Categories
Skateboarding News

Danny Way – Now You Know

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This new feature on Danny Way is worth a watch. He discusses his life in skating, from the early days, to having kids, playing music, XYZ days, jumping the Great Wall of China, his views on the 2020 Olympics and more.

We interviewed him exclusively in 2004, if you missed it, dive in.

Categories
Skateboarding News

Daewon Song & Marc Johnson Speak Out

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The Skateboard Mag have a new interview with Daewon Song and Marc Johnson today who discuss their latest switch from skater owned brands to a billion dollar sports shoe brand. Press play for their own reasons why.

Categories
Skateboarding News

Mike Carroll kicks MJ off Chocolate in an interview

marc_johnsonWhen the news came through Twitter that Marc Johnson had been seen in a new sports skateboarding video this week, we did ponder if it was true as his name as bold as the Eiffel Tower on the Lakai website.

Could MJ have sneakily cut a deal with a billion dollar sports brand after coating off their tennis shoes in a recent interview? Yeah, of course, because that’s sadly how pro skateboarders do their business today after long time friendships in the skate industry. It has become a joke, but today it became even worse.

Mike Carroll has just responded in a very open and cutting interview on Jenkem, the same site that ran MJ’s anti-sports brand rant a while back:

“I’m mad that he told me, point blank the night before the premiere, that there would be no announcements and that he would talk to his lawyer and we’d figure all that out. All the people that work hard for him, that design his shoes, the sales people, production people, the team – everybody that works for Lakai was there and for them to show up to the premiere and get blindsided like that… We didn’t do anything to him to deserve that. For them to find out that way? It just makes us look like fucking idiots, because this dude is a pathological liar. He couldn’t be man enough to tell me straight up.

The night before the premiere, when Marc and I talked, he could’ve told me… I would have been mad but at least he would’ve been honest and I could’ve called the team and told them instead of them finding out like that. He recently had things come up personally and I respect his privacy and distance. I’m just truly disappointed how he went about this. I’m curious to see what he has to say for himself. I can’t wait to see what type of lie he is going to say to justify his action.”

Read the full thing here but good on you Carroll, it’s about time people started discussing how these billion dollar companies are setting themselves up to ruin what skateboarders have worked tirelessly for. Choose skateboarding.

mike-carroll-portrait

Categories
Music News

Ian Mackaye and Steve Albini head to head interview

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It’s not often you will hear Ian Mackaye (Fugazi/Dischord/The Evens) in conversation head to head with Steve Albini (Big Black/Shellac) but it’s happened on Kreative Kontrol.

In part 1, listen to Albini slag off Rites of Spring, and the influence of Minor Threat on hardcore, punk violence, the Butthole Surfers, one-upmanship, record distribution, explaining Pailhead and how Ian came to work with Al Jourgensen from Ministry (softy dance stuff, ha!) and most importantly, they discuss in detail that ‘In On The Kill Taker’ recording session that never worked for Fugazi that Albini engineered.

In part 2, the pair discuss politics, Sylvester Stallone, the Urban Outfitters/Minor Threat thing, Henry Rollins, communication, anonymity and much, much more.

This is a great chat if you are obsessed by hardcore, make sure you find time to sit down and listen to it properly.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Categories
Features Music

A visit to ‘The Seaside’ again with Cardiacs

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I was once a Little Man aged 11 looking out of my Little House through my parents’ Whole World Window. It was a beautiful, innocent time hanging out in the burbs of Surrey, riding my BMX after homework through wet leaves and spiky conkers, not giving a hoot about anything. The stereo in my bedroom played 7″ records from Adam Ant, The Jam, The Specials and Madness – slabs of vinyl bought on a Saturday afternoon in the little independent record shop in our hometown of Sutton called Chick-a-Boom, that was owned by an overweight biker who sat behind the counter with a huge beard spinning discs. Aside from his overwhelming presence I loved the smell of the vinyl there, as opposed to the big store on the high street they called Woolworths, where my Mum preferred visiting. Collecting music weekly became something special but as you know, the Whole World Window is a very special and endless space – where discovery, is everything.

