DOGPISS MAGAZINE PRESENTS
TIM LEIGHTONBOYCE NEIL AN INTERVIEW WITH
MACDONALD
BY
CONTACT:DOGPISSMAG@GMAIL.COM
DOGPISS MAGAZINE ISSUE 6 SUPPLEMENT EDITED BY BEN
HAIZELDEN
SCANS BY NEIL
MACDONALD & DAN ADAMS
DESIGN BY BEN HAIZELDEN
NEIL MACDONALD OF SCIENCEVERSUSLIFE INSTAGRAM
INTERVIEWS
TIM LEIGHTON- BOYCE SINCERE THANKS TO
TIM LEIGHTON-BOYCE NEIL MACDONALD
DAN ADAMS OF THE READ AND DESTROY ARCHIVE DYLAN LEWIS & STEVE LAING
ALL IMAGES CONTAINED WITHIN ARE COPYRIGHT OF THEIR RESPECTIVE AUTHORS.
NO REPRODUCTION WITHOUT CONSENT.
When the opportunity arose to interview Tim I was at first hesitant. Not out of any lack of enthusiasm though, I just didn’t know where to start. To interview someone who had such an instrinsic role in the promotion of the activity of skateboarding the U.K. in its early years, and do it justice, seemed beyond me. Where do you start? And where do you end? Fortunately Neil came to mind. I had contacted him previously about possible involvement with Dogpiss through his superb Instagram account Science Versus Life (instagram@scienceversuslife). I couldn’t think of anyone more knowledgeable or enthusiastic to undertake the task. I’m happy to say that both Neil and Tim went above and beyond to bring you an interview that reveals both the motives and the modus operandi of one of British skateboarding’s pillars. Ben Haizelden
Editor of Dogpiss.
How did the transition between you working at BMX Action Bike to changing it into, and subsequently running, Read and Destroy go? Was it hard to convince the BMXers and the people working at BMX Action Bike that skateboarding was going to be the big thing? That took a very long time, and it wasn’t just me doing it, it was me and Dobie Campbell who were involved in that. I’d been involved in skating since the ‘70s, doing pictures for Skateboard! magazine and so on, and then carried on being involved in skating during the very, very dark ages, but I was also involved at work, in the sense that I worked for a retailer and distributor, Alpine Sports, who then became Alpine Action. So I was involved in skateboarding that way as well, but in that context I got involved in BMX and therefore naturally started taking pictures of BMX which evolved into taking pictures for BMX Action Bike. So for quite a long time at BMX Action Bike I was taking pictures, and gradually starting to be involved in actually writing things, and generally more and more involved with the magazine. Throughout that period they used to take the piss out of me and Dobie over our interest in skateboarding, so they would do things that we found to be particularly lame. One thing that comes to mind is when they had a picture of somebody riding something called a Roller-Shuttle— which was a horrible little thing like a unicycle with a skate truck coming out the front of it—at a bowl in Knebworth skate park, and the comment was something like, ‘Here’s one for Dobie and Tim’. Was that them making it clear that they thought skateboarding was a fad? Oh no. No, no, no. This is what they’d consider good-humoured, wry comments on our strange obsession. I have huge admiration and fondness for those guys, they taught me a great deal about producing magazines and so on. This was their idea of fun. But to anybody that was involved in skating in those days, when it was really the dark age times, it was a very difficult time, so basically it was, “That’s not funny!” There was skating going on though, which delighted people like me and puzzled lots of other people, but gradually our interest became a lot more acceptable. Especially commercially acceptable. The other person, if I recall correctly, that they had a little joke about in that picture was ‘Michael’, and that would be Mike Allen who ran Shiner, one of the distributors of BMX and skateboard stuff and one of their major advertisers, so clearly they weren’t being too rude. And indeed Shiner was involved in the biggest chunk of early skating that we got in to BMX Action Bike, which was a one-off pull-out supplement, which was actually called ‘Skate Action’, which the Higginsons then borrowed, or lifted, for another magazine a bit later on. When they were launching a skateboard magazine they called it Skate Action. Did the BMXers on staff accept that skateboarding was going to overthrow BMX as the cool new youth movement? Ah, hang on a sec. I don’t know if people would view it that way. This is a very small group of people so the notion of describing anybody as “staff” amuses me no end. Was there even anybody that was actually on a salary there..? I’m not even sure. But the guys who actually ran the magazine were two very serious professional journalists with a strong interest in cycling, and that’s how they got into doing a BMX magazine, and in fact they launched what was the first mountain bike magazine. I certainly shot the first mountain bike sessions in the UK, for their other magazine, Bicycle Action. So there’s them, but also some hardened BMX racers like Jim Black who weren’t into freestyle, and we were all very much in it together, but with different types of interests. I suppose, effectively, Dobie and I were trying to take over. Take over an existing circulation to get skateboarding in front of an awful lot more people than we
could have done by launching something fresh. We wouldn’t have been able to launch something fresh anyway because there would have been no appetite for it. So quite a nice, gentle transition. There were commercial things going on that had a huge influence on this, some of them to do with the nature of distribution of these types of products and others to do with publishing. So for example that company went bust. I wouldn’t be entirely sure of the exact reason why but I’d say they over-stretched themselves trying to launch the separate bicycle magazine. At the time, cycling was nowhere near as big as it is now. I recall that Evans Cycles back then was just one shop in the Cut. So the magazine was folding up, and they sold it to another very small publishing group, and that company then retained the original editorial people, the original publishers, to supply the content, as a package. So what issue number was this? It’d be a few issues before issue 50. I’m very fuzzy on that! So they worked like that for a while, trying to produce a package at a very low cost, and that, for example, is how Nick Philip got involved, how he transitioned from just being this kid from Muswell Hill who was doing amazing, strange t-shirts as Anarchic Adjustment and wanting to advertise, through to becoming this astonishing design input on the magazine, he started out doing paste up but became a huge design influence. So that carried on for a bit, and then the original publishers I think felt that it just wasn’t working for them and that they weren’t able to do it successfully. They wanted to concentrate on other types of things I suppose, so they put a proposal to these new owners saying, “Why