Actually...Fuck it. I'll get this out fo the way now.
Street Qualifiers:
Vert Qualifiers:
Street Semis:
Blueprint and Mob Grip Best Trick comps:
Vert Finals:
Street Finals:
Last weekend was mental. Sam Beckett is a wizard. Throwing 720's into runs and Kickflip Liens. Is he pulling forward from his forenamesake who seems to be stuck on the 540 variations? No diss to Bosworth. You can't knock a fourteen year old doing seven foot high airwalk 540's. Beckett's bag of lip tricks and flip tricks seems to work out for him, though. I'd still love to see the X Games footage where Bosworth won.
As for Street - Grove got done out of the big money. I say that as a judge - and it was way harder than last year. Cast your mind back and think about Chris Oliver's run. Not one person would have doubted him at the top of the podium. This year, though, the guesses we're all over the place from the crowd. Ross won it, fair and square, though. Everything he did was a joke - clean and comfortable. I'm actually looking at the scores now - and up until eighth place it is all so close. Grove was only a couple of points below Wileman - but a £700 drop in prize money is harsh. I'm sure he doesn't give a fuck, though - He killed the Blueprint Best Trick comp (As did BP's other ex, Flynn Trotman) and walked away with an entire warehouse backing him.
Grove is on form - Ross and Sam may have taken the loot, but it was his weekend, undoubtedly.
Oh - Check Daryll in the finals. Dude's we're feeling ballsy kickflipping that driveway when he came along and ruined the show for them.
Special mention to Vaughn Baker and Neil Smith. Vaughn was clearly having a right laugh and Neil was creating lines in a park for which they don't really exist.
I just put this post up on the Tweaker blog. Figured I'd double post it here as the video is so good...
"Skateboarding for the love of it is so out."
...Was this part filmed PRE-Flip?
If so, that means that Luan came up with this without Ewan and Co. breathing down his neck.
Does stuff like this video part happen anymore without management, PR and marketing (AKA the paid up pro-team/TM, the staff photographer and the employed filmer) giving the skater hell and riding them hard on deadlines, paychecks and cover shots?
You could probably count the amount of times this sort of knockback shit has happened this millenium on one hand. In fact, all I can think of is PJ Ladd.
PS. PurpleTurtleDrizzle - Extra points for filming it off the TV. Lose them all, go straight to jail and don't collect £200 for encoding your username in the top corner of the clip.
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.
Yeah, thats a big, big claim...But there is a certain air of Marc Johnson in Mark Nicolson's style.
I've known Nicolson since he was about 12. He used to frequent the Waltham Cross Youth Centre on a Wednesday. It was about three years until he spoke. Actually, I thought he was a girl for pretty much the first six months. Don't tell anyone. It was Tom Ball whop got him talking, if I remember rightly. I think that the MJ comparison initially surfaced after witnessing an old downhill line at the Diving Board Benches in a Big Worms video. Mellow flick and some clearly very loose trucks.
Check out this post on the Death blog. Passmore's old Focal Point video (another I lent out, never to have been returned) has had the Nicolson section ripped. Good viewing.
So refreshing. I loved the Lakai video, as did every other skatenerd. However, it's nice to see that Alien are still doing their thing and not conforming. A few nods to old Alien videos and a lot of J. Mascis.
...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.
