NORTH SKATEBOARD MAGAZINE
ISSUE 13
MARIUS SYVANEN
INTRODUCING THE 345, EVOLVED FIT, FLICK AND FEEL COMFORTABLY SUBTLE
WWW.CARHARTT-WIP.COM SYLVAIN TOGNELLI – OLLIE UP 5-0 • PHOTO: MAXIME VERRET
A COLLABORATION BETWEEN
ISLE SKATEBOARDS RAPHAËL ZARKA CARHARTT WIP
It’s that time of year again. The weather is dogshit, it’s dark, and you’re feeling really unproductive. It happens every year yet I’m never really prepared. At the start of January this issue wasn’t looking too great. “Who’s in this issue? Who’s on the cover?” The usual fear and pressure started to kick in. I want to say thanks to Marcel for taking the time out to provide me with some truly great content. I’ve been pestering him for a couple of years to feature him in the mag; his work is amazing and I’m a big fan. I’ve probably been chasing Kieran for the same amount of time to shoot photos. He stepped in at the beginning of the year and banged out some great stuff in a short time, despite him being an hour late every time we met... I’ve always loved doubles photos, but never really tried to shoot one. Kieran was down to try so we recruited Daniel Nicholas to help us, and within a few goes they had it figured out and I got the cover I was waiting for.
Cover: Kieran Menzies & Daniel Nicholas Photographer : Graham Tait
Contents
Kieran Menzies Film Gallery Marcel Veldman
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Kieran Menzies Photography by Graham Tait
Interview by Kieron Forbes
Your dad Ali skates and has a heavy involvement in Skateboard Scotland. You’ve always had skating around you from a young age. Yeah, pretty much. Since as far back as I can remember my dad was always driving us out to Livi or Bristo Square to skate. We’d go somewhere at least once a week. So no choice in the matter or just happy being taken along? I don’t know. I definitely wasn’t forced into it, I just enjoyed doing something fun and challenging. I would go skate various curbs in the neighbourhood, usual stuff other folk would have done. My dad made a few launch ramps to put out in the street; that was always fun. Definitely a benefit having a parent that skates. I’m guessing it was easier to get decks and shoes, or was your mum like everyone else’s and not stoked on having to fork out for them every few months? Yeah, for sure. I probably wouldn’t have been introduced to skating if it wasn’t for my dad. He would always buy me a board when he got one for himself, so that was rad. My mum is really supportive and always has been. She’s still buying me shoes even now!
FS Nosegrind
I remember you always being a familiar face at events and competitions when you were growing up. Do you think that’s had an influence on your skating? Yeah. I just always wanted to go out skating, and back then contests were always packed. It was so good just to skate with everyone! Man, all the Livi Fun Weekends and War of the Thistles comps were amazing. Seeing dudes from around Scotland killing it was so rad when I was a young kid, it got me hyped to skate as much as possible. Whenever there was a contest that my dad was running, I was happy to go and compete. But I was always stoked to go just to check out a new park or meet new people. Did you ever get any shit for placing in Skateboard Scotland competitions if your dad was running them? Not to my face. If they were saying it behind my back they must have been a bitch! Haha! Your family went through a pretty gnarly house fire a few years back. What happened? Shit, that was pretty fucked up... I basically fell asleep smoking a joint with a candle stick stuck in an old skateboard wheel and it melted through the wheel. I woke up from my leg being in the fire and my whole room up in flames so I ran, grabbed my sisters and my folks. Then I went back in to try grab my laptop but it was fully smoked out so I just ended up burning all my hair. Haha! I remember standing in the street at 4am in my boxers watching the house burn waiting on the fire brigade. That was pretty intense.
