Bomo Jaja. Sidewalk #1

Pierre Andre Interview - Sidewalk #128

Below is the unedited text for a Pierre Andre interview I did back in March 2007 for Sidewalk #128. Click on the images to read the proper version (I'm actually not sure if there are any differences!).

That intro is true, by the way - its not just there to please the advertisers. He seemed like a rad guy and it was a shame that I had to do it under one of those horrible 'in and out' PR interview days.
Oh - and the GVR we were talking about never happened as the people who run Prissick Plaza decided that no one will ever run events there*. Smart, eh?

*At least, that's what the deal seems to be these days.

I’ve just left this interview with thoughts racing around my head like crazy. I got myself prepared for this interview as I would for anyone. Badly. En route I started to worry. I mean, this wasn’t a First Light – This was Pierre Andre Senizergues; President and CEO of Soletech; the umbrella company for Etnies, éS, Emerica and Altamont among others. He’s business. Serious business. Right?
The strange thing is, when I got to my destination and through the cloud of PR people – I sat down with someone unexpected – someone who clearly still has his heart in skateboarding. It’s definitely not from the same angle of someone trying to sell themselves or an image of ‘still clued up’. He doesn’t need to research his market or learn his industry – He was, is and always will be firmly grounded as part of the skateboarding. I guess years of pro-skateboarding and the knowledge of the beginnings of that doesn’t just dry up - as I naively expected – when you take on a corporate role. I think this became even more apparent after the interview. Someone had cancelled their meeting with him which resulted in the Dictaphone being shut off and us talking for a good half an hour more. We talked about Street Machine skate shop in Paris, Mischief Skate shop over here as well as the good scenes, parks, spots pretty much in the same way I’d talk to my mates, mid-session whilst once again trying to re-learn some ledge trick every kid in town has on lock. The funniest thing of all is that I never actually asked him if he still skates. That doesn’t matter. He is a skateboarder.

What brings you over to the UK?
I come to the UK every year. I travel around the world and try to promote skateboarding and my company. So, I am in the UK today then on to Amsterdam then New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo. All this over the next week and a half. I try to make myself available to communicate to everyone – so that we can use my company to elevate the game with skateboarding.
The UK is very important to me. I came here a lot for competitions so I have good memories. Crystal Palace, Farnborough, Manchester and London of course. My mum was an English teacher. She was telling me about England when I was a kid and then she sent me when I was twelve years old to learn English.

To Farnborough?
Ha ha. Farnborough was the first. There was a park. The first thing I learnt was how to order a one way ticket to get to London from the suburb I was in.
I like the vibe here. It is always moving. It’s creative.

So, what are your ideas for elevating the game as you just stated, then?
Our main office is in Lake Forest, California. There were few places to skate. We tried to create a platform. A place for kids to skate. A model. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. The idea of the platform was not to just bring skaters in but to create a scene itself. I went to see the city officials with an idea to create a joint venture between the government and my company working hand in hand. The public sector and the private sector working together. This is the first time this has happened like this. The skateboarders involvement isn’t just in being at the park – They run the skatepark. They make it happen – Working together. It goes beyond the act of skateboarding, too. We organise competitions. We have movie premieres, bands, local bands primarily. It gives them a platform, too. Instead of playing in the garage we bring them into the park so that they can play there. The kids can bring this whole personal experience to the park. I needed the committee and government to understand that skateboarding is not just about skating. It is a 24 hour thing. You think about it all the time – the music, the art. Your scene. It is so creative. It defies normal ‘sport’ conventions and should be respected for that.

I think this is where London is just starting to catch up to the North. We have several parks such as Burnley, The Works, etc. who run amazing events, have bands playing and their scene is so strong. London has been park deprived and so things just seem so much more scattered here. It’s changing, though.
One thing for this is that there are always more skateboarders inside cities. London, Los Angeles, Tokyo – All the same. Always, though, you find the skateparks outside the cities. I know it is because of land value and people believe it will make all this noise, but there are still football fields, and their activity makes as much noise.
So, Lake Forest skatepark is in the city; it is free to skate. We have over 100,000 skaters visit per year. To me, this is just the way it should be everywhere. Luckily in California, because of the weather our skatepark is outside and good all year – but they all should be. I grew up skating underground garages in the winter; being a rat.
You play your part in society – you pay your taxes or if you are younger, your parents do. In the UK there are around a million skateboarders, so I don’t see why there can’t be good support here. It gets you off the couch and outside. Kids like to play Playstation. It’s cool. They also need somewhere to go outside. That why I think skateboarding is good; for the events. Kids need to defy convention. You never know what each skateboarder will do. It’s different all the time and there is just so much going on around you in a park or competition. They need to be able to run with that. That is the thing which I can see attracting young kids.

