When We Was Rad

If you’re interested in the history of skateboarding in Britain, this site contains original vintage UK skateboard material from the eighties and nineties which originally appeared in R.a.D Magazine. It is an exercise in skateboard nostalgia for old school skaters and a glimpse of the roots of British skating for historians and people researching street culture: part of the Long Tail for skateboarding in the U.K. There are also hints of what life was like producing magazines in the days before desktop publishing.

The curse of captioning strikes again. That doesn’t look like Birmingham to me. But maybe my eyesight is failing!
This page marks the end of the monster coverage of the Powell Tour of 1988. Looking back on it, I think we went over the top: there’s 11 pages of it. That was huge amount in the days when the magazine was only 56 pages thick. But we were into this kind of thing. It was exciting. It was an event in the days before there were any stadium-type skate events in Britain.
It also involved getting out on the road and sharing in the atmosphere at a whole load of different places. That was very much more a R.a.D mag type of thing than any big centralised competition.

The shot of Mike Vallely at the South Bank skating in a R.a.D shirt certainly catches the eye… Those T shirts were completely over the top.
But the PC’s Skate shop advert is significant too. I think there was some fuss over the use of the ‘Pig City’ name in this context, but it’s a very dim memory. What’s nice now is to look back at these pictures of Mark Collins, Justin Ashby, Andy Binns and John Mitchell. Brighton was and is a very special place.

The words on this page are about the rain that plagued the Latimer Road demo, but the pictures are of blue sky and sun over Southsea Skatepark as Steve Caballero makes excellent use of the tombstone on the ramp. Photo by Paul Sunman — who took time out from Slam City to act as the driver and coordinator for the whole tour.

Two of my favourite skaters grin out at us from this Zorlac advert.
Mark and Barry Abrook were at the heart of British skateboarding right back to the Andover days. In fact, I think that should be “Thruxton Days”, but that was before my time. They go right back.
This advert was to promote their joint (I think) signature model “Limey Bastards from Hell”. Someone let me know, please: have I got that right?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.