Wall to bank Ollie
That’s some heavy shit. I can’t imagine I would be so quick to respond? Yeah man, it all happened pretty fast. That’s pretty gnarly going back in. I went back in to see if I could grab anything valuable. My laptop was the closest thing I could see but it was half melted already and I couldn’t get to it. What were the repercussions? I somehow didn’t get into that much trouble. I think at that point we were all just happy to be alive. I explained the situation and it was obviously an accident. I had to give a statement to the fire investigators which made me pretty nervous. But everything worked out OK in the end. We were pretty lucky. It sucks to lose everything you own. I did manage to save my board though! I borrowed some trackies from my grandad and I was skating again the next day. Do you reckon you cheated death? I’m not sure, but I definitely value life more now. I’m just glad my family were all OK. I think it’s fair to say you were under the radar for a while, then it flipped and everyone started saying, “Have you seen Kieran skate lately?” What happened? You sell your soul to the skate gods? Haha! I don’t know man, no skate gods. Saughton being built probably helped. I think it was just gradual skating every day and travelling to other parks, that definitely helped. Some days I’ll try different things and push myself too. I grew up with my friend Chris [Nwufoh] and we still skate together as much as possible. So we push one another to try new tricks or whatever.
Hip to halfpipe BS Transfer
How did the whole Santa Cruz thing came about? They had you out to California recently didn’t they? Yeah. Alan [Glass] from Shiner just hit me up a year or so back after they were on a Scottish trip. I’d skated with the guys and basically they just asked if I wanted to skate for Santa Cruz. I get my stuff through Shiner but they paid for me to go out to San Francisco for a couple of weeks for this OGSC tour. That was insane! I got to skate some gnarly spots. It was pretty sick to meet Emmanuel Guzman, Eric Winkowski and Tom Remillard. Those dudes all kill it! The weather was sick the whole time, they’ve got it really good, and there was weed everywhere! Definitely gonna try get back out there. Were you a Santa Cruz fan before getting hooked up? I always loved watching ‘Wheels on Fire’ but never really skated many of their boards before, but they’re sick! They have loads of sick classic graphics. The list of riders is insane from back then and to now. I’m stoked to be skating for them. They’ve definitely helped you get more exposure. I’ve noticed you popping up in Sidewalk and online in various edits. How’s it been shooting with Graham? Yeah, the homies at Shiner hook it up big time! And Sidewalk are always rad at sharing photos and shit which is rad. Going out shooting with Graham has been sick, I’m just stoked we managed to get it done finally! Haha!
Previous page: FS Noseblunt slide Transfer
BS Tailblock
You guys have chatted for a while I take it? Yeah, I think for over a year at least. He’s been noising me up to do this! Dude’s persistent! Did you manage to shoot any street photos and what’s your preference? Does a street transition count? Haha! To be honest I just love skating anything man. I have been skating a lot more street though. It just depends what I’m feeling that day, I’m pretty easy. A lot of my mates skate different spots so I like being forced to think about my skating. Have you got any plans for the coming year? Yeah, I’m moving down to London for a couple of months to stay with my girlfriend. Honestly, I’m going to chill and try and skate as many parks and spots as possible. Just take advantage of being in a different city. Anyone you want to shout out? Big thanks to Alan and everyone at Shiner, Focus, Graham/North mag and all the homies!
