SHEM BRAGG
SKATE
TONY: Where did you grow up and when did you start skating?
SHEM: So I was born on the Gold Coast, Queensland and grew up around Tweed Heads. I moved to Ballina when I was about 14 and that’s when I started skating for the rst time. I still remember the rst time I tried to drop in the Ballina mini bowl, I body slammed the concrete so fucken hard, haha. I’ll never forget that feeling.
TONY: Where do you reside at the moment and which spots / parks do you skate?
I live just outside of Bangalow at the moment. I moved here with my partner basically for the local skate park, haha. It has an 8-foot classic kidney shape bowl with concrete coping, you can’t beat a classic shape. It’s so bullshit all the new parks getting built with 4-foot transitions and steel coping, just put some pool coping on that shit for fuck sake!
PHOTOS by NELLO & GRAEME McDONALD. PORTRAIT by ANNA MORETÓ INTERVIEW by TONY CHAVEZ, CAMERON MARKIN and JOSH KOTLEGA
Tail pick at an old brick drain in Melbourne.
Photo: Nello
Frontside tail grab at Grimace’s Pool. Photo: Graeme McDonald
JOSH: Is moving to Melbourne still on the agenda?
SHEM: De nitely not o the cards, I’d like to move to Melbs for the skate scene and constant DIY action, plus the Smoke Beer crew. Still, some life discussions to make on my behalf before I dive in. De nitely pros and cons about living right near Byron Bay.
JOSH: When it comes to skate trip accommodation, where’s the best place to get some shut-eye?
SHEM: Ideally away from everyone else, I’m pretty good at smoke booming, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
CAM: You’re a well-rounded chap when it comes to trick selection, if you could only go frontside or backside for the rest of your life which would it be?
SHEM: Can’t deny that a high-speed front 5-0 is one of the greatest feeling tricks, but I’m going to go backside because I’m a end for a back smith.
CAM: What’s the scariest transition you’ve ever set wheels to?
SHEM: Well, I usually say the weirder the better. The scariest would have to be this quarter I skated on the roof of a little hardware store in Lismore, the eave was made out of concrete and had a perfect little quarter at the end. The run-up was alright but there were bolts hanging out of the concrete all over the place, possibly to stop people from skating it, haha. I did a blunt to fakie on the two-foot wide quarter with around eight-foot drop directly onto the gutter, if you fall o that shit, fuuuck that’s game over.
CAM: You work in a trade, right? Have the skills you’ve learnt from that job been useful for your love of DIY?
SHEM: I’m a pool builder by trade so yeah I’ve picked up a thing or two about concrete and laying tiles but these days all I’m doing is throwing in berglass pools which are great for swimming but that’s it, haha.
NELLO: Tell me quickly about Grimaces and your role in the project. How often do you skate it these days?
SHEM: Grimaces! Man oh man, that place is a masterpiece if I don’t mind saying. Me and my good mate Tony went halves in the cost and labor
Layback back smith. Corio bowl in Geelong. Victoria, Australia Photo: Nelloof getting that little beauty the way it is now. It took some back-breaking labor jackhammering up a shit ton of crete and then formed it up with some steel and sprayed that shit like any other pool. Worth every cent, sweat, blood and tears. We try and have a session once a month but it’s hard to organise sometimes.
JOSH: Barber or backyard cut?
SHEM: Backyard for sure! Either by myself rst thing in the morning or by the half-cut barber himself Kotterz, haha.
CAM: Are you an advocate for the liquid warm-up? If so how many milliliters is the perfect amount?
SHEM: Well, I actually try and stay clear of the booze before the warm-up, after I’m warm I don’t mind having a few tinnies at the local, sometimes quite a few and that’s when shit gets weird or I fall on my face, haha.
TONY: Have you been impacted by covid at all? How did it impact your local scene and your skateboarding?
SHEM: Covid didn’t really a ect my job, in fact, we had more work than last year. The thing that
a ected me the most was not being able to skate the parks and hang with the crew at the pub. All in all, I think not being able to skate the parks was a blessing in disguise. Me and a few mates would go and skate slappy kerbs for hours and when we got sick of that we would go skate some other weird shit that we usually wouldn’t go skate. I feel like the DIY scene boomed as well, it was sick! I helped my mate Tom and the other boys build a barrier spot in Byron and we skated that shit almost every day! Shout out to GPC!
CAM: Dream DIY sk8 location?
SHEM: As far as traveling I’d really like to go to SheepSide in Hawaii. It looks so weird and hard to skate, but I’m keen for the challenge.
JOSH: Favorite skater?
SHEM: Daan Van Der Linden for street or Ronny Sandoval for transition. Sooo many good dudes out there though.
NELLO: How do you see yourself if you weren’t a skater?
SHEM: Fuck never thought of that haha. I guess if I didn’t end up loving skating I would probably smoke weed and surf like everyone else around here.
