Hello.
Dan Adams has given me 5 tickets to give away on here for anyone wanted to attend the Read and Destroy forum featuring the likes of TLB, Wig, And various other R.a.D mainstays.
Myself and @buildafire will be officiating it.
It’s happening next Saturday from
3pm (13th July).
If you’re keen - please write something short about why R.a.D was important to you; a favourite photo or article or just whatever that relates to the mag.
I’m keen to have some of you there so if you’re keen too - get involved.
Cheers
RAD was like the gateway drug into skate journalism for me. My first issue had a Mike Manzoori interview and a Memory Screen review. Mike ate Caramacs I had no access to skate videos. The photos and sequences were all I knew.
I starting to get into skating properly when my parents decided to move abroad. It was 1991 and I went from London (Southbank) to a tiny village in the Alps. My dad would fly out on weekends and one day he handed me a copy of RAD. I poured over that magazine studying absolutely everything. The captions, the gear reviews, the masthead… Perhaps because of my English roots and having skated Southbank, I felt a connection.
In the early 90s skateboarding was changing fast. Stuck in a village with no one else to share my passion with, I studied the video grabs and tried to decipher the tram lines and trick tips to keep up with the trends. Finally, after a couple of years my parents realized country life wasn’t the answer and so we moved to the city. Suddenly my collection of RADs were complimented by foreign equivalents and American media. I smiled when I read about the rest of the world waking up to Penny and Rowley, Shipman and McCann. RAD had already introduced me to them heelflipping on Wakefield rooftops and sliding curbs in Worksop car parks. Thank you for the memories.
What is there to say except RAD was the only window into skateboarding there was for 8 year old me. Every single issue got religiously studied, for years, over and over again. And then it got cut to pieces, pasted on my walls and across my schoolbooks. Every single image in every single issue I had I knew back to front. Even random ones the RAD insta account posts up that I haven’t seen in nearly 40 years are all so familiar, burned into my brain.
Can’t make it there but would do 100000% if I were in the country.
I was a paperboy when I first started buying RAD (it was deducted from my pay packet). It was the first magazine I got religiously and, like many others, seeing photos and scans from it nowadays takes me right back.
Yeah, RAD were very conscious to not do that because they thought it was boring. Steve Kane and Royce Creasey were from the '70s generation, so they loved that stuff.
It was some kind of gentleman’s agreement wasn’t it? Skane was talking about it somewhere, maybe in an interview? Am sure it was a written one. Where Skateboard! would have all the tech specs and RAD would leave them out, which meant if you were in the UK and wanted a complete picture you had to buy both mags, or something?
Skane had his ups and downs, remember when he came onto n26 and at first it was “wow, stoked, it’s skane” which quickly went to “oh god it’s skane again”
Thought he’d sorted himself out from the sounds of that slam interview
Yeah, I devoured the tech specs. I was looking through issue 1 of skateboard! at the weekend and I was transported back to that wide-eyed 13 yr old learning about this new world he didn’t know existed. That wheel chart: nitro’s vs rockets vs x-bones vs OJIIs vs bam bams vs reactors vs bullets vs ripsaws! Wondering what ‘drift’ and ‘float’ meant? Still gets the pulse racing now!
I had no money so it was bargain bin, loved graphics but knew they were pointless because I had some free standing curbs to erase them instantly but I did start to really look into tech stuff when I started to realise what worked for me.
I’m pretty certain RAD ran hardware specs during the goofy era. I don’t remember having issues of skateboard! It didn’t last long though as I imagine it was a ball ache to compile. Only other place I might have seen it was in a French mag.
