tour, Southsea and Romford, 1988
-
High Speed Video for the Masses
I have a pet theory that the entire development of skateboarding was changed by the introduction of affordable video cameras around the time of the first H Street video. So I was really excited when I came across a short skateboarding video clip in high-speed high-definition, shot on Red cameras:
skate – shot on red – 120 fps from opus magnum prod. on Vimeo.
-
Lance Mountain and Steve Caballero: Livingston, Birmingham Wheels and Wolverhampton
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.
-
Classic skateboarding: Steve Caballero, Stevenage Skatepark, July 1988
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.
-
More from Simon
Every now and again I feel I should point people at some of the current work of the artist Simon Evans….
-
Powell Peralta tour Stevenage, Brixton, South Bank and more
My goodness. What a dull looking page. Too many words again. But I always wanted to get so much in. For example, here’s a reference to Stacy Peralta signing the South Bank when he was on tour in 1978. He was on Blue Peter on that tour as well. I dare say a high-profile skate tour might attract such coverage again now, but in 1988 things were much quieter. It was still very much a ‘skaters only’ scene back then and “skating not signatures were most in demand.”So this page talks about the off-duty sessions which took place in the Midlands (I’m not sure if even now I dare name those banks), Meanwhile II and Stockwell. And the rain, which nearly wrecked the Latimer Road demo and meant that Stevenage was the ramp high-point of the tour.
It seems like a very long time ago, suddenly.
-
Steve Caballero South Bank Wall 1988
Too many words and not the right pictures. One of the curses of producing a magazine which could only have colour on some pages was trying to use the right pictures in the right place. So this page of the tour report is about the ramp session in Birmingham, but the relevant pictures are on another page — so they could be in colour.What we get instead is a sequence of Steve Caballero at the South Bank’s wonderful wall. The one which the South Bank Centre’s management took so much trouble to spoil. Each time I wander past there I gaze on that wall and think of some of the things it witnessed.
This page also has a sidebar about the food and the weather. Which reminds me of another curse of the magazine: I could never cut anything out. I always wanted to cram in more and more stuff to try to give the flavour of these events to people who could never experience them for themselves. So there were always too many words.
I have the same problem today.
-
Vintage Rad stickers on e-bay
Dan Adams just sent me an email about someone selling a R.a.D window sticker on e-Bay for £5.50. Is that a little or a lot?
-
Mike Vallely South Bank 1988
Top caption “On any bollard. Ollie 180 to Frontside Rock.” Bottom caption “360 Block from Vallely. Raging”.The combination of South Bank murk and our even murkier black and white printing makes these hard to follow and leaves this as a very weak page. I wish we could have done justice to the skating.
-
Mambo ‘More a Pair of Shorts’ advert 1988
Here’s a Mambo advert which did not get us into trouble the Advertising Standards Authority and nor did it cause us to be denounced from pulpits. Some of their other efforts had those effects.There isn’t really much more to say about this, is there?