don’t Nick and Tim produce the magazine for you instead?”, and that is what they agreed that we would do. So Nick and I ended up producing the magazine from, literally, a desk. It was desk space in somebody else’s office and it was one desk. He had a paste up board at one end of it and I had a PC at the other, and that’s how we produced it. At the same time, we had entered into that agreement knowing that we were going to transition from BMX Action Bike to a new title that had been invented, which was R.a.D, or Read and Destroy, over the course of three issues. So that was all planned out, the change in the logos, but that had to be done in a very controlled way. It wasn’t until issue 64 that the BMX Action Bike logo finally left the cover, after getting smaller and smaller. That’s quite a while. The key to publishing in those days, far more so than now, was all to do with distribution to the newsagents, so we could not just change the title of the magazine because that would jeopardize the existing distribution. People would think, “Hang on, this is a new title. Are we going to stock this or not?”, so it had to be done in a very low-key way where it stopped being one thing and became something else. There was still BMXing in the mag for a long time after that too. There was less and less. The thing that’s probably confusing here, and it confuses me too and it was only because of the work that we’re now doing for that book that this has become apparent: is that the gradual inclusion of skate material went on for a long time before that. More than a year, I’d have said, gradually putting more and more in. We were basically pushing at an open door, to use that horrible phrase. It became more and more the case that people were quite interested in all the skate stuff. There’s a huge crossover between BMX freestyle and skateboarding. And BMXers and skateboarders co-existed at spots at the time. Were any BMXer subscribers up in arms about these changes?
I think they were very upset by it. I wasn’t exactly crippled with guilt, but I was extremely sympathetic to that position because that is exactly what had happened with skating. We had basically lost our only means of communication in the late ‘70s, and saw this other explosion of interest in BMX and so on. So the thought that I, as somebody who was actually quite actively involved in that BMX world, should then turn into the person that did to them what had been done to the skaters was kind of difficult. But my fundamental loyalty, which was always quite clearly stated, was skating. I’d been evangelising for skating and fighting to get it coverage in all manner of ways throughout this whole period. It was no secret. You mentioned once that you’d show slides to skateboarders to gauge the reaction and see which would be best for the magazine. How long did you do that for? It seemed like you were defining UK skateboard photography pretty early on anyway, so how long before you were confident you were actually doing it right? That took years. When was I doing it right? Which day was that?! The period I specifically had in mind when I was talking about that was 1978, so that is when Skateboard! magazine was still around, and I was working in a skateboard shop and hanging around with the skaters from there. I was already a photographer and I started photographing them, and going out with them to sessions at skate parks, of which there were quite a few in London in those days. That’s when I was learning how to do it, and learning what people liked, and what worked and what didn’t. During that period I’d have a projector and I’d show slides so I could see what they thought of them, and then on the back of me doing that, another shop, Trade Winds —a rival shop actually—took me off with their team to go to a skate competition in France and take some pictures for them. They then showed them to Bruce Sawford who was the editor of Skateboard! magazine, and he rang me up and asked me to start doing pictures for Skateboard!. So that little period was an intensive summer, I think. In memory it will always be a summer. So that’s when I was actively doing that, but of course that similar process continued onwards, although it wasn’t done in such an explicit way. When I was doing R.a.D, or BMX Action Bike, I never chose any of the pictures. I’d shoot the pictures, then we’d be looking at them on the light boxes and I’d be seeing how people reacted to them, and which ones they liked and which ones they thought should go in. There was a constant feedback process of learning what people liked, and experimentation too. In those early days, for instance, I was heavily inspired by a lot of the American skate photographers. There were a couple of people who worked with Alva, whose pictures I liked a lot. Wynn Miller was one, Raul Vega too, and they were doing exotic things with coloured lights and filters, and I think famously on one occasion, burning petrol on a piece of coping or something. That type of thing. So I would be looking at that and thinking how it looked interesting, so I too would start using coloured filters on flash guns. Generally, in those early days, I would be experimenting like mad with stuff that I would later come to regard as a kind of visual clutter. When I first started doing Skateboard! I was getting paid money! Astonishing money by the standards of today. I was getting £75 a day for doing that in 1978! I think if you were getting paid page rates it was £40 a day or something like that, which would probably be OK by today’s standards. Definitely. So what I did with that money, was plough it into ever-more exotic and expensive filters with all these different diffraction gratings and stuff like that, to get all these strange visual effects. There was a period of quite some time when I used to do that, with quite elaborate lighting set ups, but later on I would come to regard that as ‘getting in the way’, and realised you don’t need that at all. Actually, looking back on it, it probably was quite a good thing