Somewhere hidden in the suburbs of the same county in 1984, Cardiacs were preparing the release of their original cassette of The Seaside. They were only a few miles down the road. Their off-the-wall, psychedelic punk rock was being distributed to the ears of the chosen few throughout Kingston Uni and the suburban alternative pubs like The Mill and in other small towns nearby in Surbiton, Teddington and beyond. Little did I know that a few years later just one sniff of Cardiacs’ musical drug would change my entire life, forever.

Trying to explain Cardiacs’ sound to those who have never heard them before was always difficult. Like Victorian funfair music in a knife fight with John Carpenter; an horrific, terrifyingly exciting sound that should be used for torture purposes, they said. It wasn’t for everyone, but I wasn’t everyone, I fell in love on first play and made it the soundtrack to my life. We had a crew of us at school who worshipped the band but most people thought we were weirdos. This was a local band, one that our brothers had past down the line to us and we totally enjoyed being those weirdos. It was an honour to wear that badge…with the big flower on it.

Cardiacs’ live shows were like anti-theatrical minefields that detonated every single explosive part of your brain. They left you in tiny pieces, excelling you to the verge of heart attack with excitement whilst every breath of air around you (and a huge fan) pushed tiny pieces of confetti into the air creating a dream-like scenario – kinda like the best acid trip of all time but without the strychnine come-down. And so it began, my Cardiacs virginity was taken at NESCOT college on February 10th, 1989 and it turned me completely inside out. I remember leaving that room feeling like a lost dog, confused, horny and wreckless, with my lipstick hanging out. Only Cardiacs fans are going to read these words so you know exactly what I’m talking about. The question is: Where did you lose yours? Tell us in the comments at the end of this waffle.

Ph: Steve Payne

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William D. Drake’s keyboard prowess, Dominic’s incredible precision drumming, percussionist Tim Quy’s vital inclusion, Sarah’s huge smile and her mighty presence on sax all made the shows shine like nothing else. Jim Smith’s bass playing, down trodden persona and incessant bullying, dished out by brother Tim, made the show the most unnerving experience I’d ever seen. Tim’s ranting, swinging of his guitar and insane facial expressions was pure madness, but oh so controlled and delivered like a pro. All other bands playing live at that time in Ewell seemed boring and pointless, so finally I had found armageddon in music form and it became an instant obsession. I hit the road to as many Cardiacs shows that I could get to with my new driving license and crappy brown Ford Fiesta. It made for a decent bed after the gigs finished too.

The biggest problem with my new found addiction was that their Seaside album, released on cassette, seemed to be some sort of myth. Kind of like what Animal Chin was for skateboarders; you couldn’t find it anywhere but it left inspiration with everyone who came in contact with it. The internet and mobile phones didn’t exist of course – just fanzines, the fan club and record fairs, so I searched far and wide for The Seaside (The Obvious Identity and Toy World) until a friend’s friend of a friend came good with a blank TDK D60 copy. All I ever wanted were the originals though and to this day they still evade me. The CD re-issue in 1995 (and 1990) were must-haves but a few of my favourite tracks from the live shows didn’t make the pressings.

Hearing ‘Dinner Time’ on the new re-issue today made me bounce off the walls. It was like discovering Cardiacs for the very first time again. Similarly, the mesmerising riff of ‘Nurses Whispering Verses’ was always a favourite live (alongside the chaotic punk rock assault of To Go Off and Things). These were rare gems in between the epic singles, ‘Is This the Life?’ and ‘A Little Man and a House’ – both legendary works from the amazing songwriting and production skills of Tim Smith. It’s very rare to find talent like this man was blessed with. Tim created another planet through his own World Window that we could all see, feel and touch – like nothing we had ever discovered before, or have been close to discovering since.