I think that is why War of the Roses or the Crossfire Jam work so well. A whole load of best trick competitions and everyone just making noise – I also guess that is why GvR works so well. I mean, one stance versus another? It’s a fun idea – Actually, it’s a stupid idea. For that reason it encompasses what skateboarding is about - for me at least. Just a riot.
Oh, I think it is good to be stupid. You have to be spontaneous. Skateboarding is constantly moving.
The idea of the GvR is just about having fun. Just to get everyone together and give them a goal for the weekend. Not like team sports such as football or basketball. Skateboarding is more individual. At the same time, skateboarders are always skating together, sessioning something. This is how the team thing works.
We use it to bring more awareness for us. For people to understand skateboarding better. We have good media support. We get a lot of TV coverage. It is good to show what we do – it then makes it harder for people to believe that we should be getting tickets for skating in the street as the can now understand skateboarding. Goofy or Regular also gives those who don’t know about skateboarding something to pick up on. They can understand stance – and this could make it a little easier for them to try it out.

I think that has always been street skating’s problem in the eyes of the general public. Vert skating is easy for people who don’t care about skateboarding to understand. Big jump after big jump. You don’t need to know the intricacies of flips or switch, or whatever, to appreciate it. Ideas like this make it more approachable.
I also think this helps bring pressure on the city to cater for street skaters. We make it like a fair – a celebration of skateboarding. People can see the companies, the pro’s – They can see what we are actually doing on the streets. We also set up a little skatepark for the kids over the weekend. Otherwise they get frustrated at seeing all of this skateboarding but not being able to skate. We bring music in. Last year the Beastie Boys played. That was cool. They have been interacting with skaters for so long. It turned into a big skateboard fiesta. Three days. We run the event so that we have a bunch of people skating at the same time, too – not just one guy. The pressure for just one person on their own – especially if they miss tricks – it’s not good. With a few people skating it just means there is so much more to watch. Like a major frenzy going on. Waah! There is so much energy. It ends up as more of a session, and people push themselves when that happens. We’ve been surprised watching over the last three years – feeling the excitement growing as the hours go by. You feel it step to the next level as the sessions get more intense.

…and now you’ve decided to ship the idea to the UK?
Yeah. The first one in Europe. Our event is being run in September at the Prissick Plaza. We just felt like giving something to the UK. It felt like it made sense and we’d like to help where you are taking skateboarding. Something major for Etnies was our roots in the UK. The first team we sponsored – Pig City – they were from Brighton. Also, where we did 20th anniversary – We did it in Paris and also Lake Forest – but we didn’t do something in the UK. That kind of sucked. I felt I had to do something in the UK.

Are the facilities we now have such as Dundee, Prissick and Stoke making the UK more noticeable?
Yeah. When we do something like this it needs to be on a certain level – Although, I do hope that GvR isn’t just limited to big events like this. I’d like to see skate shops or local contests run with this format.

Kind of like the Game of Skate?
Yeah, yeah.

So something else I want to ask you about is your environmental issues and how you felt the need to run with it.
Okay, well I remember when I was skating in Paris, growing up. I starting thinking about how I couldn’t breathe so good while I was skating as I skated by the freeway. With skating, too, I was interacting with the environment, so it made me really start to think about this all the time especially for the last ten years. So, I started to try to understand it and learn. It was then that I realised that there was things which we could do. I mean, I always felt there was nothing I could do about it before. Car use gas, burning gas pollutes. What kind of good could I do? It would create little impact. Then, I realised that through my company I can do this. I can talk about it. I can try to make people aware. I realised the company could change to do something about it as we had people there who were passionate about it. For most companies it is about money. Public companies are about investment, shareholders, how much they are making. This doesn’t help to make a more environmentally friendly approach even if the consumer is asking for it.
So, I started to think that maybe – like the skatepark in Lake Forest – we could try to create a model for other companies to do this too, to help people feel better, breathe better, skate better. This all has to really be a long term thing.
The one thing I really think is that I don’t want to really, really push it. Skateboarders don’t want to be told do this or do that. We don’t push the advertising for it. It is more an education thing and Etnies is about pushing skateboarding. Skateboarding is number one. We make an environmentally friendly product line – we do a range called the SEED project. This is how we show what we are doing – We know it doesn’t sell that much but that isn’t the point – It is to show awareness. To educate. I think there are a lot of things which people may not be aware of though. I mean, everybody needs to change the processes of everything we do as in thirty years it will be impossible to reverse this. In fifty years it will have catastrophic results. This is what Professor Stephen Hawking is talking about a lot right now. So, we are changing the processes used in making product. Right now 80% of our products use water based glues. Not petroleum based. All of the paper, the boxes – everything is recycled. We also have our headquarters which is powered by solar energy. The building itself is recycled limestone. We have to regenerate. We want to create no carbon dioxide.