because there was a period of quite some time when I used to do that, with quite elaborate lightingset ups, but later on I would come to regard that as ‘getting in the way’, and realised you don’t need that at all. Actually, looking back on it, it proably was quite a good thing, because ...one of the things that was going on here—especially with that feedback loop—is that I was helping people realise their idea of how they’d like to be seen, I guess. So to some extent, the use of all these colours and the making of it to appear more dramatic than it would have been in real life, probably went down quite well with people. It wasn’t vanilla, it was quite special. We were collaborating on how the skaters wanted to be seen. The NCP sessions you shot were every bit as inspiring as the US stuff that ran. Fast-forwarding again to R.a.D days, I was completely obsessed, visually I suppose and culturally, with the idea of documenting what’s going on across the UK as it really is, but I didn’t take that to extremes. I’d always want to photograph local scenes, but I would take people with me who were known skaters, who could deliver the goods in terms that there would be rad pictures of people doing rad things in a situation where potentially nobody’s actually doing anything that interesting. So one part of me would have said, “No, we’re not going to have any American coverage in the magazine at all, if people want American coverage they can go and buy Thrasher or Transworld”, but actually that would have been daft, because people wanted to see those Powell tours, they liked seeing the stuff, I think, that Steve Douglas used to send over from America, they wanted that. So if those events happened, we would cover them, and if we could get some really rad pictures we would quite happily stick them on the cover because a lot of people would be stoked to see them. How did you even know which supermarket car park or which new town to go to, and when? How did you come to know these people in the years of no social media? Well there’s an irony there! I used to basically spend my life on the phone, and to the pint where now I’m quite phobic about it. I hate phone calls now. I really don’t speak to people if I can avoid it. But as anybody who was working with me at the time would testifiy, basically I spent my whole time on the phone talking to people who knew somebody who knew somebody. It was extremely difficult. In the early days, bear in mind that it’s not just that we didn’t have the internet and email and all these mechanisms for communication, the phone calls themselves were really expensive. You used to pay extra if you phoned before one o’clock, so I would be running up massive bills. The earliest example of this that I can remember is all the stuff with Livingston. When Livingston was opening up I was in a lot of contact with the Urquharts, and we would be having these hugely long phone calls, mostly in the evenings because it was cheaper. It was constant work to try and find out what was happening and it cost money as well as time. As an example of the transition into digital stuff, I started out with a written diary—my phone numbers and contacts book—and then very early on I got a Psion Organiser 2, not the first one, and those contacts transitioned into an electronic database very, very early on, and that was the secret of it all. Basically you had to work like mad on the phone to try to track down things, but of course when somebody did tell you about something, sometimes you strike gold and sometimes it wasn’t very good. Did
you
have
many
failed
missions?
Surprisingly few to be honest! The most classic failed mission ever, it seems to me, was when we went to Cromer in Norfolk with various other people to skate this backyard pool... ...and it rained.
It rained all the way there, and the crew are all saying, “Oh, it looks brighter ahead, it looks brighter!” That’s one of my favourite articles from that era of R.a.D. I’m glad it rained. The photos, the story, the whole vibe of that was amazing. The most amazingly British take on pool skating, I mean of course it was raining. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that it was a complete and utter nightmare, a complete horror show, and I cannot thank Sean Goff enough for actually doing that, for skating. But at the other extreme, there was a thing that we did—me and Simon Evans were the minds behind it—this thing about going up and down the A1, and to my lasting shame, I think we only got as far as Newcastle. But that involved, every weekend for well over a month, me and Simon basically driving up and down the A1, and the petrol and mileage on that would have taken us to Los Angeles! Our choice, but the cost of all that would have paid for a flight, I reckon. Our choice would always have been, “Nah, we’ll go up and down the A1!” Speaking of Los Angeles, and of long-distance phone calls, how did you build the relationships with people like Spike and Tobin? That’s not me. The secret weapon there was Steve Douglas. Steve I had known ever since that period in the ‘70s, so around ‘78 onwards. He was this kid who was one of the Harrow locals, he was one of the Harrow Boyz, so I knew him through that. He was doing his zines and so on, and then went to live in America and he got involved in the American skate industry, and because of his interest in magazines and because of the fact that he knew me very well he was heavily involved in making R.a.D happen. So he was the connection who knew everybody there, and he pulled all that together. Having said that, when you mention people like Spike, that also would have been through the BMX side, and Nick Philip. Nick left the UK, went off to America, and instantly was part of that scene with the Osborns, the people who did Freestylin’ magazine, and then Club Home Boy was a sort of off-shoot of that particular group of people, and Nick was involved around that. So that possibly would have been the connection there. Indeed, there’s a connection there with all the digital stuff, because the way we communicated with Steve was digitally. His company were using a sort of commercial bulletin board system, one of these communication systems that were being made in those days before there was actual internet access, so we dialled into that using modems. That was the connection with him, one of the early ways in which the magazine was using digital technology ahead of its time. I’m sure I heard of somebody sending you a photo from the States that way, and it taking about two days to download. I’d be astonished if we ever tried it. It’s conceivable because there was one whole strand of the magazine that was very much to do with pushing the limits of whatever technologies we had. There was all the stuff that Nick Philip did with the Xeroxing and various other physical manipulation of pictures and objects. Then there was the fact that the whole thing was typeset from disk, right back into the BMX Action Bike days. This wasn’t desktop publishing, there was no digital paste up, but the typesetting that we did was done using codes that were very similar to HTML Markup which meant that people like me could manually type codes fluently and so when HTML came out it was the same. Just using different letters and numbers. And so we could instantly hand-write HTML in those days. Loads of stuff went on like that. Then there’s all the episodes with experimenting with using video to try and do sequences in a way that people didn’t like... Still cheaper than trying to shoot a flip-in, slide, flip-out revert trick on film! I was amazed at how much of an issue of RaD was done by hand. I’d never have thought those early-’90s issues weren’t made entirely on a computer. Were you guys just chasing after every new bit of technology at that time? It’s like you were ahead of the technology.