Tailblock at Corio bowl Photo: NelloTHE GROVE DIY
LONDON, ENGLAND
ARTICLE by TOM CRITCHLEY PHOTOS by ALI GLEESON and OLLIE JARMANThe Grove DIY seemed to have sprung out of nowhere. I regularly used to take a walk-through Dulwich Forest and opposite the entrance sat the disused Grove Pub; boarded up and decrepit with the layering of di erent gra ti tags at each visit being the only earmark of time passing for the disused public house. Four, ve, maybe even six years the building sat empty, degrading yet imposing beside a busy junction haunting the neighbourhood of what could be if business takes a turn for the worse. Well, business did take a turn for the worse… amidst the lockdown restrictions of London during the COVID pandemic I was taking a regulated walk away from potential pandemic hotspots into the forest when I heard the all too familiar sound of rolling wheels and purposeful pops of a skateboard coming from the pub carpark. An inquisitive glimpse over the hedgerow and some young skaters had cleared the at, moved away the trash, kept a sofa for chilling and have set up some modest wooden ramps which is now London’s newest DIY spot: new life for The Grove Pub.
And each time I returned to the forest en route I had a look over to see what was going on and each time a new wooden object had been built: “oh a kicker” and then “nice a ledge” until… “holy shit what is that?!” As if beamed down by an interplanetary DIY space traveller, this otherworldly obstacle appeared out of nowhere slap-bang in the middle of the at gaining all the attention it deserved. A slappy curb comprised o small transitions into a medical grade nitrous oxide cannister acquired from inside the pub leftover by squatters with an upturned curb corner on one end for wallies presented the most unique and locationperfect obstacle I had ever seen. From that point I could no longer walk by without getting stuck in, and after some exchanges over instagram with the crew I was there the following weekend lending a hand to what was now The Grove DIY Crew.
From modest beginnings and a gnarly slappy nitrous oxide curb came a period of rapid growth at The Grove DIY from new obstacles popping up to the crew learning more about building, and new
Photo: Ali Gleesonunderstandings on what a DIY should be there for. There wasn’t much building experience amongst the crew, but as old tales of DIY spots before tell us: one big skating community with an even bigger desire to learn to build, a four pack of beer, one part cement, two parts sand and three parts aggregate is all you
need for your very own DIY spot. From quarters, to kickers, to hubbas and hips, alongside “London’s steepest volcano”, The Grove went from pretty shitty disused pub to free- owing spot with an evergrowing community vibe pretty quickly.
Benjamin Bostock & Harry Conway
Photo: Ali Gleeson
Theo Hughes. Blasting o the kicker over the couch for the lil’ hommies.
Photo: Ali Gleeson
Alleyoop
fakie 5-0 to fakie at Home Ave. San Diego, CA.
Photo: Sean Meighan
spend a lot of time working with spray paint or chopping shit up but I feel like my most precise means of communication is with poems. I’ve been self-publishing through Old Youth Mag little chapbooks and zines of my writing and art since 2014 but now I wanna do a real collection of poems, try and get it published by someone else. Been working on that for the past two years or so. Also, working on a longer form experimental animation lm with my friend Bill Moran who is an absolutely brilliant poet and musician.
Who were the skaters you looked up to the most when you rst started skateboarding?
When I was mad young, I saw a skate video playing in the corner of a skate/surf/snow shop in Encinitas. Someone blasted a tweaked out frontside air over a bowl and I remember being like, “Damn, I wanna do that” so I asked for a skateboard that Christmas. I did some research years later and found out that it was Cardiel’s guest trick in Tony Trujillo’s part in “In Bloom”. So yeah, John Cardiel got me into skating. All those vert dudes in Encinitas were huge in uences, I really liked Rodney Mullen, and the rst video I ever got was “Dying To Live” from Zero. I was pretty all over the place as far as what I thought was cool.
How did you get on Heroin?
One of my good friends, Alex Papke, was shooting photos for Heroin a few years back and the team was making a trip to SF. Papke hit me up saying they needed a place to stay, so like ve of the guys slept on my oor and we skated the city for a few days. Ever since I became aware of the brand I thought it was sick, the art direction, the feel, the type of make-something-out-of-nothing skating, the fact that it compared skateboarding to one of the most addictive and life-ruining substances in the world, but once I met Fos on that trip and realized that he does damn near all of the art on his own I developed a much deeper respect for the company. I had been wanting to skate for them for a while, but Fos was supporting a huge team from all over the world so he said he couldn’t really make it work. About two years ago, I quit the board company I had been riding for, hit up Fos to see if I could just get some boards with no strings attached and he was down! I got a box and at the time I was really red up because I had just started skating again after being out for six months. Sent him the clips I was getting just to show that I was putting the boards to use then he called me and asked if I wanted to get on the team and lm a part!
Wallie hurricane. Los Angeles. Photo: Taylor Ballard
Sick skating, sick nature, sick music, delicious mojitos with barbeque, lots of relaxation at a lake (which was right next to the house) and the birth of our new band Detox. Perfect so far.
The next stop was the DIY in Glücksburg, on the way we had to throw out Max to head back to Stuttgart with his injured knee. We slept one night at the Baltic Sea then went on to Denmark. First we went to Roskilde and met some nice people from the indoor skatepark Hal 12, who helped us with a place to sleep and video games for Anna S. The next day we
Diego Eisert. Frontside lipslide low to high at Fauna DIY under the bridge in Hamburg.