So, in effect trying to leave no carbon footprint?

This is it. Skateboarding has smaller companies, though – unlike surf companies so this is harder for them to do. At the other end, the larger companies turn into public companies. As I said – They have to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. This is how they work. Whereas for me, I own the company privately. I’m passionate about skateboarding. I’m passionate about living and feeling good. I can make the decisions and the people I work with want this.

Do you see ever taking this further to take the education directly to the skateboarders?

For me, this would take a long time to set up and do. I have to run the company. I have hired the first ever environmental manager for my company. I have been doing his job for 8 years and it finally become too much. So, I found a guy – young and was into skateboarding. I got him to study Soletech – To work with the company, educate the company. Right now he is going through all of our offices and factories to figure out how we can reduce the carbon footprint for all of our processes and how long it will take for us to leave no footprint at all. It is a lot of work and it will take a lot of time as it is a big company with a lot going on. I’ve spent a lot of time in China over the last five years to educate the people in our factory as to where we need to head. It is enduring as it is a totally different level.
I don’t want to tell skateboarders what to do. I’d rather just do it and if it inspires then that is good. I’m glad skateboarders want to talk about it and I think if we can just share the information and change the way the company works – create a platform just like the park – then we can do our part.

2nd June 2004

This little clip consists of someone I skated with most days in Oz, yet filmed very little of. Resident number one at the citypark in Melbourne.
Richard Flude, Nugget (Shane O'Niell) and Brenton were there every single day. Those three are some of the most consistent skaters I've ever seen.

Anyway - I think this little clip would have come from a visit to Globe HQ (as this hip was built in their car park) on a shoe blag mission by Brenton.
As I mentioned - he's one of those guys who can do everything on a skateboard. I tried to get him into filming stuff, but I just think he felt a bit too self concious to be pushing himself.
This would have been one of those 'break in' attempts to get him into the swing of it. A simple spot and a bunch of tricks he can fire off first shot which'll look fun thrown together.

I guess it didn't work.

Brenton Wierauch - Hardcore Offices, Melbourne from Kevin Parrott on Vimeo.

July 27th-28th 2004

The broken arm (fourteen weeks and counting) has made me slack on all things keyboard related of late. One finger typing sucks. Doing it for a laugh on a blog doesn't come in on the list of things I'm up for currently. Sort of.

Anyhow, after an operation which has seen my arm once again wrapped to the point of immobility and - just to add to the excitement - a hip which has had bone marrow removed to help said arm, I've been put in the strange position of having to take proper time off of work.

Fun, but only partially as these painkillers have a knack of leaving you staring into space for hours at a time.

Anyhow, during this time out I managed to get around to sending my damaged fisheye in for repair. No filming anyway for the above reasons - but now I have time on my hands I can finally get on with the things you only ever worry about seconds before you fall to sleep.

One of which for me is thirteen years of footage for which a good chunk only resides on DV tapes.
Under the previous regime, once the footage appeared in a video it was deleted from the hard drive if no more fun was to be had with it.

Except now, all these years later tapes are deteriorating and memories are fading.

I've begun a recapturing project which will hopefully see me regrab hundreds of random lines and ticklers from forgotten faces, child-doubles of now more well known names and those that just never went and aged at all.

First up - a little trip to Prague.
We got in on the 27th July 2004 - the night before the Mystic Cup Qualifiers. Rodney and I shared a room kinda near the park. We got straight down there for a little session and the first half of the clip below was filmed as we had arranged to meet a few Antipodean pals for a shred.