By the period you’re talking about, things like PageMaker and QuarkXpress had appeared, and Illustrator and Photoshop and so on, and certainly Steve Hicks, the designer, was really pushing the limits of that stuff and that carries on into Phat, even more so. I can’t remember when DTP first actually appeared in RaD. It was done very strangely at first; at one point one of the companies that owned it insisted that all the make up should be done by people who they had a very good deal with, who were great blokes, down in Fordingbridge in Hampshire. The way it used to work there, Dan Adams the designer would have to do roughs and fax those to them, and they would then use PageMaker to do the actual DTP down there and then print it out and fax it back to him. It was the most ridiculous thing. We just thought it sucked, it was daft. It was like remote-control DTP. Very, very very weird! The physical side, the pre-digital stuff was really interesting, as we were transitioning, so we had a very hybrid version of it and we would be using an awful lot of mechanical stuff. To be honest the only digital aspect of it to start with would have been the typesetting. As I kid back then I got i-D and The Face too, and much as those were stylish magazines, RaD always seemed to be uniquely inventive. Did you take any cues from what Sheryl Garratt and Matthew Collin were doing? Oh, I don’t know. I’m trying to think... I wouldn’t have said there wasn’t. We were certainly aware of them, and we were looking at them. I never was the designer, bear in mind. It’s impossible not to be influenced by things. The other influence in design terms wouldn’t be somebody like Neville Brody at The Face but David Carson, one of the great legends of American magazine design. And he started on Transworld! I heard there were discussions I can only imagine between him and Grant Brittain with Grant Brittain getting really upset that the picture of Tony Hawk is the size of a postage stamp, and saying “He won the contest, for God’s sake! Why is it this tiny picture?!” So there’s another strong design influence that we would be seeing all the time. What’s the you don’t
favourite shot that you feel could have been
took that any better?
I have a huge fondness for the ‘Dead Cow’ cover shot. Technically it was close that I would normally go. It was a titchy mellow bowl and I somehow felt that it was going to risk someone getting really hurt, so it was OK to try it. I was stopped down massively to get the necessary depth of field, even on a fish-eye and that gave even more blur than normal, but the trees also meant that the sky was not burning through. And of course it was a local scene story, so that appealed to me a great deal as well. For years in my false memory way I had come to misremembered it as being Sean Goff, which would fit with my idea of not causing accidents because Sean was used to the antics of photographers on ramp platforms. But it was one of the locals, which made it even better for me. I suspect it might also be a case of me actively encouraging the choice of a cover picture. I also really like the picture of Simon Evans skating along the flat at the Shell Centre, carrying a can of Coke which I used on the www.whenwewasrad.com site. It’s not a ‘skate’ picture at all, but it summed up a whole period and place for me.
How many cameras have you owned? Which are your top three? Very few. I started when I was five, but even so there have been very few. During the skate period I shot nearly everything on 35mm on Canons. An EF to start, then a couple of A1s one of which I wore out, and then T90. I also used a medium format Bronica during the late Action BIke days. That was mainly so I could synth flash at speeds above 1/125th, not so much about the higher quality. The better question would be “how many flashguns” but I couldn’t answer because there have been so many. The main workhorse was a big Vivitar 365 to start with, which was super nice but they stopped making batteries for it so I move to Metz CT60s. I had many of those, plus the smaller Mecatwins that plugged in to to the same pac. I tried the dedicated flash system for the T90: had two of the flashguns and all the special cables and adaptors to use them together, which cost more that the guns themselves. In reality the did not work. The CT60s just worked. They had massive reflectors which gave a really nice quality to the light and their autoexposure was really good. They could also keep up with a motordrive for quite a few frames, which was useful for this strobe things. I also had loads of odd little slave flashes. And then on a few occasions when mains power was available I would go the whole way with studio flashes. I did that at Mon’s once. And in the BMX days I even did it a Rom for a session with Craig Campbell. Although most of the time I honed it all down to just the single CT60 flash and I developed a real feel for how to work with it, at various points I did experiment with lighting in more ways. And I certainly never hesitated to invest in yet another flash or slave system. But most of the time I felt that my job was to concentrated on the skating, not be fiddling around with technology and not interrupting the session. Lenses were a bit like flashguns. By the end I think I had nearly every focal length Canon did between 15mm and 200mm. But a huge proportion of the pictures would have been shot on the 15mm fish-eye. I lugged a huge load of equipment everywhere, but it was all ‘just in case I need it’. Most of the time I just used the combination I knew best so that the technology kept out of the way. Film was a vital part of this. In the early days the colour was always Kodachrome. That had and has some kind of special status, but it was a real pain. Only Kodak could process it. You had to drop it off in one place, Holborn, then Wimbledon at the end, and they took it off to their processing line, Harrow and then Paris. You got it back the next day. Conceivably it was later the same day when they processed in London, but I may be making that up. Anyway, the point is that you never knew whether you had got the shot until the next day. Not at all like digital. You had to shoot insurance shots all the time. And it was very expensive. Film and processing were a significant cost, but I always took to heart a lesson Bruce Sawford and others taught me: never let the cost of the film get in the way. Put that out of your mind and make sure you’ve got the coverage. The other thing about Kodachrome is that I did not really like the subtle neutral colours it gave. If the day was cloudy and the light was flat and you were in a concrete skatepark or some dismal car park, then the pictures looked dull no matter how much flash you used to add some punch.
