Looking back now, what we did was special, and we really felt it This wind of change blasted through skating in the UK where US brands just became completely irrelevant and everything was about UK skateboarding Half my jaw was falling off and he wanted to go to a handrail at Embankment. That shows his mentality Vert just became stale, and street skating became very exciting British skateboarding is strong enough, and it’s got enough people that love it and we don’t need to be told how it looks, or what you should buy, by Americans We were getting invited to clubs, and fashion shoots, and all sorts I had the confidence where I felt like anything was possible, so I would just do it and I’d land it, and that’s when things changed for me It felt like life couldn’t get any better. Like you were on the cutting edge of life It was so insane back then, we all had guns I’ve only snapped two boards. I land bolts, you know what I mean? They had rocks, bricks, lumps of wood, bits of metal, and they were setting fire to stuff It was like, ‘Here we are, three idiots who don’t know what we’re doing and we’ve made a video. Fuck you, give us a magazine’ London was a great place to be at the time. There were still riots going on, still great differences in wealth, but on a summer’s day in London with your friends, some skateboards and a couple of cameras, it was brilliant I think I spent that two grand in the first week on Hilfiger and Polo Sport shit After that demo we went to fucking George Harrison’s house and I remember thinking that I was in another world All these brilliant, talented, fifteen and sixteen year-olds doing their own thing, this Anarchist philosophy and anti-wage-slave ideas The fact that he wasn’t alive anymore made me realise how young we all were, and how young he’d gone When those guys came and told me it was over, it was a surprise, because I just thought I’d be able to tread water doing nothing forever We’d have what looked like a cinema queue outside the shop every Saturday and we used to have to fight our way to the front to open the door So we sat there with the dude we’d caught burgling our house watching Faces of Death, drinking tea, at half four in the morning I remember not giving a fuck about the money they paid me, but I gave a fuck about the money I made from selling the shoes Has there been this kind of myth built up? That’s not how I see what happened The first drug I ever took was a line of ice—crystal meth—on the counter It’s still the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. The blurriness of my pic was probably me shaking with excitement  I look back on it and I’m not particularly proud of my behaviour If there was something fresh, you’d be like, ‘I’ve got to do that now!’, and I was always a sucker for trends It isn’t like, ‘Hey! You’ve got to look stylish!’, all it is, is future-proofing The amount of skaters who had so much talent but lacked the motivation to do anything with it was heartbreaking We might have a child travel card once in a while but more often it was one travel card between ten of us They were the modern thing, they were the new thing, they were happening, they were trendy, and the rest of us had to get used to it I think if someone’s got the bollocks to try and open a skateboard shop, then fuckin’ good luck with that mate, because it’s a nightmare They were fucking doing it, it was happening all around me, these guys were it It’s normally at comps when people turn up and drink that things really happen There was nothing that he couldn’t make look really, really good The trousers were impractical, to say the least I probably thought my window had opened and closed, but in hindsight, it probably hadn’t at all. I had plenty to go He said to me, “You’re going home on the first train. I’m buying the ticket and you’re going fucking home, I’m chucking you off tour” There were about a hundred skaters in the whole of the UK, and we all knew each other, then two years later was the explosion that led to now. That was the beginning of the whole thing I wasn’t forewarned in any great detail so I was a bit sad about it, really I was going skating then going home and taking valium and listening to Belle & Sebastian and painting everything magnolia. I wasn’t really that gnarly People’s jaws were hitting the floor when they were seeing this stuff; they knew this was the next thing It was a complete democracy of people who came together just to do one thing, and embrace each other and be stoked for each other The first time he came to pick me up he just drove up this grass bank because he wanted to see if his car would make it. My parents were watching going, “What the fuck?!” Fashions change and people change but for that summer, it was perfect You wanted people to appreciate it and be part of it but it wasn’t to be owned That whole thing was completely unintentional, it was just a group of people who happened to get together All of a sudden it went from going to the local pub for an evening to going to nightclubs and hanging out with models The first guy who wore jeans to go skateboarding down Fairfields got fucking annihilated Once it started appearing in the pages of The Face and i-D, everything just went through the roof We just had so much fun, and there was no-one telling you you’d done it wrong For that microsecond you felt like you were part of something