What's really amusing is that this was a Creme Skateboards trip. Rod was (is?) pro for them. I believe the rest of the team at that point was Manuel Magreitter and Dominic Dietrich. Maybe there was an Am or two. Who knows?

Notice however how only Rodney appears in the park section of the clip.
Powers that be over at Creme HQ were so clued up on skateboarding that they managed to send us out to meet up with Manu and Domi at Mystic with a plan to us useing some downtime from the contest to go and film.

Nice idea, if a little limiting.

However, Creme negated to let Manu or Domi know. They also failed in letting us know that they were at Mystic with Quiksilver who would be using downtime to look after the lads in only a way which Quik would - boat parties and other general shit that has fuck all to do with skateboarding.

So, once all three Creme bods had finished their runs, I tried to get the action underway only to find out all the above.
Rod retracted to a purely support role from there on in, pissed at the donuts who sent him there - yet excited to party and roll with old Aussie mates. He was good value on the sidelines.

I'm stoked the Aussies were there. I'd hung out with Morgan and Jake a lot. Jake would come and give us a shout when he was down in Melbourne way back when he was scared of anything even booze related. This was right around the timme Jake got on Volcom (He's wearing SMP gear here as well as Etnies) and probably not long after Blind.
We both went to grab some food one afternoon in Prague and Jake refused to let me pay as "I'd looked out for him when he was younger, so he felt he should return the favour as he's now doing okay".
That's fairly fucking rad.
That line of Jakes at the end was something he did in two part with the upmost of ease - yet come camera time, it became a nightmare.
As he says at the end (His last of probably 70 tries) - "I really don't care".
Fair play.

Morgan had asked me to film a video park with him while I was in Australia, which we'd finished a few months previous to this - so it was nice to see him post deadline in a neutral country for the good times.

Jon Lorcan was someone I'd kinda met a few times. He's a rad guy - always grinning. I think this was right around the time he became the editor for Slam magazine.
Actually, after this trip he usked me to come film a tour video for Slam. They'd be going to Lisbon with a good crew but sadly I was elsewhere over their dates.
Ciaran O' Conner ended up putting that one together for them. One of Ross' tricks from Savoir Faire ended up getting filmed on that trip by Ciaran. It's probably the oldest thing in that video!

On street only duties is Ben Gauci starring in an unfinished line. Blind in one eye. A painter and decorator who had a moment as Dark Star TM. He's fairly excited about the world.
I've not heard from him in forever.
Richard Flude, Steve Gourley and Ben were the first people to take me street skating in Australia. They just grabbed me out of the citypark, threw me in the van and took me on their mission. For that, I eternally hold them in the highest regard.

I think a bit of this ended up in Morgan's Liquid Pixel World Lap. I can see Morgan getting doubles on the final Jake line...

Prague 27-28 July 2004 from Kevin Parrott on Vimeo.

Magic Sticky Hands

I just re-watched the Magic Sticky Hands DVD recently and remembered that I reviewed the DVD for Sidewalk #127 a few years ago.
Whatever happened to Nick Worthington?
Originally I had the plan of getting Div, Benson and Colin Adam to review it for me, but when it came to it that turned out to be as much fun as herding cats - so it ended up being a fairly straight affair.

The sections aren't up on the Heroin site but the still solid Pulman extra is over on the Mpora site.




Anyway - here's the review:

Tom Ball Circa 1997.

I think I've already mentioned that I found a bunch of CD-ROM's with backups of a lot of lost Hi-8 footage.

I put this clip together a few weeks ago - just before the Stone Age Tour (Of which I still need to post up). It's Tom Ball footage from my parents video camera, Alex Mead's camera and my first one, too.
In fact, Alex filmed a bit of this, if I remember correctly - The kickflip at the end was his.
A little Jelly Mumbo's in there, too.

Anyway - Tom is rad. Still shredding. Not sure how his golf game turned out these days, though.

Enjoy.

Thamesmead is a hole.

In order of appearance:
Dave Chesson, Tom Crowe, Mark Brewster, Ed Harper, Nick Biagoni (Rav), Nick Jensen, Pete King, Luke Hunt, Simon Skipp, Matt Cotton, Tom Ball, Clive.

I think this clip was put together purely becuase I had some new editing equipment/software. Maybe. It'd explain the reverse footage and the crappy mosaic fade out at the end. This edit is from about 1997. I found it on a CD-Rom when I last moved house.