It breaks my heart to be reminiscing all of this right now knowing that Tim is unwell and has suffered through illness. Even though Cardiacs’ music is played weekly in these parts it always leaves me praying for his health – and I’m no religious man. He changed people’s lives forever and we are here right now to give it all back. I doff my hat to Tim Smith. Sir, you are a true musical legend.

Ph: Sarah Maher

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These words were written ten minutes after the album finished from hitting my email account today. The fingers did not stop, the memories came too fast and I just had to spit everything out. The re-issued record will be coming out via the Alphabet Business Concern on November 30th this year with those 4 tracks mentioned above and the original running order on CD, double gate-fold vinyl – both cut from the original 1984 1/4″ master reel. There’s also a tasty boxset coming, with the inclusion of replica newsletters, (YOUsletters) a cassette, poster, Walker prints, lyric booklet and a beautiful photo book containing previously unseen photography.

Prepare space in your wonderful record collection next month to re-own some magical musical history and enjoy listening to ‘Dinner Time’ from this release that we have been lucky enough to unleash for you today. It’s a marvellous tune that has been missing from the Cardiacs catalogue since the cassette release of The Seaside. Pre-order the box set here.

Big love to all Cardiacs followers worldwide.

Zac

Categories
Features Skateboarding

Smoking Coping – the making of the Sk8 80’s book

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The 1980s skate scene in the UK was a blast, fueled by countless comps, parties and shredding going down weekly all over the country. These raucous gatherings formed lifelong friendships and pushed skateboarding forwards from each session, all leaving a trail of destruction, smeared graphics on the coping, and many memories in their wake that paved the way for what we have today.

The influx of American riders throughout those times played a big influence in how quickly the scene progressed, which has been covered extensively in the new Sk8 80’s book just released. It’s been a long time coming but Trawler and Paul Duffy, the duo behind the 212 page coffee table must-have, have delved into the archives to bring us what makes up this rad new book looking back on the entire era with unseen photos and plenty of stories from their travels. It would have been rude of us not to find out how it all came together and who made the cut, so we asked Mark ‘Trawler’ Lawer to fill us in.

Easy Trawler, it looks like you’ve been busy mate, care to tell us about how this book came to fruition?

Well it was an idea we had back in 2005, but we sat on it for another ten years while the photos matured. Between 1987 to 1991 I worked with Paul Duffy on articles for Skateboard! Magazine, (the exclamation mark in the title is important!) together we covered mainly Southern England and sometimes further afield, driving everywhere together in my Vauxhall Nova to cover mad weekends at contests and doing interviews and scene reports for the mag.

How did you and Paul meet originally?

Paul came to Plymouth to study photography at our art college. We’d met a few times earlier when I’d visited Liverpool and Warrington to skate but he was a bit of a fish out of water at first in Plymouth, a scally in a strange town. So I helped him out and we became good friends and travel companions. I reckoned I could write for a publication if asked and the magazine was looking for skate correspondents at the time. I jumped at the chance and soon we were off on many a wild ride.

Ph: Bod Boyle gets straight legged in a Morfa sesh.

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Tell us about the 1980’s skate scene and your memories of Southsea, as that park was definitely a mecca in that era.

I don’t remember too much, it was a bit like our version of what they say about the sixties. If you remember it, you weren’t there! There was a lot of pot smoking about and most of the skaters I knew were burning through tons of the stuff. The skatehouse in Southsea was owned by Mr Tracy Weller, it was a small terrace in Liss Road and every weekend there would be skaters turning up from all over the UK, and then Europe, and then the world. It was carnage most of the time, stumbling back from the countless drinking sessions in Southsea’s pubs. Some of us went on to Peggy Sues, a sticky dive nightclub on the seafront for more debauchery, then it was usually all back to Liss Road for more drinking and smoking. People lying around in all corners. Parties, skate videos on loop, skaters being sick in the sink and on the dishes, carpet skating, stair diving contests, Butthole Surfers blaring out at 2am, huffing on poppers just for a laugh: “here try this!” Generally we all acted the asshole! Tracy’s neighbours must of hated him. Looking back it surprises me how anybody rode skateboards the next day, especially the Sunday afternoon sessions at the skatepark, they were hard going!