FS Ollie
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Film Gallery
Graham Tait / Aaron Wilmot / BS Lipslide
Graham Tait / Andy White / Ollie
Graham Tait / Pablo Aresu / FS Nosegrind
Graham Tait / Daniel Nicholas / Hardflip
Graham Tait / Jack Hackleton / Boardslide
Garrett Remy / Kurt Haubenstein / BS Smith Grind
Sam Shuman / Zach Dykes / FS Noseslide
Paul Coutherut / Dylan Goldberger / FS Blunt
Bobby Murphy / Josh Baker / Crook
Photography by Kazuhiro Terauchi Interview by Graham Tait
Federico Casella / Luri Furdui / Wallie Crook
Sam Coady / Cody Riley / BS Smith Grind
Zak Gold / Keanu Robson / BS Bluntslide
Friedjof Feye / Carsten Beneker / BS Tailslide
Scott Smith / Tone Marcus / FS 50-50
Daniel Beck / Daniel Weinstien / Wallride
Yoshimoto Masahiro / Toru Sasaki / Crook
James Griffiths / Diego Najera / 360 Flip Noseslide
Will Creswick / Conor Charleson / Ollie Ride On
Steven Mastorelli / Travis Washington / BS 180 Nosegrind
Terry Worona / Ben Gore / 50-50 Rail Ollie
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Marcel Veldman Portrait by Morris Jay Veldman Interview by Neil Macdonald
Fluff started just before skateboard media began its massive shift online. After a couple of years of doing the mag, were you worried you’d feel obliged to go down that path? Not really. We had a website, or at least a page, forever, but we never really put anything on it because we really sucked at making websites. It wasn’t even a thing. What we do with The Fluff, it doesn’t really translate well to online. I think you have to hold it in your hand, and feel the size, smell the paper or whatever it is we do with a certain issue. It’s part of the experience of reading The Fluff, I would say. I mean, the difference between physical and online now is huge. Guys like you, and Graham who does North, and all the other dudes doing these great magazines in 2017 are making things well worth owning, but when you started The Fluff, the ‘novelty’ of a print magazine wasn’t there. It’s like mags now are a deliberate reaction to online content. Yeah, yeah, totally. For us it was the only way to go. We started in ‘99, and we always wanted to make something different to the other magazines anyway. It was like that from the start, just wanting to make something original. We knew we were never going to be a monthly magazine or anything like that, and so we figured that we could do one, or two, or three a year in the beginning, and do something good. Something worth having, and worth looking through, and worth looking forward to. We always had people asking, “Hey, what’s the next Fluff going to be like?”, and I remember that from myself back in the day, always being a fan of Big Brother. For me I was always anxious to see what they were going to do next. In skateboarding it’s the same. What’s going to happen next? You don’t want to do the same trick and repeat yourself every day, you want to do something else, and that’s the way we approached the magazine from the start. Before the thought of making something different from the internet, we were doing this anyway. But yes, it’s a lot more relevant today.
So much is happening in skateboarding just now, everybody films everything, and it can mean that something amazing is only destined to exist until the next amazing thing comes along. You’d stare at something for a long time in a magazine, but I think now people only look at something long enough to decide if they’re going to double tap it or not before they move on. The preservation, in books or magazines, is important. There’s also the fact that if you make something in print, it will always exist in that certain way, forever. Even the ads, the language, the way people dress – it’s a timeframe. It’s going to be there in ten years, or twenty years. But online content, don’t get me wrong, I’m a sucker for that too. I’ll get up and I’ll browse the websites and the Instagrams to feed my brain with content. I enjoy that, but you’re right; three days later a video part that someone worked really hard on for a long time is overwhelmed by tsunamis of other video parts, or photos or whatever. That’s just the way things are nowadays, but I think a print magazine or a book will always be a thing. An online magazine for instance might not be there anymore ten years from now. You might be able to find the content here and there on the internet somewhere, if you can even remember what was in it, but the collection of the content is gone. If you pick up a physical copy of a magazine twenty years from now, it’s from a certain era, and nobody can change it or alter any text or delete a photograph. It’s always going to be like that, and I think that’s important for skateboarding, and for the history of skateboarding.
How do you divide content between the mag and a book project? Do you go and shoot for the mag, then shoot for the book? It depends... There’s so much, I can’t even answer that! Sometimes I know up front, sometimes I’ll have a certain idea, and sometimes I’ll just go along and something will just happen and it’s like, “That’s a good idea, we can use it for that”. It changes all the time. But the magazine looks like a book most of the time anyway. But if we’re doing a collaboration of some sort then I usually know up front which is for what. That’s cool. How did your relationship with Nike come about? You’ve been close to those guys for a while now. Yeah. I don’t know, I basically just rolled into that by accident, I guess. Pretty much from the start I was involved with stuff they’d been doing here in Europe, and it must have been going on for twenty years. At least. We used to skate together; I’ve known the guys behind the scenes for so long, and it just slowly rolled from that. You travel so much, but have you ever lived elsewhere? Ever lived in the States? The most time I’ve spent in the States would be three months, I would say. The same in Sweden, three or four months years and years and years ago. Maybe decades ago. Right now I don’t really feel the need to live anywhere else because I’m always gone anyway.