So when Fuji 50 and Velvia came along, I jumped ship completely. They were so much more colourful. They made things look exciting. And they were standard E6 process, so you could get them back in hours not days. So on the way back home from all those skate sessions in Barrow or Bury I would drop the film off in Clerkenwell Road after midnight and then pick up the pictures the next morning. Much better — but it didn’t make and difference to the fact that you did not know during the session whether the pictures were any good. You had to develop an instinctive feel so that you had some kind of ‘feel’ for whether you had got anything good. It must be so different now. The other thing you can do now is fix things up afterwards. In those days all colour was shot on transparency film, there was no manipulation afterwards. You had to get it spot on. We started to explore alternatives, though. I started to use colour print film sometimes. One reason was so we could physically stick a load of prints together and get them all scanned as on image because we were only allowed two small scans or one full scan per page. Another thing about print film was that the quality was better with higher speed films, like ISO400 or above. So I experimented with using them in gloomy places like the South Bank if I wanted the whole scene to be visible. And because a print was made it was also possible to make some adjustments at that stage, so I also used them for things where there might be unavoidable exposure problems like the multiple exposure strobe pictures. Using colour print wasn’t like Photoshop, but it was not quite as inflexible as colour slide film. Black and white is a whole different story. It’s a shot story: the black and white reproduction was done very very cheaply and it was embarrassing most of the time. There were very few occasions when a black and white picture looked any good. But I shot lots of them because most of the pages in the magazine didn’t have colour available. So there’s probably a whole load of good stuff in the archive which Dan hasn’t put on Instagram yet. Short version of all that: the cameras don’t matter, the lenses do a bit. Get good ones. In terms of technology it was the lights and the film which really affected the pictures. You shot some multiple exposure one-frame sequences, most memorably with Rob Dukes and Simon Evans, but why not more? Those two still really impress people. Well that’s nice. Those things are extraordinarily hard to do, it seems to me. That’s back to all the clutter because you need a camera on a tripod and you need lights that are capable of flashing multiple times very quickly to get that strobe effect, so they were quite a palaver to do. Generally my approach was always to keep the stuff out of the way and just let people skate, and therefore that sort of set-piece activity was kind of alien to me. I can remember most distinctly the Rob Dukes one, being down there at Stockwell, and persuading Rob to come along and do it and saying to him, “Can you wear a white t-shirt, so we don’t get too much ghost showing through?”, and then basically doing this thing which is so unskater-y in a way. Especially in a skate park! I mean I like them, and there’s a huge buzz out of, “Oh my God, it actually worked! It actually came out!” Bear in mind this is all pre-digital, and we didn’t see that until the next day.
ROB DUKES / STOCKWELL
You talked about the cost of doing sequences... If a roll of film didn’t contain anybody actually making the trick I’d put it in one pocket and wouldn’t bother to pay to get it processed, and if I thought somebody had made something I’d put it in the other pocket and it would get processed. At one point I actually had this strange device made for me that allowed you to have two cameras side by side, on a sort of bar, and it controlled the shutters and fired them independently, so it went A-B-A-B-A-B and so on. You actually had two cameras interlaced to try and get more than four frames per second. I went to some silly lengths occasionally! I don’t imagine you ever spliced frames of one sequence with another to get a make, did you? I know that happens now. Does it?! Oh yeah, I’ve been told more than once that it does. As long as the dude has, at some point, made the trick, then it’s fine. The photo that runs doesn’t have to be the actual make and the sequence doesn’t need to be the full sequence, the roll away can be edited in, as long as it has at some point be landed. Or in one case, as long as the guy promised to go back and definitely make it... Ha! I’m certainly not knowingly aware of anything like that ever happening. Of course there would be plenty of pictures that end up in the mag and you look at it after and say, “That foot is so flappy, in retrospect I don’t think that was a make”, but I can’t imagine ever stitching together a sequence. No. I keep coming back to this, but it got to the point where everything should be as simple as possible, and we were never able to get rid of the flash guns because the lighting here is so horrid and everything I did involved flash guns, but basically towards the end of it, it was 1/15th at f5.6, and that was it basically! Everything was that, with the flash gun taking the light to match at that level and pep it up a bit. That side of it became simpler, and simpler and simpler, and all the emphasis went back on to the skating, on to whatever was happening and trying not to get in the way of it and not to influence it too much. That’s a task there though, to make it actually look like skating, rather than a photograph of skating. Yeah. I don’t think I succeeded, in that they always were a photo of skating. The point about the fish eyes was nothing in my mind to do with exaggerating height or anything like that, it was about taking the person who’s looking at the picture subconsciously into the place. So the perspective subconsciously is telling you that you are really, really close to this. This is happening, and you’re right there, you are part of this. That was the effect I was conveying, that’s what I did most of the time. Part of me would have really liked some of the longer lens stuff, in the days before autofocus when it was you who made that appear pin-sharp at that specific distance, but the ones that I think did what I wanted to do were the ones that were shot with very wide lenses in order that you felt that you were part of the scene. That was the whole point of this, that RaD was a magazine that was for all the readers to feel that they were there, that they could be there. That was something really great about RaD, you’d run a photo of some unknown next to a photo of John Cardiel or Sean Sheffey, and that unknown could easily have been the reader. It’s not really like that now but RaD was incredibly egalitarian and inclusive. Did you go out your way to achieve that? Oh yes. Obviously not exclusively because we also completely understood all the reasons for including the high-profile stuff. But yeah, very, very, very keen on new people and on different things. I feel very happy in some senses that I’m not involved in that world any more because it sounds so, so difficult in different ways from the difficulties we experienced. But the thing I do really feel sad about is that I was really quite keen on the whole notion of a skate scene that’s outside of California. The thing that I think is amazing that’s happened since my day, is the explosion in recognition for skateboarders from loads of different countries, and the fact that there are now people who are completely regarded as top-name figures that don’t come from that inner little world. I love that. I would have loved to have been involved in that.
