Beneath the pavement, the beach! Or a bit of plywood should do it.

In the late 70’s, just as I was approaching puberty, one of those inevitable and cyclic youth ‘crazes’ hit the UK.

But unlike, the Frisbee, the Hoola hoop, the Rubik’s Cube, the Yo-yo, and all those other dodgy baubles to keep the kids gormless and off the street… SKATEBOARDING put the brats firmly back on the pavements, and provided them with a mythology and iconography: a first sniff of the counterculture and the edginess of teen cool and sexuality.

There was another kind of glossy porn passed around on the school bus and the cloakrooms of my early puberty: American Skateboard magazines with full frontal centrefolds of longhaired, tanned ragamuffins, being spat into the cloudless azure skies over dry Californian swimming pools.

Wow, this was the life. It was my first introduction to alternative lifestyles outside of the school/work/family narrative trinity that me and my friends were being indoctrinated into way back when.
This was surfer culture for the landlocked, Bondi beach in your backyard!

It all felt a bit naughty and possibly dangerous to my young mind, but that of course made it infinitely cool as well.
I mean shit, teenagers are so grown up to an eleven year old kid, when a single year can dilate to a lifetime in its condensed developmental novelty.

The names of those place’s in the magazines too, so exotic and beautiful to an apprentice free spirit like yours truly: San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, New Mexico.
The sun was always shining, the beach was never too far away and everyone looked healthy and happy.
And there was something else too, a sensation of big, open, airy spaces, vast panoramas, alien worlds where total freedom reigned.

Compare this to the grey, heavily populated, rain swept industrial landscapes of the British Midlands, and I think you can imagine the magnetic pull of Skateboard culture and symbolism on my young and oh so impressionable mind.

The artwork, logo’s, slogans and urban graffiti that signposted and stamped this beautiful new world were awesome too: lots of Skulls and cross bones, Tarot card figures, reapers and snakes, stylised flames, the ace of spades and tumbling dice!
I had found my Mojo.

This was my first introduction into the semiotics of urban outlaw street style – the graphic semaphore of the rock ‘n roll language.

The esoteric grammar that I had to learn in order to communicate - with the correct balance of detachment and ‘cool’ - with my fellow surfers, involved phrases such as ‘Hang ten’, ‘axle grind’, ‘aerial’ and many others that are now lost in the mists of time.

The skateboard subculture of the UK in 70’s definitely had a Punk DIY vibe.
But whereas the Yanks had beautifully sculpted, Hockney-esque empty swimming pools and huge sections of industrial irrigation pipes awaiting ‘appropriation’ in the desert…we had to create our waves from sheets of plywood and half a dozen house bricks.

Not exactly California, not much of a tan, and the potential for disaster and encripplement (and embarrassment) were always lingering, like the proverbial broken pop bottle on Blackpool beach.
I mean skateboards were basically missiles with wheels, bad enough when someone was aboard, but the sudden torque and weight reduction that was created as the rider became violently detached, created a potentially lethal javelin of wood and plastic energy. (Oh those battered ankles!)

Me, and most of the kids I knew, had friction burned a hole in the knee and/or arse of their jeans at some early stage of their board training.

Everything was patched back then, or you had a jumper tied around your waist to hide the inevitable rent in the fabric of your back seam.
Don’t get me started on my collection of crimson scabs…

For the older kids, the soundtrack to this urban surfing culture was Rock music of course. But this came later for me, I was still listening to Blondie’s Heart of Glass and Racey – too young for full sexual/occult immersion.
Besides, I don’t think my balls had dropped yet and my testosterone count was hiding beneath a very small stone.

I do think that my skateboard and its sub-cultural trappings were for me, what psychologists would call a ‘Transitional object’.
Like a teddy bear may become a substitute for parental attachment – the plush dummy for the emotional tit – my skate-world inducted me into adolescence, self-reflection, sexuality and more ‘adult themes’.

A couple of years later on, it was natural for me to fall hopelessly into the long haired, be-denimed, vortex of Rock music and its cartoon symbolism and sexism. I’d done my apprenticeship after all.
My next transitional object was also made of wood, very mobile and surrounded by a lexicon of strange mutterings…it was also a little less physically dangerous.
The electric guitar.

As the Parisian revolutionaries had screamed in ’68: ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach!’ I still have fond memories of my urban beaches, my pavement surfing sessions, and not too serious ‘wipe-outs’.

See kids, I was a pioneer, a purist. I was to the history of British Skateboarding what Robert Johnson was to the Blues.
(Is that laughter at the back.)