There were a few other hotspots with vert ramps and parks that were just as popular for a roadtrip back then too, right?

Yeah. When we travelled to other places it was just as bad. Morfa in Wales with the big red vert ramp and the other ramps they had before the huge one, was always an epic trip too. Getting drunk in Langland and Mumbles – I barely recollect getting on the helter skelter ride on the seafront late at night and going up and back down about twenty times!

Brighton and the Pig City Level ramp was just as mental, we would always get invited back to someone’s flat for a pow-wow. One time we shared the room with a massive cage and a huge python. I remember some random Brighton skater sat in the pen with it, blowing smoke in the snakes face! Throughout these times we had to try and come away with some rad, non-blurry skate photos and enough memories to write a clean story on the events of the weekend!

Ph: Danny Webster’s crail slides traveled round the world.

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There are quite a few pages of American visitors in the book from that period…

Yeah, we have about 80 pages of American riders in there, mostly anyone who was anyone came through the Southsea park because it was the place to skate back then. They all loved Harrow and Rom too, those parks have that quaint old English feel about them, even more so now. To an American skater, I guess Rom is like a cobbled street or Stonehenge or something!

When we first took Craig Johnson out for a beer in Southsea he had just got off the plane from Texas. We handed him his first English pint and he thought it was a pitcher of beer to share! By the end of the night the six foot four, dreadlocked Texan was slurring and stumbling back to the skatehouse shouting AGUA -AQUA! at the top of his voice, I guess he needed some water to dilute it down! I Interviewed him for the magazine and he was cool and had a lot to say.

I interviewed Rob Mertz too, he was cool but different to most I met back then. Mertz is a straightedge East coast punk with a ‘sober till I die” outlook with X’s drawn on the back of his hands. I had never heard of the straightedge lifestyle before and I was in awe of the guy and his skating was off the hook, he is still amazing now. I also sat down with Allen Losi for an interview, he won the Shut Up and Skate vert contest here and he did the same at the same contest in Houston. He could go for trick filled rides of about 25 walls, a minute and a half of sick skateboarding per ride, so much stamina and so underrated before he got here.

Southsea always reminds me of the late Steve Schneer (RIP) from a comp I went down there to watch once, his stamina was next levs..

He said he surprised himself at how well he skated over here. He was such an entertainer with the Ho-Ho plant and he dropped in a big makeshift plywood extension twenty feet off the ground at that Southsea contest that went down in history. He became legend and folklore that day! Sadly Steve is no longer with us and our book ends with a RIP section to the ‘fallen heroes’ if you like – those skaters who we met and photographed and got to know but are sadly now gone.

Ph: Steve Douglas’ lip tricks were far classier than his choice of football team.

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It must have been a trip going through so much nostalgia, remembering so many stories on the road and discovering old photos…

Yes it was a pleasure for me to do and rekindle my friendship with Duffy over last winter. We went through boxes of slides, hundreds of them. We both shared constant neck ache from holding them up to the light. Some had aged and were damaged, some had caught damp and were irretrievable. Luckily our local photo lab had a process called ICE which cleaned the back spots and mould off the final J-Pegs so we went from super anxious to super stoked when we saw the discs full of our 220 cleaned up shots. When it came to writing the captions I was just honest and matter-of-fact about the skaters on the page, to try to give the reader an insight into what the subject is up to now in their lives. I seem to be in touch with everyone who was a British “Pro” through social media, so that helped a lot. There are some pretty cool people in skateboarding then and now, most of us go on to have great lives with lots of achievement despite being the mad idiots we were back then.

