Wearing a helmet has, in my ten-years of stubbornly skating nothing but multi-storey carpark curbs and this thing, rarely been appropriate. It’s almost certainly been necessary as I suck and fall over a lot but the only time I’ve accepted that my head is to look that much more like the end of one of Ed Bowen’s fingers is when it’s been enforced. Suffice to say, that massive hunk of plastic has always saved my bacon if I ever kid myself into thinking that skating the bowl at Rom is a good idea.
Here’s the dilemma, skating bowls IS a good idea because it’s the raddest, purest form of search and destroy skateboarding that everyone should man up and have a butchers at doing at least once, but it’s impossible to protect ya neck without, you know, looking like a bellend. And none of us here are Grant Taylor, whose head I hear is reportedly made of reinforced concrete; we need as much black plastic on our heads if we don’t want to end up like my good friend chimpy who couldn’t skate a curb last weekend as he was waking up in hospital after taking a slam to the noggin.
There is some good news from super helmet makers Bell, who since day one regularly succeeded in stopping people from dying and managed to make a few look like Daft Punk while flying through the air towards that hard, loving concrete. They’ve summoned Jim Phillips’ Sun God to put on this helmet, who you may (and should) recognise from Jason Jesse’s infamous deck run way back when helmets were so necessary they were kind of cool. They’ve certainly developed a sort of nostalgic coolness recently through the assistance of rad-tinted blogs like Chrome Ball and Vert Is Dead, much in the same way that baggy chinos and flannel shirts will always look awesome when listening to 36 Chambers.
So scope out a bowl, put on some shorts, pull your socks right up and go and try something new. But there aint a damn thing changed boy, protect ya head!
Bellend Sebastian