What’s this! Banks? In Milton Keynes? No, no, it can’t be.
I thought those plans for the South City Plaza were a joke too but it’s true. The grey ledge metropolis of Milton Keynes now has some much needed grey-coloured flatbanks installed, and some more tasty-looking ledges of course. Karma Skateboards went down there to check it out.
Owen Hopkins, Channon Wallace, Joey Hurst and Troy Wilding get stuck in below…
The last decade has seen the landscape of British skateboarding undergo a radical seismic shift. Though the small-town spots, blindbumps and cobbles that helped craft the UK’s idiosyncratic approach to skating still pepper our streets, the rapid increase in smooth concrete and innovative skater-made terrain has done so much to encourage younger skaters to roll and get creative. Maverick Industries‘ latest construction in Midsomer Norton is another creation that has continued to push the boundaries for what a skateboarder in Britain can do.
Christened the ‘Kate’ park by the Maverick team because of the invaluable input that began in the mid-90s from the BA3 skate store owners and friends, it’s a live physical manifestation of what the collective skate scene in Norton could ever want to skate. Maverick Designer, Ian Jennings, lived and skated in Norton for 14 years prior to the completiton of the concrete dream that stemmed from a simple petition from the man himself. The petition swiftly became a concept which soon become a real, flowing park through a little graft and a lot of passion from Maverick, the locals and the Manic Skaterz crew. Are you sick of living in a small town with no spots? It’s been proven time and time again that we can make it happen. It just takes a little effort, some patience and the motivation that comes from a real desire to get some banging terrain on your turf.
In just the first few weeks the unanimous reaction has been glowing. Ben Nordberg has already described it as the best park he’s ever skated, as have countless others. Such claims would often be dismissed as hyperbole but this really is the real deal because just look at it! It’s a tremendous looking park, but we wanted the full low-down from someone who’s got down and dirty with the park and left some of his skin on the concrete. We got in touch with one of Bristol’s finest and one big hoppa, Owen Hopkins. Fresh from skating the place he gave us his insight into Midsomer Norton…
“It is one of the best concrete parks I have ever skated, it has something that caters for everyone’s needs and has a very nice flow about it. I’ve skated many concrete parks and a common flaw is that you can only hit one obstacle and then your line is over. This is not the case at Norton; you can cruise around the whole park from the top, it’s really fun.
It offers you everything you need to be able to take stuff to the streets – it has handrails/stairs/ledges/manual blocks/flat bars etc as well as all the other stuff that is usually in a skatepark – hips/driveways/quarters/bowls etc. I really enjoy the driveway with astro turf in the middle and also the flat bar rail across the astro turf – they both make you go the full distance! The pump bumps which lead to a bank and then into the bowl are really fun to cruise around and get some speed together. I’m not really a bowl skater but have been told it has some really nice lines, I just can’t hit them!
It probably has everything I have skated before in one park which is what makes it so fun. I’ve done some things there that I have never done before, so I can imagine the youth of Midsomer Norton being in the X Games in a few years time!”
So if the words from Hoppa and Nordberg haven’t caused you to book train tickets to Norton already then have a look at this clip from James Harris featuring the Redlight and 5050 crew below. Skate everywhere and everything kids, if you aren’t satisfied then do something about it. Big props to everyone involved in the making of this fantastic park.
You can find Midsomer Norton Skatepark at Gullock Tyning, Midsomer Norton, BA3 2UH. Or check the map…
The first big event to hit Norton is the medieval themed Grand Skate Jam on August 14th. Further information is available here. For a teaser shot by Tim Crawley just watch the video below.
The UK skateboard scene has been summoned to appear at a ye olde skate jamme kind of affair at the brand new concrete dreamland in Midsomer Norton.
The Official Grand Skate Jam will take place on August 14th from noon onwards and will be your usual comp format with lots of great stuff to be won and all the typical gubbins; except the theme is medieval castle style so put on your shining armour get jousting for the Knight of the Realm prize! Better than wearing a helmet, right? Protect ye neck…
Today we enter a Norton time capsule constructed by Tim Crawley, who is currently piecing together snippets of the Norton skate scene history as it flourished and bloomed over the years prior to getting one of the best skateparks in the UK.
We’ll be putting a Spot Check of the new Maverick park in Midsomer Norton a little later but here’s a little history for you to sink your teeth into beforehand. Hi-8 tapes and small town spots, the things dreams are made of…
Random Clips from Norton Skate Massive – Circa ’98 from TCTV on Vimeo.
Attention reader: you are all to stop what you are doing and watch the new Grinderman video. Even if you aren’t too keen on Nick Cave’s grimey and groovey garage rock troupe you should spare five minutes of your time to enter the batshit insane world of Heathen Child, a video directed by John Hillcoat.
Imagine a topless voodoo dancer, some wolfmen, a wolf, a hair-monster, a dog composer and a gun-totting, lazer shooting Roman warrior version of Cave and his crew collectively taunting an eerie girl in a bath that’s seemingly possesed by a director with ADHD. Now try to pretend you’re not excited to watch it.
Wow.
Really, just wow.
Leigh-On-Sea skatepark will be holding a competition with Switch Skatestore for skateboarders only on August 29th.
The jam kicks off at 1:30PM so get down there and suck in some of the Essex sunshine for a chance to win some product from and for a guaranteed good time.
Searching For A Pulse / The Worth Of The World
No Sleep Records
Two of the pre-eminent members in burgeoning Post-Hardcore scene ‘The Wave’, La Dispute and Touché Amoré release this brand new split 7”inch Searching For a Pulse / The Worth of the World. This pairing of some of punk’s most exciting young blood means expectations are set high, but the two bands meet them convincingly.