Photo: Max Shrädder
Børge Lehmberg. Nosepick in Lüchow
DETOX TOUR
planned to go to Copenhagen but the weather was shit. In the pouring rain we went to the Spoon Mountain Vert, luckily our buddy Christian from Denmark invited us for a vert session. Perfect! Ookaay, so Johann from Berlin joined our crew. We had sick vert and bowl sessions at Faelledparken. Shortly before the end of the tour Marco dislocated his elbow. Nice. But Anna S. had this, like everything else on tour, perfectly under control.
The last days we were hanging out in Alis Wonderland. Sascha from Alis invited us and showed us around in Christiania. Thanks for the support!
At the end of our tour we said goodbye to Anna P. and David, who went on a trip to Sweden. One weekend later we had the rst gig with our band Detox in Leipzig at the Level 5 premiere at Conne Island Ookaay!
Article by Marco Rottig & Anna Sterle
Marco Rottig on the otherside of the lens. Lien to tail in Fælledparken. Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Anna Plewa
Baz Dan. Backside boneless on a burnt down ramp at M32 spot in Bristol, England
Photo: James Collins
Adam McGuire. Workboot digger bucket bash on-site with Concreate skateparks after nishing a concrete all nighter Castletown skatepark, Isle of Man. Photo: James Soutar
Kale Sandridge. Smith grind at the Mango Bowl Honolulu, Hawaii. Photo: Chase Simmons
THE ADVENTURE IS ENDLESS
Everybody is so busy these days not enjoying their life. Things get put on the back burner. Ideas get lost in notes. Phone calls go unanswered and texts are unread.
During this pandemic, Adam G. Novicki and I met at his local spot in Reading, PA. I would drive an hour from Allentown to skate this DIY because it’s challenging and what I am into. It was away from everyone. Somewhat secluded. Not driving 10 or 20 minutes to a local skatepark. But an hour. After a session or two, we decided to try and shoot some skate photos. Our mutual interest for the abandoned landscapes, the forgotten buildings and the diy builds, is how we enjoy our time.
Take some time to search for the unridden, unnoticed and unappreciated spots.
The adventure is endless if you just use your imagination. - Ray Gurz
RAY GURZ of LOST SOUL SKATEBOARDS // PHOTOS by ADAM NOVICKI As business’ seize, spots are everywhere. Hippy jump in Reading, PA Ray Gurz
Pivot fakie. Tetanus Paradise. Reading, PA
Monty grind at Helltrack DIY. King of Prussia, PA
American Malls disappear. Drop in. Reading, PA
Website down - under construction. Wallie. Reading, PA
RAY GURZ RAY GURZ RAY GURZ
THE
ADVENTURE IS ENDLESS
Washed and sanitzed hands before a layback frontrock Allentown, PA
EIGHTIES PUNK ROCK PHOTOS FROM A TEENAGE FAN KEVIN SALK
Give us a little background of where you grew up, what kind of music you listened to before you got into punk and what were some of the rst punk shows you attended?
I grew up in Manhattan Beach, CA. It was a typical beach town. I listened to Hendrix, KISS, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, etc. My rst “punk” show was the Clash at the Santa Monica Civic in 1979 with my friend who I have known since kindergarten. I saw 999 at the Roxy but I don’t know if I was still in junior high school or freshman year.
Did you take photos of other things before you got into punk concert photography, or did you dive right in to shooting live shows? Was your focus on documenting the music scene or just taking photos of your favorite bands?
I never really took photos of anything prior to my punk rock photos. My dad took a lot of pictures documenting our trip around Europe. I just started taking photos of bands. I really don’t have a reason, I just did.
How old were you when you shot most of these photos?
16-17 years old.
Keith Morris and Greg Hetson // Circle Jerks. Goleta Community Center, CA. January 21st, 1983 Ian MacKaye and Lyle Preslar // Minor Threat. Dancing Waters San Pedro, CA. July 11th, 1982Were you friends with any of these bands or did you become friends, or were you just anonymously shooting photos at concerts?
I became “friends” with Black Flag because I used to “stalk” their HQ in Redondo Beach. I knew of Milo and Bill because they went to my high school. A number of the shows I was just anonymous and worked my way onto the stage.
What was your rst photo where you realized, this is good, I’m a punk concert photographer?
The one of Doyle starting at me at the Goleta Show. Also some of my Henry Rollins photos from The Federal Building and Mi Casita. I never thought of
myself as a photographer. I was just a kids who took pictures at some gigs… I wish I took more!
What was your go-to venue to see a good punk show back in the early 80s?
There wasn’t one. I only took good photos of Black Flag, The Mis ts, Minor Threat, The Circle Jerks, and The Descendents. It turned out to only be a handful of venues.
What is your all time favorite punk photo that you took?
#1 Henry with the guy giving him the nger (Mi Casita). #2 Doyle staring me down (Goleta Valley
Doyle // Mis ts. Goleta Community Center, CA. January 21st, 1983
