Skateboarding: the bastard offspring.
I was hooked by skateboarding videos in the 1980s because they, more often than not, contained sections on surfing, which had gone underground. It was still the original, golden sport I had seen in Bantham ten years earlier, but now I could also see it had a difficult streak and had spawned its bastard offspring, skateboarding. Together they kicked and screamed. I loved that. Surfing, I saw, could give me a niche that was beyond reproach or criticism. Bollocks to you and your middle class values. Surfing would give me a smokescreen to obfuscate those who didn’t or couldn’t get me.
Whenever I skateboarded after 1980 it was purposefully ironic, although deep down it really wasn’t. After the craze had fizzled out it was seen as another one of those silly here-today-gone-tomorrow fads – like Slinkys or spinners – and, as a result, was deeply unfashionable. I still loved it though and didn’t care that I was spectacularly off-trend. Standing on a board and flying down a hill, especially a smooth one, was nothing short of heavenly. I guess you would call it the glide in surfing terms – a state of perfect trim and balance.
During the craze my parents had realised they were fighting a losing battle so bought me a helmet for me to ride at the skateboard club, but after 1980, it was left to the spiders. My skateboarding was growing up and becoming a part of my newly forming identity. Skateboarding, and me, went underground.
I met Guy Hearn in 1981 but didn’t really become friends with him until 1983 when we started skateboarding together, with even deeper irony. He was taller than me, better looking than me and better at the guitar so I had to become the funny one. He was also better on a skateboard too, and had better equipment. We realised that there was a lot of good quality skateboarding gear languishing unused at the back of our rich friends’ cupboards and bought them up. I assembled a board for a song that I could only have dreamed of 5 years before: a Fibreflex with green 70mm Kryptonic wheels and ACS 651 trucks.
Together Guy and I started to ride the half pipes at Meanwhile Gardens under the Westway in west London. We hitch hiked to disused skateparks in the Chilterns, choosing to get out at the top of the best hills to skate down before sticking our thumbs out again. We played guitar, listened to The Beach Boys and got drunk on Thunderbird. We considered ourselves to be kids out of time. We travelled to the old 1970s parks that hadn’t been demolished: Meanwhile Gardens, The South Bank, Harrow and Brixton.
Skateboarding, enjoying something of a renaissance in the USA, was becoming the bad boy, having reinvented itself in the streets. It grew up, lost its childish image and dragged itself out of the crumbling, neglected bowls and into the critical gaze of authority and their security guards. The Ollie, a move that changed things forever, had been invented in the late 1970s and was now a standard trick for street skating. Videos drifted over from the USA . Every one of them, it seemed to me, included a section about surfing. Like skating it had moved on from the clean living image of the 1960s California boom. Instead of Jan and Dean, Gidget and Beach Blanket Bebop, I now saw surfing being presented as the domain of hardcore locals, off-the-map travellers, outsiders and mavericks.
I could see a direct line between the thrills I experienced while rushing down long, smooth hills on my skateboard and the freedom I had felt while riding waves on my belly at Bantham in 1974. I liked the obscurity of the pursuit and the effortlessness with which the surfers seemed to thread their way through the waves they rode. It had everything I felt I needed: sticking two fingers up at convention and authority and acting outside of the pathway others expected of me. Surfing, once again, offered me a way out of my home counties existence. Plus, it was, quite simply, cool as fuck.
I began to fixate on learning to surf. My old polystyrene board was still around somewhere but it wasn’t what I needed. If I was to learn how to surf properly I would need a proper board.