Ph: Scott Stanton brings hench Zorlac plant steez to Southsea’s infamous blue vert.

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How many books did you get printed?

We are on our second print run of the book now this year, the first 330 sold out in two weeks so we have another 20 dozen made for now up until Christmas. A bunch of those are on pre-order and sold now too.

It must be a buzz knowing that people have supported it after all the hard work.

It has been an amazing experience and the feedback we get is very gratifying. People send us photos of themselves reading it and holding it up from all over the world.

Would you do it all again?

Hell yes! We are already planning a follow up book called REBATE! – The black and whites and more. That one should be out by mid 2016 if all goes well.

Sk8-80’s Book is available now whilst stocks last from sk880s.bigcartel.com.

Jeff Hedges – 360 Varial Handplant.

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Categories
Skateboarding News

Jerry Hsu interview on the Chromeball

The Chromeball Incident had a chat with Jerry Hsu about his forthcming Made 2 part for Emerica that is being filmed right now, watching Spanky turn it around at Baker, his slams and injuries over the years, Osiris days and much more.

“Pro skaters are the most insecure people in the world. They constantly need reassurance. Is this cool? Did I do that okay? Should I do this again? Filmers and photographers seriously have to deal with so much insecure skater crap.”

Jerry Hsu Portrait

Categories
Features Music

Wand interview

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March’s sophomore album release Golem saw Los Angeles-based Wand state their claim as a face-slapping psychedelic force to be reckoned with, inviting you on a juvenile joyride to bold, head-melting dimensions unknown across nine treacherous tracks.

Fast-forward six months and Wand are still skidding through the grimy back-streets of sludge rock and doom with gusto, yet this time around there’s even more on offer. To investigate the trio’s new-found Crazy Horse-indebted groove, we sent Yasmyn Charles down to Brighton to catch up frontman Cory Hanson and find out how, exactly, their new album 1000 Days became reality.

What was the formative process of Wand and how did it come into being?

Well, the three of us went to art school together and after we all graduated we all had a bunch of different projects and I just kind of asked everyone if they wanted to play music together… so we did. It’s a pretty unremarkable story! [Laughing]

Did you have any idea of the sound direction you wanted to take?

I was listening to a lot of 70’s German, kind of krauty music at the time and I’d been playing in a lot of Rock n Roll bands and then decided I wanted to start a more ‘arty’ rock-driven project I guess.

Do you feel you’ve kind of achieved that with Wand?

Yeah, I mean it was maybe a good choice because there are a lot of musical directions you can take at any given time. So it makes it easier to be inspired than maybe working within a more succinct genre of music that’s more defined by the traditions it’s partaking in.

Would you say that residing in LA has had a positive influence on your sound due its current and past musical history or has it had no effect at all?

Well I’m from LA and I’ve never lived anywhere else so I think it has had a huge effect on me in terms of growing up there and sort of seeing the way things have changed. LA’s an interesting city because it has these really intense moments of scene proliferation, it’s an explosion of bands then it will kind of eat itself and then it has to start over from scratch. Then there’ll be moments where LA seems so attractive then huge lulls where it’s a very unattractive place to be and everybody hates it. And right now for some reason there’s like a really big light shining on the place that I’ve lived forever and everyone is transplanting themselves into the city and it’s kind of bizarre to me.

Golem sounded far more acerbic and abrasive than Ganglion Reef and this was supposedly down to a shift in songwriting away from you to greater inclusion of the rest of the band. Has this been the same for 1000 Days?

I feel like our process is constantly evolving because we’re always trying new ideas and configurations of writing songs. With 1000 days, it was within the sort of framework for which we wanted to make the album in terms of it being a lot larger and more about having the space to make mistakes and experiment with things. Both Golem and 1000 days are very performance intensive. We spent a lot of time in a rehearsal space for like hours and hours and hours just reconfiguring songs, breaking them apart and trying to find every possible outcome that we could. The only rule that we had for 1000 days was that every single part of the process for writing a song, the song had to change dramatically. It had to be altered from one moment to the next; it could never be played the same way twice.