You kind of helped start that. You had all those unknowns in your magazine, and I think for a generation RaD made it important to appreciate your peers as much as the pros.
Well let’s not pretend we weren’t affected by certain commercial pressures. If Shiner were stumping up for a Powell tour, there was no way we wouldn’t have covered it. But then we’d have covered it anyway because they are rad! I had some great times, not with the big high-profile tours, but with the strange things that would go on with people like Jeff Grosso when they were over. Or Lee Ralph and his escapades! I went on some of the Powell tour demos but typically Paul Sunman or Mad Mike did the tours, not me, because I was stuck in London doing stuff. Any tour gossip? I’ve heard a few interesting things about what might have happened on certain tours...
Not me! Haha! The thing to bear in mind about this is that I was always considered to be someone terribly old. When I was doing RaD I was actually in my thirties, which would have been regarded as old in the context of the skaters at the time, although it wouldn’t be so much so now. An awful lot of the stuff that went on, for the best of reasons, did not happen in front of me! I’ve heard tales since, of things like what Christian Hosoi was getting up to at one of those Holeshot things, with Andy Ruffell having to work on some damage limitation. Did you prefer shooting with one person of with a whole load of people? I guess those are quite different dynamics anyway.
I can’t say I have particular preferences either way, in terms of working with a small number of people or more people. A thing to bear in mind, is that in skating terms I was always quite clueless, so one of my problems with loads of people around is that I wouldn’t know what I should be doing! I’d be doing one thing and somebody else would be doing another thing somewhere else and I’d be completely oblivious to that. So there were very simple, practical solutions to that. I tended to travel with people who would tell me, who would point things out to me and say things like, “You ought to be taking pictures of him instead!” That was quite an overt specific thing: just as other people chose the pictures because I could never choose anything, it was useful to have people around who knew what was going on and did not assume that I would notice. There are times when you were out there shooting skateboarding, when skateboarding barely existed in the public consciousness. Did people wonder what was going on? Did the public interact? Yes, sometimes. And it was seldom positive! Did we get any problems? Yes! Surprisingly rarely, but there would be trouble. Most of the response you’d tend to get would be fairly hostile, fairly negative. It was just part of it. Having grown up through that dark-ages period when you really were sort of ostracised, what was going on in the ‘90s when there were a lot more people skating, didn’t seem like a problem. I have no idea what it must be like now, with skating being so big. That’s not something I’ve ever really been involved in; I came into skating on the tail-end of the massive first boom, then went through those very dark ages and then the beginnings of the growth again, amd all the stuff that goes on with ‘stadium skateboarding’, as it seems to me, is not something I’ve ever been involved in and it’s not something I particularly want to be involved in. and it’s not something I particularly want to be involved in. I’ve said something about evangalising, and it is a case of being careful what you wish for because the notion of skateboarding in the Olympics would have appalled me. I’d have been horrified at the thought of something like that happening. I want everybody to be aware of skating and to be into skating, but to turn it into some spectator sport, or some big high-profile glamorous expensive commercial thing worries me no end. For me it was always a very underground thing, a thing that happened on the fringes, a thing that was not mainstream. These are just my personal interests in it, I suppose. I find it very odd, it being so high profile as it seems now. w
It’s interesting how you looked after UK skateboarding during its roughest years, and then stepped out just before it took off again. I didn’t step out, I got thrown out. I got ejected. Alright, so the last issue of RaD you worked on, April 1993, the issue with all the faces on the cover, was the last of that era due to the publishers selling it, right?
Yeah. It changed hands numerous times, and on this occasion the publishers were selling it, and they asked if we wanted to buy it, so I got together with the other people who were involved in producing it and we said yes, because we were fed up with it being sold out from underneath us again and again. So we started raising the money to do it, and getting ourselves organised, but foolishly, and one of my great mistakes, I thought that since I couldn’t imagine them selling it to anyone else we’d haggle a bit, so I made them an offer. Unbeknownst to me they had got somebody else lined up, who paid whatever the asking price was. Which was not much. And so they sold it. But because we’d got ourselves organised and hyped up to produce the magazine, that’s when we decided we’d go ahead anyway and do Phat instead. Which was a mistake! It’s a mistake which I’m glad happened... It took me ten years to pay it off! Oh wow. That’s what I was doing at New Deal. That period when I was actually getting paid a salary, and quite a good one, is what paid for Phat, basically. With New Deal I went from being a sort of weird online person and not getting paid much money to somebody who had a proper day job and got paid a salary. and quite a good one, is what paid for Phat, basically. With New Deal I went from being a sort of weird online person and not getting paid much money to somebody who had a proper day job and got paid a salary. It seemed crazy that those people would buy RaD and somehow think they could run it too. Oh no, that wasn’t their intention at all! They probably thought they were getting us as well. There was a strange meeting when I went down to see the windsurfing people who had bought it, and there was this strange moment where I had to tell them that we were the other people trying to buy it, the people that they were bidding against, and that we weren’t part of the deal. They’d bought the title but they hadn’t bought us, and we weren’t going to be doing it.