The tower blocks at the start are the Thamesmead Estate in South East London. They appeared a couple of years later in the Aphex Twin Come to Daddy video.
Thamesmead is quite possibly of of the worst places, ever. The old police station was burnt out had then been moved into an adjoining port-a-cabin. In turn, this had been burnt out so they'd just moved to another next door.

On a Dave Chesson hot tip, we went out relatively early to skate there on a weekday, thinking that all the smackheads would be asleep. It was the right plan.
Simon Skipp's Backside 360 flip to bow legged run out was filmed there, too. I'll have to find the other Chesson/Skipp tricks from that session and get them up soon.

This clip has got a few Chesson treats, actually...I can't think of seeing him do many Backside Nosegrinds, and that Frontboard on the now defunct Bexley Heath rail was great.
Brewster's Zoo Yorked out Frontboard near Southbank is really of its time. Black Shell pants. Yo.

Ed Harper is the guy doing the Frontside Half Cab Flip. He used to knock about Playstation Skatepark until the boss gave him a job. He's now in a pretty successful band called White Rose Movement. Matt Cotton is in there too with a Switch Heelflip Varial. I think this was the day he came out with the "If I don't get sponsored this summer, I am going to quit skating" line. Ha.
I saw him a year or so ago. I think he actually did quit for some time.
Clever.

Rav is in there skating my old secondary school. He once had a sequence in Sidewalk skating the middle of the A12 link to the M11 about 200 meters from where I now live. I saw him in a pub last night, too. I think thats the main reason I uploaded this clip today. Rad guy. Shame he doesn't skate anymore, but I think he fucked his knee so many times he had to stop as he was missing a lot of time off of work.

There a little Nick Jensen in there, too - both in terms of the one trick appearance and his size. He used to be part of the OG crew at Playstation. He was there every single day only disappearing off to Southbank at weekends, although he'd return for the evening session. True rat.

Simon Skipp has the one foot roll away from the Fakie Backlip on a bench which is now the local hang out in Romford for a bunch of Emo kids who carry their boards by their trucks and have yet to figure out that they could skate the benches as opposed to just sit on them smoking Marlboro Reds...

Tom Ball is in there with the Nick Jensen WFTW Double set stair ollie amongst other things. Tom was stoked Nick did that in his video part (Nick did it in a line a few years after).
Chris Ault returned and killed those stairs for a HTL edit a couple of years ago.
Tom also has probably the first footage of Skipps Ditch, way before we cut back the bushes, fixed the ledges and concreted it up...

Old times...

Chris Pulman

Ben Raemers came to stay last night before he went off on his mission this morning to Belgium, Rotterdam and Amsterdam.
I'll meet him in Amsterdam in a couple of weeks for a weekend of riding bikes around the city.

We ended up looking at some internoodles, which led onto going through some footage of new-ish local spots (bear in mind that I've filmed about 10 things in total the past year), which then led me to rediscovering a load of footage tucked away on a drive.

There's all sorts there.
Like this clip of Chris Pulman.



I think it may have been in 'Good Shit', although I'm not sure. I know I filmed Fos' wrist breaking. It was right where Chris' above trick was filmed, just before the mini ramp was built (Which I think was brand new in the Pulman clip). That slam was horrible. I'm glad I don't have the footage and that he does.

Anyway - what pushed me into putting that up was that this morning on my usual internoodles rounds, I came across this Blackbox High 5's.



I'm especially impressed it got past Gonella.
























Chris Pulman's High 5's over at the Blackbox site.

Not digging too deep...

This was a little ad I put together for last years UKSA National Skateboarding Championships.

I think Niall Kenny filmed the Ben Nordberg training footage. I like Nordberg. He is up for it and doesn't take himself too seriously.

Hopefully it is obvious what we were trying to do here. I mean, it's clearly goofy footage of him pissing about while bored on some tour.
Kind of a shame as I wanted to do a really serious one. One where no-one would actually be sure if we were joking or not. I mean, we came out with the "National Skateboarding Championships" (A necessary evil) moniker which kind of reeks of everything I didn't want to be near when I got into skateboarding - so we could of managed to pull off the 'not getting it' angle easily, I'm sure.
Anyway, if you missed it -gutted. It was a good excuse to not only get all the usual contest faces together but also knock about with those not normally prone like Snowy, Joey, Lev, Nicholson, Tom Knox, Tanner, Howsey, Sean Smith and the like. The actual skateboarding was fucking crackers, too.