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Is this something you recreate live as well?

Yeah, we try. I mean it’s interesting because we don’t really like to play the songs the way they are on our records. For us the records are these things we spent a lot of time making and in order to stay true to the writing process and the kind of spirit of the songs, they have to change within the structure of a performance. It’s a very different space than a recording space.

You’ve said that Golem was recorded at “not an upbeat time”. Has the atmosphere affected the output on 1000 Days the way it did with Golem?

We’ve gone through a lot of changes as a band. And personally through a lot of highs and lows in our short career that have totally influenced the way that the records are shaped and the kind of themes that get brought into the songwriting and the recordings and the way that we treat the recordings. We definitely have no intentions of making a happy record or a sad record but rather something that’s a little more true to the time we spend in the band and out of the band.

There’s definitely a sense of that on the albums. There’s no emotional guidance, you form your own emotive ideas about the music.

Yeah, I mean, we don’t really have a compass for those kinds of things or a trajectory… in most ways [Laughs].

It’s been said that the influences for your past material have been Final Fantasy and Dungeons and Dragons, what have been the influences for 1000 Days?

Hmmn. Let’s see… We were listening to a lot of Crass and a lot of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle. A lot more Industrial and Anarcho-Punk bands.

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There’s maybe a slightly more electronic slant on 1000 Days, is that something bore of listening to these industrial acts?

Yeah, we all have a previous relationship to these kinds of bands but the influences seemed to take on more of a character during the recording of 1000 Days. I mean we’ve had synthesizers on every record and on every record we process all of the guitars through a lot of synths. They’re very much studio records in the sense that everything is being massaged and processed and treated in a certain way. So it’s sort of an accumulation of experiences in the studio that resulted in the records sound.

So you’ve followed a very natural process with the recording sound but also appear to have a deliberate ‘mystical’ aesthetic both visually and as part of your sound. Is this intentional?

Yeah, I mean there is a curiosity/relationship to fantasy or esoteric themes but I feel that a lot of the space that’s occupied is not that. Like, if that’s the kind of outer… ‘trappings’ of the music, then the things going on inside are pretty real. [Laughs] In the sense of us being human beings it’s kind of inescapable that we’re going to have a relationship to the music that’s really intense.

Do you think that that’s essentially the nature of psychedelic music in the sense that’s it’s something both real and a form of escapism?

Well…I wouldn’t say the music’s escapist, though it may flirt with those ideas, I think that in the most positive sense, escapism is a way of finding a moment of removal from the present or whatever surface problems that are accumulating in order to better understand what’s happening. It’s so that you can re-interpolate into reality or the present and become better equipped to deal with shit.

If you had to describe 1000 Days in one sentence, what would it be?

[There’s a long silence] I don’t know… I feel that the title is pretty indicative of what’s on the record. To me it feels massively contained. It’s a lot of information and a lot of music that’s selected and curated in way that despite it being the shortest record we’ve made, it feels like the biggest. And it is, for us, our biggest… kind of…

Magnum Opus?

Not our magnum opus but up to this point the truest that we feel about music and about playing and making records. It’s just a more ambitious version of what we have been doing.

Even though that wasn’t a sentence it was still a pretty good answer! Has there been any anxiety with trying to follow up the success of Golem.

I have a lot of anxiety about those things! We basically started writing 1000 Days as soon as Golem was mixed and mastered and the artwork was at the plant. We were like, let’s make another record before this one comes out and we did it with the last one too. The real hurdle we’re going to have to overcome at some point is that, now we have these records and the stuff that’s been happening, we need a little time to process all of this in order to make the next one.

Would you say that all your past projects have taken a complete backseat along with your solo work?