It became immediately clear that they needed you. They probably thought they were getting us so I imagine they were pretty pissed off with the people who had sold it to them. People stepped in to help them out, Sean Goff was involved, and there was this feeling of, “We need RaD to survive, because what if whatever Tim and those people are doing doesn’t?” So people got involved and helped it sort of lurch on. I never saw what it was like and I still haven’t looked at it. You’ll have heard about it... I’ve seen copies around in Dan’s studio, I’ve seen the covers, but I never brought myself to really look at it. Did you have a shortlist of names for Phat? A lot of things were quite ‘of the time’ then, with brands like Fresh Jive and X-Large, so did it feel like a bold move to go with something so ‘current’? Or was that all part of the excitement of getting it done? Yes, there always seems to be a list of names with new projects. I think I even saw a copy of a list like that in the boxes at Dan’s studio when we were going through the archive. Or maybe that’s just a false memory. Maybe some of the answers I give will be false memories. I can certainly remember that for a brief period it was going to be spelt ‘Fat’ which pissed off a Dutch BMXer who was already publishing a mag with than name. Names seem like such a big deal when you’re launching something, but once the thing has a life of its own, the name comes to seem right. I remember at one point Richard Grant of BMX Action bike suggested launching a magazine called Rad. The thing he had in mind seemed a bit like the Californian ‘Action Now’ which was the offspring of Skateboarder. So it sounded awful to me. Really cheesy. A few later I ended up running such a thing and at that point it seemed OK. A few decades later it seems to have achieved some kind of status which is very far from cheesy. Was it Matt Stuart’s water pistol on the cover of issue one that ended things with the distributor? I don’t think they ever specified, but I’ve heard since that the gun cover caused one massive wholesaler not to stock it. The gun article caused the trouble. There was a huge, huge explosion over that magazine because unfortunately it coincided with the Jamie Bulger murder, so there was a huge interest in violence amongst children at the same time as we launched. We had been told as a condition of getting distribution, which was very important, that we had to employ a professional PR company and have a budget and a plan for publicity. That was what we did, and we quite knowingly and consciously promoted a story which would be possibly likely to get some attention, which was this thing about guns in rap culture, and it blew up big time because it coincided with the Bulger murder and suddenly something which might have been a small, niche item, went very big indeed. It was appalling timing, and of course most people didn’t actually read the article, which was extremely balanced about it all and was basically anti-guns, and anti-violence. I mean, there’s a daisy in the water pistol. It seemed obvious what you were saying. Well, none of that mattered because they just went for the headline. Did you know when you were making issue three that Phat’s days might be numbered? Yeah. It was horrible. It was an awful, awful period, that. It was a complete and utter nightmare and we all felt really bad at the time, but we sort of lurched on. We didn’t have enough finance to last very long and so we made the decision quite consciously to stop at issue three because to go longer would have meant that we’d end up with a load of bad debts. So we had to stop, rather than behave in an unethical or dishonest way.
So issue three was always going to be the last one? There wasn’t ever work done on a fourth issue? I think that’s right. This was such a stressful period and a load of it is very confused in my mind. It was extremely intense. One of the problems I had throughout that whole period was that I didn’t do any of the skate stuff in it. Skin did it all, so I’d got myself into a position where I wasn’t even doing anything with skating, I was just trying to hold that magazine together. So it’s a bit hard to say what we were doing during the production of three, but it must have been getting closer and closer to that decision. More newsagents were dropping it and orders were going down. It was fairly clear what was going on. Curiously, there was quite an interest from the advertisers. When we launched the thing we could get virtually no advertising, but we did have people like Sony’s agency getting quite interested by it all at the end. There were various people who were starting to get interested in it, so conceivably, if we had enough funding, we could have tried to carry on long enough for it to actually take hold. But that was the end of skateboard magazines for you. At that point I was completely exhausted, extremely broke, extremely personally in debt, and I just imploded, I think, for a while. Was there ever a conversation between you and Andy Horsley, Wig and Ben about the last incarnation of RaD? No. No. That was it. I’d spent the last fifteen years or whatever it was nursing that thing along through multiple instances of publishers going bust and each time they would go bust, they would owe me more money. £2,000, £6,000, £13,000... The amounts that I was left owed each time that magazine went down were quite remarkable. And that’s in old money! That was a lot of money. They way it worked, I got paid a fee and I paid all the other contributors, so Gavin [Hills] and Vernon [Adams] and all these people all got paid out of the one pot of money. By the end of doing those magazines it was quite a big pot of money, but that meant that if the publishers were going bust and didn’t pay me for a few months the debts built up very quickly. So the last time it was thirteen grand, which was several issues. The cumulative effect of living through that and then this insanely intense burst of trying to transition from RaD into Phat and then Phat itself being a nightmare... That was it, it just wiped me out. It never even occurred to me to try and carry on with this stuff. I’d carried on through every other iteration of the magazines. Starting with Skateboard!, I suppose. Skateboard! disappears, and what did I do? I hijacked the mail order price list of Alpine Sports and turned it into a newsletter for skateboarders. That was the first thing, it was like a newspaper and it was originally a price list. There was always this determination to keep doing this, to keep doing this, and by the time it came to the end of Phat I’d had it. What’s the plan for the Read and Destroy book? Two separate volumes? I don’t know. The thing that’s important to stress about that project is that it’s not RaD, and it’s not me, there’s a whole group of us, so it’s a very collective thing which is certainly not controlled or lead by me in any way whatsoever. So for example, the format or nature of that Kickstarter project wasn’t something I suggested because again, I’m out of my depth. I’m out of date on these things. People tell me that people will pay £70 or £80 for a book, and I’m like, “Really? Really?!” That version didn’t work but I’m sure it will regroup and appear as something else. I certainly hope so! That project is the fruition of a very slow process that started more than a decade ago, when we thought we really ought to do something about the old magazine and about those pictures. The first meeting about that took place in the Slam City warehouse over in Notting Hill back in the days when Paul Sunman was running Slam. That’s where it began, and I think I would have been working at New Deal at that point. It was a long time ago!