You’re not going to run out of things to shoot, living in Rotterdam. I live in Amsterdam now! I used to live here, and then I lived in Rotterdam for a long time. I would say I recently moved back, but it’s really been two and a half years! To me it doesn’t really matter where I live. I’m not an employee, so I don’t have to go to the office and stuff. I’m still doing my own thing and I can do that anywhere else. My friends are here – people I’ve known forever – and we have our own skatepark called ‘The Showroom’, my wife is from here, I used to live here and I just like this city for living. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world. For skateboarding, Rotterdam is better for sure. But it’s only an hour to get there. What’s the furthest you’ve travelled, to not get the photo? Like, going out somewhere specifically to shoot one photo. Oh wow. Let me think. Honestly, that doesn’t happen that much. Obviously there are some tours.... I went to Sicily last month and it got completely rained out. First day was good, then afterwards it was just sitting it out, waiting to go home. It happens, but it’s never really, really bad. It’s skateboarding, so sometimes you get great stuff and sometimes you don’t. These guys are not robots, so you can’t really expect anything like that. But these guys are on such a high level anyway, so it happens very rarely that somebody doesn’t really pull through. And usually they have a very good reason for it! Your skate photos will very often have a lot of background, or other people, or other things going on in them, and that’s what I always liked about Tobin’s photos. It tells much more of a story. Who did you admire when you were coming up as a skateboard photographer? Personally, I think there’s no right or wrong way to take a photograph. I think it depends on the photographer and personal taste. My all-time favourite is Daniel Harold Sturt.
Have you met him? Well, yes and no. I was shooting a Goofy vs. Regular contest in the States one time, I think it was about 2005-ish. At that time I was still shooting everything on film, except for sequences, and at that point I was shooting a sequence. I saw him, and he was sitting behind me, and he gets up and he starts talking to this guy who was shooting analogue, and he was all, “Oh yeah, it’s so great that you still shoot analogue, rather than all this digital stuff”, and I was just thinking, “Dude, fuck...” as I’m standing there with what was my first ever digital camera. The guy who owned Fluff at that time had told me I was wasting too much film shooting sequences... And there I was with Daniel Harold Sturt, and I’m shooting sequences with a digital camera. I would have loved to talk to him, but I was too scared to approach him, especially with the camera I was holding. Maybe it’s for the best, it’s not always a good idea to meet your idols. I love the mystery. Should sequences go from left to right, or in the direction the subject is moving? I’ve always put them in the direction the subject is moving. Definitely. But it’s weird, since some mags do run them from left to right, regardless. I think that’s confusing. You lose the flow. I totally agree. I’ve had my sequences run like that in other magazines, but in Fluff we always do it the other way. It always felt much more natural. Who do you always get a good photograph of? It’s kind of hard to get a bad photo of Oski [Rozenberg]. It somehow always goes well with him, on and off the board. He’s a handsome devil, and a really fucking amazing skateboarder.
Are you friends with everybody that you shoot portraits of? It always looks like there’s a connection in your portraiture. I would say most of them, yeah. Even if it’s just some guys I’m getting to know, we’re all skateboarders, and I’m a skateboarder first and foremost; I just happen to have a camera and take photos for a job, so the link is already there anyway. When people are just getting to know me, they’re like, “Oh, that dude, he’s always got a camera”. I would like to think I’m one of the guys and not an outsider looking in. Most of these guys are my friends, and yeah, if you have that connection you can get away with a lot more rather than try to have people posing for you. If you meet somebody for the first time, quickly, for ten minutes, they are fairly aware that you’re there. If you’re friends, or have a good connection with those guys, you’re just there and they don’t really pay attention if you take a photo or not. That always helps with the end result, I would say. Plus most of them are familiar with what I do and my work. Do you shoot random people when they don’t realise they’re having their photograph taken? Do you have to tell them? Oh, yeah, I shoot people in the street. Just as long as I don’t put them in a commercial, it’s my right to shoot them. I don’t really tell people that I shot their photo, but sometimes they’ll tell me to erase the photo, but if I shoot it on film it’s hard to erase! Although if I shot it on digital I wouldn’t erase it either. You’re allowed to shoot photos in public places. I heard there’s a country where they’re gonna ban having your picture taken on the street. I’ll have to look into that, but if it’s going that way, that’s because of social media. It’s getting harder to shoot random people on the street these days because everybody’s afraid they’re going to end up on some random Instagram or blog or some dodgy website. Or a meme, you know what I mean? It’s much more work to just take pictures of strangers in the street. But I like to do that, and I feel it’s important to document life.