that was just incredibly good You hear people joking like, “I shat out my innards!” but he literally threw up a tumour Skateboarding’s always been a calling, it’s a life choice; if you do it you don’t need to conform to anyone I battered him for the journey into the police station in the back of this van because he had nowhere to run at this point It was important that there were things that people didn’t like in the magazine He probably caned gazillions of pounds worth of film trying to get us mugs looking good It wasn’t a scene, it was a life, it was what we did, but we were part of something that we shared with other people and they were the best of times I spent twenty years being a bit of an arsehole, really It kind of became another language that only we knew about Southbank was like Neverland; it was basically a bunch of kids flying about on skateboards doing what the fuck they liked with complete freedom At the end of a Saturday I had to take carrier bags full of money home to my house to count it on the living room floor Everyone was using a Canon T-90; that was the skate photographer’s camera We saw these kids picking up bricks and wrestling a fencepost out of the ground, and started thinking how it wasn’t looking very good This dude who didn’t speak, who lived on 9p noodles and literally lived in a cupboard that was doing switch 5.0s down handrails What we did, and I’m not saying we claim anything beyond that particular place and that particular moment, was something quite unique Only an interest in whether you fucking make a trick or not, and not whether you’re black, white, fat, thin, girl, or boy Tom obviously doing the right thing told Jeremy what had happened, and I ended up in a choke-hold from Ian at a St. Albans comp We’d be trying to skate but it was a bit like just having our heads in our hands, wondering what we do now Being pretty juvenile and stupid seemed appropriate to skateboarding to me The Six Pack didn’t travel as one, obviously we would split up in case there was a terrorist attack. You can’t have the whole Six Pack being taken out at the same time I spent twelve years in that shop, had one week’s holiday a year for the entire time, and I spent that one week in the company of my customers, and I loved every minute of it So I’m standing on the corner outside, holding onto this guy, surrounded by baby socks, with her just screaming at me I felt like I was in A Clockwork Orange or something like that, and it reeked of piss, but it was unreal That was kind of just the way things happened for me, just out of the blue I’d do one, and it’d be perfect I heard they’d even tapped the electricity, they’d wired it to the train tracks above so they weren’t even paying any electricity bills I threw away my return ticket because I thought they’d give me another one for the flight home We were sponsored by a pub, and they’d give us a pint a night, so what we’d do is go every Saturday and have seven pints Looking back as an adult now, we maybe could have done with some outside interests in our lives They’d a bong made out of a chocolate milk carton, and they’re smoking the massivest bong hits going 100mph down the motorway in the rain with a plastic windscreen The moment Simon was on the cover wearing blue adidas Gazelle, that was it The footfall was fucking crazy, it was just insane, the amount of people, and every last one of them was a shoplifter He didn’t give a shit; he was fucking hardcore. Like hardcore That was the best education that I could have ever had, and it turned out to be the main education I had, and it’s been the blueprint to the rest of my life I was a ghost haunting my own past; nothing ever stays the same and nothing’s meant to last When people say how amazing the stuff I did was, I’m just like, “Was it? It just kind of happened” If he saw any sort of bullying he would be the guy you could count on to jump in, like, “Who the fuck are you?!” And start punching people One day I was able to get out to that place, and it was like the devil going to the Vatican You know in Bristol, the ground’s got something in it where it’s less dense or something—only by a fraction—but it affects the gravity He was light-years ahead of his time for his age, for the era, with his skating, the way he thought and the way he saw the world For us it was just about going out to skate, cause havoc, have a good time and take pictures I thought the shop had been there for years because it was so rundown but it turns out it had just opened Even when he was feeling low he always turned it into something incredibly entertaining. He was just a life-enhancing person to know He got persuaded to smuggle money for this gang of high-end coke dealers, and he got caught trying to take £90,000 in cash strapped to his body through JFK airport It’s not all sweetness and light in the garden of skateboarding, you know? We would smash the coping with the tails of our boards so hard that trucks would fly off and boards would snap It was just on another level of coolness Two grown men hitting him with their boards, because they’d just seen him knock out a thirteen year-old kid You have to be serious because these people will just try to walk all over you He’d worn out his septum, and he had to have it fixed, because he’d just coked right through it At that moment, it was just a perfect storm of cultural ingredients…