Where did you keep all your slides and negatives between the end of the magazine, and now? In various forms of paid storage, paying roughly £100 a month just to store the things, and then by the end of it they were in a damp loft at the top of an industrial estate building. All praise is due to Dan Adams, because Dan has done something with those pictures that was never done before. He’s got them all sorted out. It’s an amazing thing and I’ve never seen them sorted as well as this. His work has made that possible. I’m so full of admiration for that, and it’s such a thrill seeing these pictures again. I do look at them on Instagram, but I don’t tend to comment or join in on that. A bit like how I was saying I shy away from phone calls these days, I try and keep a fairly low profile. The funny thing is now, at work, some people say, “Are you the same person?!” It’s really weird. I’m glad you’re still so stoked on all your work in skateboarding. It’s not like you seem to spend much time in the past. For ages I was very much, “I don’t do that any more”. I didn’t want to know about the skate stuff. I mean I did, sort of, but I felt very uncomfortable around it. Then because of the book and because of Dan doing all that work with the pictures in particular, I felt I had to support the book and help make that happen. But also that’s changed my feeling about it. It is now however many decades ago, and the scars are still there but they don’t hurt so much. So I’m happier now looking at those things, and indeed talking about it. The photographs, the editorial and the layouts all paved the way for so much of what went on to happen in skateboarding. Having people like Nick Philip, Simon Evans and Gavin Hills around alongside the creativity of outlets like Slam and M-Zone... These influences are still massively identifiable in skateboarding now. Can you accept, or appreciate, the cultural shift that RaD caused in a generation even though you were so in amongst it at that time? How much of UK skateboarding it shaped? I hear about it, and it puzzles me, some of it. The best thing you said there is that I was living it, so it didn’t seem like that. I’m not saying that it was all unconscious, because there was a very strong ethos behind the magazine, and a lot of that came from me. Not that I originated it all, but when you speak about people like Nick or Gavin, or Ged Wells who’d be another example, these are people who brought extremely distinctive characteristics to it, which resonated well with where I was coming from, I guess. It wasn’t me setting a tone as such, but then if I hadn’t liked that stuff as much as I did then it wouldn’t have been such a theme in the magazine. So a lot of the influences that you’re talking about I do sort of recognise, and part of me says it wasn’t me, but then there is an element there that had I not been disposed to do it the way that I was, then presumably I wouldn’t have been as keen to print so much of it, or publish it. You always make clear that the people around you had so much to do with everything. I want to emphasize how much of a collaborative effort it was. There were all these other people who had a very, very strong influence over it. Different people at different times, and I can look back on that period and think that I worked with so many amazing people who took it in completely different directions. The visual aspect of it for instance, we had a sequence of different designers who did different things with it, while I myself had no design abilities at all, but loved working with them. I think some of that worked remarkably well. That type of collaborative aspect of it was great, and I loved the influences of different people. I know a lot of people are very fed up with what they call the ‘Six Pack’, but I just saw this as a remarkably creative, interesting group of people...
Who were the Six Pack? I don’t even know who they were, specifically, and there was probably a lot more than six of them, but it was a derogatory term aimed at people like Simon Evans, Matt Stuart, Sam Silverstone; what was seen as a small cluster of London-based skaters who had somehow got an undue amount of influence over the magazine. That lot. But one of the things I love that we published was that Simon Evans interview. That’s the best thing that’s been in any skateboard magazine ever, and anybody who says otherwise didn’t read it at the time. That’s a toned down version, that was version two! The first attempt at that, which they decided they didn’t want to do although I really liked it, was just more extreme, although I can’t remember what disappeared from it. Sigourney Weaver meeting Simon’s dad, that kind of thing? There’s this concept of the Big Interview in a skateboard magazine, and Simon was somebody who really played with that notion. Actually it was a group of them, not just Simon, it was a very collaborative thing as I recall, messing around with what’s real and what isn’t. The photos made it look like he’d do the interview, just as long as his friends could come along too. Yeah, and we had great fun shooting that. That was a collaborative thing; that’s got some weird lighting and effects in it, with the lights sort of going around people. I liked occasionally doing fun stuff! I’m very pleased we actually got to do that. Me too. And it’s been a pleasure talking to you about all this amazing stuff. I love hearing from people who experienced it, it’s interesting. It’s fun talking about it.
I’m still making friends with new people now because we both happened to read the same British skateboard magazine thirty years ago.
Thank you for all you did.