Good times.

You have 7,000,000 unread mails.

Cruising YouTube to avoid work is great. Karma rewarded me already for such a grand decision.

I'm guessing this is Reading University time for Si Skipp around 96ish.



I remember being handed tiny comressed Quicktimes of these tricks for an old video part which were never used due to the quality. Stoked to see them somewhere again.

Back to the idea...

I seem to have strayed a little from the original idea of this blog as the excuse to get all the edits and randoms off of my hard drive and into one place.

So, back on with the task.



I had the Scots (Div, Colin, Benson and Alex Irvine) stop by the house for a few days and managed to convince Raemers it'd be worth his while taking some floor space at the same time.

We rolled around a few spots - Ilford Bowl, the rail (Frontlipped at 11am after the previous days 8 hour skate marathon), Whitstable (Which has the worst BMXicans for locals), Saffron Walden, Dartford, the Finsbury Park double kink and that secret spot, too and Ben just kept upping the ante wherever we went.
We seriously ended up with so much stuff. I should find the extra bits from around that time and get it up as a second clip.

Anyway, about three days later Ben, Munson, Leo Sharp and I headed to Rom where Ben went crackers again (Flip Backside Disaster in Rom Pool is not to be sniffed at). This was followed to a pre-team house trip to Bilbao for Ben to shoot his Haunts...and shoot it he did.
Kris Vile was also on that trip. He didn't skate a ton, but every trick he did was the "new best trick of the trip". Most of that stuff showed up in his interview last year and a little appeared in Savoir Faire. All the Spain stuff was over a 4 day visit.

Actually, there are a couple of randoms in there. Three tricks are from Amsterdam Am, during practice or over on their amazing mini ramp. A couple more are from Wild in the Park's in Aberdeen. There's also a vert wall slam from Penzance (Where we got a little of Div's part for Savoir Faire).

About this time I gave Nick at Power a shout about their new Death DVD. Reason being that I just really didn't want Ben's stuff to end up on a web edit or worse, sit on a hard drive for 4 years only to become outdated. I'm good at letting shit go stale.

He was keen and threw Ben's part on as an extra (Although it got an airing at the premiere - Whoop!).
As a side note, I also sent it up to Consolidated to see if those guys we're interested in it. I didn't get a reply at all - until I re-emailed them after I saw that they'd just thrown it on their site a few weeks later and had given it to TWS, claiming it as theirs. So stoked they're still about the little man, eh (Although to be fair, Volcom paid more than I did. Petrol receipts n' all)?

Anyway...Negativity out.

The K Grind at the end was stupid. Vile Backside Smithed it and Raemers believed he couldn't keep up with that, so he just tried to go really fast on his trick to make it worthy. Such a funny outlook. That Lipslide hop in is bullshit. So gnarly, and a fucked up but amazing Raemers roll out. In fact, the whole part is still bananas. That doorway spot is so, so hard to skate.

Enjoy.

PS. I'll try to find some obscure stuff soon. I know I have Santa Cruz UK demo tapes somewhere. Tim Brauch and Chet Childress.

If I remember correctly...

...this would have been the final trip I went on whilst completely skint.

That's not to say money is great right now - but if we're out of milk these days, chances are I'll go buy a bottle and not hope someone else will take care of it. Know what I mean?

Excuse the blandness of this post. I'm ill as...cooped up on the sofa filled with medicines.

All of the edits use Small Faces songs. Vans have this list of songs they've already got cleared. It's actually a pretty fucking good list. I think it contains all of the good Maiden albums and plenty more. Trouble is, the fun we we're filming didn't exactly suit Maiden. Any tour which avoids the pub in the evening needs something other than metal set to it, right?

Part 1.
Oh - that Vans mention a minute ago wasn't random. I should point out that this was their little UK team 5 day trip around the South East of England. I think this was also the first time a lot of the team met Dave Watson. We got to hit up a few of his local spots before travelling out to these odd places I had previously pretty much only hit up with Si Skipp and Tom Ball.
Ste Roe's Alley Oop Disater Wallride thing ended up as his last trick in Savoir Faire a year later. That came out of nowhere...One of those sessions where it was all winding down and then someone gives something 5 tries only to up all that came before it.