Touché Amoré kick off the split with I’ll Get My Just Deserve, which is boosted by the contributions of La Dispute’s distinctive vocalist Jordan Treynor. The ascending guitar melody injects the track with a great sense of urgency, which is just as well, as like most of Touché Amoré’s material the song is over in a flash. But it’s the vocal interplay between the two singers that is most impressive about the record’s first half, and although very brief, hints at the further potential of this collaboration.
La Dispute offer the weightier half of the release, which picks up where their immense 2008 debut left off. How I Feel is the heavier of the two tracks, working around up-tempo guitar riffs before breaking down into an epic shouting contest between the two vocalists. The 7”inch is rounded off by the slower paced Why It Scares Me, the record’s calmest offering which puts emphasis on Treynor’s lyrical sprawl. Whether or not you like La Dispute, or indeed this record, will ultimately hinge on what you make of Treynor’s melodramatic vocal style.
Personally I like a little melodrama in my hardcore, and few do it better than both La Dispute and Touché Amoré. As expected, then, this split is one of the year’s standout punk releases and promises much for the next full lengths from both bands.
Sleekly Lion
Dark Castle Entertainment
www.splicethefilm.com
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice is a puzzler of a film. In essence, a modern day Frankenstein story centering around the experiments of young scientist super couple Clive (Adrien Brody’s nose) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), hired by some sort of faceless company in order to engineer various biological scientific patents. They specialize in a form of bio-engineering that has allowed them to combine several bits of D.N.A from various animals and create a new life form, specifically a kind of animated grey turd with no recognisable features…a bit like Andie Macdowell. However, they decide to hurl all established rule books – moral, ethical or otherwise – into a huge bin and conduct a secret experiment behind everyone else’s backs by shoving some human D.N.A in there as well. Low and behold they end up making a human animal hybrid that is simultaneously elegant, dangerous, childlike, innocent and weirdly sexual. As a consequence of their action, shit and fan unsurprisingly collide in a most spectacular “science should know its limits, one cannot play god” sort of way.
Now, having watched it, digested it and had plenty of time to think about it, I’m still not entirely sure whether I enjoyed or really…thoroughly disliked Splice. First of all, what Natali has tried to achieve is commendable in itself; at heart you can see he wants to make some sort of utterly weird David Crononberg taking on the concept of the family unit.
The film features some extremely bizarre scenes as the lines between seeing Dren (the creature’s name is ‘nerd’ backwards, clever that innit?) as an experiment and viewing her as a child become increasingly blurred. However, for whatever reason, be it wish of mainstream success, or some studio meddling or whatever, the film never really truly gives into this body horror via 2 point 4 children vision and instead finds itself trying to be a more generic horror affair. As a result, the tone of the whole piece is extremely jarring, it’s like two totally separate films rubbing awkwardly against one another, scrambling for screen time. Basically, it all feels rather off.
Other than Dren, which is a quite wonderful monster creation anchored by fine performance by Delphine Chaneac, who manages to be other worldly, worryingly unpredictable and oddly sexual all at once, none of the actors really shine through. In their defence this was partly to do with the cliché riddled script (that had several members of the audience I viewed it with laughing), and a collection of plot holes big enough that you could fly a godless human animal hybrid through them.
Hopefully Splice can simply remain nothing more than – like Dren herself – a partly failed experiment; a nice attempt at the sort of monster film rarely seen on wide release these days and not go down the road of Natali’s most famous creation, Cube, a road paved with exponentially shittier straight-to-DVD sequels, seemingly with the single minded goal of ruining whatever made the original any good.
Jonathan Day
Wiz Khalifa has celebrated inking a deal with Atlantic Records by releasing a new video.
The track, Never Been, is taken from his hugely popular Kush & Orange Juice mixtape and features, unsurprisingly for Wiz, weed. It’s a belting tune and has hot women in not-very-much-at-all so, y’know, press play and enjoy it.
Outside The Box
Tempa
myspace.com/skreamuk
So much has been written about Skream in the past couple of years that it’s hard to type words that don’t re-hash a multitude of already worn metaphors and showering of praise. However, the Croydonite producer who has spearheaded the rise of dubstep into the mainstream thanks in no small part to his remix of La Roux and subsequent release as part of Magnetic Man, deserves all the accolades he gets.
His second album, Outside The Box, holds a variety of styles and shows that he’s willing to go beyond what’s expected of him and branches away from dubstep, brushing with bass-heavy hip hop on 8 Bit Baby featuring Living Legends’ Murs. There are 2-step vibes on one of the stand-out tracks of the album How Real featuring the vocal talents of Freckles and even shades of Jungle on dance-floor banger Listenin’ To The Records On My Wall which is sure to be a set-smasher for a very long time to come.
Being able to mix the minimal style that made his In For The Kill remix so potent as he does on the tracks Finally [which features the red-headed Brixtonite] and I Love The Way in with the straight-up wobbling volume of Wibbler shows his dexterity and prowess around all things beat-led. Finishing the album with a track entitled The Epic Last Song could have been a good way to shoot himself in the foot, but the jump-up nature of it ensures that Outside The Box finishes on a huge high.
It’s not a perfect album, there are a few lapses, but even when a tune isn’t as great as those that surround it, the production skills of Skream are still to be marveled at. Who knows what’s next for him, but right now, this record is sure to get toungues wagging and feet pounding.
Abjekt