What do you think about magazines running non-makes? I know it’s generally alright if the dude made the trick and another shot gets run, but what about knowingly running a non-make? I think I ran one photo ever that wasn’t a make. And that kind of happened by accident, a long time ago. I always run makes. Maybe not the make, because if you shoot a trick you can sometimes end up with a hundred of the same photograph, so sometimes I choose one where the light is better or whatever. That happens. But the make is always when I’m there. It’s a landed trick. I’m not going to run a bail. I genuinely can’t remember who it was, but I know some photographer sent his editor a photo based on the skater promising that he’d definitely go back and land the trick. The photos were run and the dude never went back to land it. That stuff happens, I’ve heard that many times. There’s the very famous one, the Tom Penny front blunt cover... ...at Huntington Beach, for Transworld [August 1996]. That stuff happens. I read the story about that, and they were on a deadline, and he was going to go back and do it again. Sometimes you have to make those decisions I suppose. I wouldn’t necessarily do that, but I’m not on those deadlines! Fluff has its own deadline, which is always a year too late. I don’t think it’s good, but it happens. They [Transworld] weren’t really hiding that either. There’s always people in any job, or profession, or hobby or whatever that are doing stuff that people don’t know about. I just like to do it my way, so that isn’t something I need to do. I like to keep it genuine. And lucky for me the guys I shoot with are super talented. I don’t really have that problem!
Ben Cundall wants to know: Where’s Mouse? Hahaha! He was actually in my car two days ago. We were skating our skatepark here in Amsterdam. That’s funny. Ben Cundall... Every time I go skating with him something happens. There were a couple of sessions skating with him, and one time this kid kicked a ball against a wall and then straight into my lens, and a few days later we got egged from a window and the eggs all went into my camera bag. The Cundall effect. I love him. What’s up Ben! Graham [North editor] wants to know about your film scanner. I knew he was going to ask that... I’ve got a film scanner. Haha! I need to scan my film. So what’s coming up this year for you? What have you got going on? Hopefully, if everything goes according to plan, there might be a couple of new things coming within a couple of months, I would say. I can’t say too much, but we’re working on it really hard. Very vague, I know! We like to have everything always be a surprise. You can never tell what it is or when it’s coming out. The surprise factor; it’s important!
Featuring: Tim Zom, Colin Kennedy, Kyron Davis, Chima Ferguson, Youness Amrani, Oski Rozenberg, Brian Anderson, Daniel Kinloch, Dave Mackey, Justin Brock, Levi Brown, Kevin Bradley, Hjalte Halberg, Fernando Bramsmark, Daniel Lebron, Wiegar Van Wageningen, Jason Dill, Jacopo Carozzi, & Grant Taylor.
Windbreakers coming soon.
Thanks Mike @ Keen Dist Josh @ Theories Ryan @ Quasi A&M Imaging Marcel Veldman Kieran Menzies Kieron Forbes Neil Macdonald Sam Paterson All the contributing photographers. adidas Skateboarding Carhartt Converse DC Shoe Co Dwindle Dist Horses Knatchbull Levi’s Skateboarding New Balance Numeric Nike SB Palomino Shiner Dist
Editor & Photographer Graham Tait Layout & Design Graham Tait For all advertising enquiries and film submissions please email: mail@northskatemag.com www.northskatemag.com @northskatemag
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The views and opinion in editorial and advertising within North do not necessarily reflect the opinions of North or any of its associates. North Skateboard Magazine and everything contained within is copyright of North Skateboard Magazine. No material may be reproduced without written permission.
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