Part 2.
The second part has a little session on the now defunct Rainham kicker. I hated that spot. You can't see the kicker on the run up, you need someone on it to spot for the lorries doing 60mph on the run out - and the kicker wasn't much more than board width. Chris' Backside 360 ended up in Savoir Faire, too. It's pretty much the only one he's ever done. Not a bad effort.
There weren't any photo's from this session (nor the Dagenham and Skipps Ditch sessions in Part 1) as Silent Will and Grove had been out the night before in Sheffield and forgot that they had to drive down the country the next morning. Truly professional.



Part 3.
The Sound Mirror. Chris Oliver and I had been up to the other Sound Mirror on the east coast a few weeks before the tour to film some bits. He ended up with a Kickflip fakie which was in his Kingpin interview as well as his Savoir Faire part.
With the Vans team we decided to try to hit up the ones a little further down the coast. They were far bigger, and far harder to skate. I'll put up the footage from Chris' session soon just so you can see the size difference.



Part 4.
Okay, illnness is returning fast. I need more medicine, so I'm going to get this post done fast.
I'm amazed we got to spend all day at this spot. There is still so much to do there...We tried to go again but got the boot by the police after 5 minutes, which sucked. It's a long way to drive from my place just to get the busted.
I don't think we were meant to find it again, actually. We were told it was in such-and-such-a-town and were driven out there. I remember someone sitting in the car and saying that "We've already driven past that hotel once already". We were also taken down a lot of back roads. Fairs fair. Those guys didn't know us for shit and they were giving up their gold. The only reason I feel comfortable writing this is because everyone ended up being really good mates with each other afterwards (James even ended up travelling the world for a year with Pas).
The thing is, that place is huge and blue and so long as we knew it was by the sea, we'd be able to find it on Google Earth.

Check Dave's Nollie Flip. Amazing.



Part 5.
The vert/mini deathtrap. Joe Sandland took us there. The place was wrong. One fuckup and you'd slice a hand off under that tired sheet metal surface.

Theres not much to say about this stuff. Broadstairs, Margate and thats about it. Tyreman came into his own here. When he knows what he wants to do, he gets on with the job. He had so much coverage around this time and it's no wonder.
Grove's double set ollie was the last thing we filmed on this tour We saved it for Savoir Faire. Ollie Ollied the double set (Woah. Weird sentence). I should dig that out. I think Ben was eyeing it up and Ollie thought he'd try it. Not only did he do it first shot, he also shinned Grove by zooming his board at him just beforehand. Clever move.



More shit when manflu passes...

Shoe-boxes full of tapes, Vol. 1

I guess the point of starting this blog is to finally get some of the footage I've had chewing up space all this time out there into the wide world...

They'll end up in no particular order I'm sure. In fact, this one is going up first as it is a tiny file and pretty much just a test to see if I can get the 'ol bloggins working.

This is Mattias Nylén.
He'd been asked to film for the Krooked DVD and only had a little time to do so.

We had some bits which had only been seen in the UK - or had ended up as clips here and there. Cobbled together, it would have made a pretty good, short intro part to non-European viewers.

However, in classic Mattias style, he let me know of the deadline the day the DVD was premiering in the US.
So, with only a few new clips we decided we could film a part and get a video going ourselves (There was among other ideas, an idea of a UK concrete video if I remember correctly), but Mattias was fluctuating in commitment - and to be fair to him, he was also traveling a lot and knocking on all doors to see if he could get something good going and a bit of solid cash coming in.
So, rather than sit on footage which may never see the light of day, I spent an evening stealing logos and artwork from the internet (Google images is and always has been amazing, eh?), nabbed a bit of Sonic Youth feedback and threw together this trippy piece with a view to it becoming a DVD extra, if I could get it over quick enough.

For one reason or another, it didn't go on the DVD - Probably because it just bastardized Krooked's art output with some rider who's only half on. Not the best sell for us, eh?
It ultimately ended up as a web clip on www.dlxsf.com. I' also guessing (hoping?) the DVD was authored on footage deadline, too (as they are always with skateboarding it seems). Therefore, internet was the only place for the clip of the rider who didn't get it together* for the DVD.

From what I can make out on the tape logs, the Stale Eggplant (or infact, all of the clip) was filmed on the 18th July 2006. Bay Sixty6 Vert Ramp, London.

*Although to be fair, he did have a trick in the credits. As filmed by his girlfriend.