With Pangea I haven’t been in that band for 3 years and Meatbodies 2. As for all of my other projects, they’re now just kind of happening in the leftover space… there’s no real point of even talking about them because they’re in the spectrum of ideas that are maybe materialising in some way or another.

Wand Interview 5y

So Wand’s your main output for material you’re truly happy with?

Yeah, at this point. I’d love to be happy with some other projects really soon, and hopefully that’ll be the case. But for now Wand is the main vehicle for my songwriting at least.

What’s next for Wand?

After this tour the record comes out then we have a US tour. Then after that we’ll start recording and writing again. We’ve established this sort of cycle of touring and recording.

There appears to be this idea of ‘if a shark stops swimming it dies’ – where you always have to be creating?

Yeah we don’t feel very comfortable taking time off because we’re not in a position where we’re making enough money to! [Laughs]. We’re still kind of struggling to make a living as musicians and artists and so there is a sense of urgency. It’s also important for us not to get ensnared in the kind of cycle that most bands get trapped in. Where you make a record…it takes 6-8 months to comes out… then you tour the record for half the year then it takes a year and a half to produce another record. We’re definitely not interested in that kind of structure, and we can’t do that because we have to keep making records.

Support Wand in their mission to keep playing and making music by ordering their new album on Drag City out on September 25th from here or order it from your local record shop. It’s a damn good one, you will not be disappointed.

Promo photos: Romain Peutat
Words and instant camera shots: Yasmyn Charles

Categories
Skateboarding News

Support the Neil and Lance book on Kickstarter

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If you enjoyed Ed Syder’s last rad book project, The Natas and Gonz Book, you will be stoked to know a new one is in the works featuring skate legend duo, Neil Blender and Lance Mountain.

Speaking to Ed today he mentioned: “I’ve rounded up some more heavy hitters in the super lucrative world of skate art to bring you another book. Stoked to have Russ Pope and Jay Croft on board this time around as well as most of the guys from The Natas/Gonz book.”

This new illustrated tribute will be bigger than the first featuring contributions from Russ Pope, Jay Croft, Phil Morgan, Kev Grey, Ed Syder, Cosme, Keith Watts, Tom Wareing and a host of others.

Get involved in their Kickstarter campaign this week and receive the book and an exclusive tee in exchange. There will be an exhibition of the final art at Beach London in October too.

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Categories
Features Home Skateboarding

Lexus Hoverboard interview with Ross McGouran

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Let’s kick this off by stating that the future pretty much delivered jack shit. If you were a kid growing up in the 70s and 80s where space colonisation, extra-terrestrials, UFO sightings and Metal Mickey were predicted to become part of family life, then you will know how much we were ripped off. The most exciting recent discovery that comes close to all of those technological promises is an image that looked like a lunar three-spurt dick etched into the dusty floor of Pluto. Twas one way of getting a few more ‘likes’ on your Facebook page last month for those who count the digits.

There wasn’t a need for this self aggrandising malarkey that social networking brings back in 1985. Nobody really gave a toss about getting themselves 15 minutes of fame, we were too busy sniffing glue, break dancing and prizing Mercedes badges off the front of cars with screwdrivers – until the Back To The Future film was released. That summer spawned thousands of skateboarders worldwide, mimicking Michael J. Fox’s balancing skills as he held his own on a hoverboard to impress girls and avoid a beating. Once that was aired, every kid in our area wanted one.

Nobody imagined that we would have to wait 30 years to even get a sniff of the liquid nitrogen smoke that pumps out of the Lexus Hoverboard though. Nobody would also have guessed it would be our mate Ross McGouran who would be the chosen one to take it for its first cruise either. Thankfully Ross was skating past our office the day after that hoverboard edit hit the interweb so we asked him to spill some beans on how it all came together.

This was filmed off the cuff in 10 minutes with just an iPhone with a broken screen to hand but should give you a bit of inside info on the shoot that took place. Thanks to Dan Joyce who kindly edited my awful filming.