Somethin Stickin In My Eye.

TDR's Duggan takes charge!



So, Brendan asked me to take the reigns on a Musique Mecredi. Shit idea. I'm not straight edge. I don't like to listen to Emperor and pretend I'm a wizard (much). I listen to all kinds of music. How can I fit this into six tracks? I need to focus. I did, however, turn thirty recently and reward my newfound maturity with the purchase of a BMX. This got me thinking that perhaps I'm still a 15 year old skateboarder in a young professional's body.

Fuck it. Here it is - the sounds of my skateboarding career.

I grew up living about 8 kilometers outside of Riddells Creek. It had about 1,200 residents when I was growing up, and exactly zero skateparks. Sometimes I used to skate the primary school stairs/ledges on the weekend. Of course Mum would have to drive me. One of my good Riddell mates who had older brothers got me into Primus. Les Claypool is an all time hero of mine.


 

Whilst skating by yourself and waxing the shit out of treated pine benches sounds like an awesome time, sometimes I liked to speak to other people. Gisborne was the place to do this. A virtual metropolis when compared to Riddells Creek, and brimming with skateboarders (about . No skatepark (although we did go to council meetings to have the current one built), but lots of places to skate, and more importantly, people to skate with. The number of times we were chased out of the carpark behind the Post Office is astronomical. NOFX was a local staple.

 

Geoff Rowley is pretty much my favourite skater of all time. Super smooth technically, but also went pretty big. He also got fucking angry and chucked his board lots, as I did, when shit wasn't going right. Flip later released the Sorry film and it had a great Graymatter track over Rowley's section. The section is still a fave of mine.

 

Before long, we were catching the V-line to the city to skate the, now-deceased, Sailyards. Right next to the library in the CBD. Huge area. Heaps of stuff to skate. Granny's Skate Shop to visit. Mutli-storey carparks to get high in. Older skaters ripping up the park with Dead Kennedys tattoos on their forearms to admire. Both the older skaters and the Kennedys made me want to charge.




As we got a bit older, parties and girls took preference. But there was a core group of us that still loved skating, and many a party was spent drinking around a barrel fire with trick competitions held on driveways and in carports. The Deftones, particularly White Pony, was a common album looking back.

 

By the time I was in my late teens, I'd owned a skateboard since I was about 4, and been skateboarding as a past-time for about 5 years. However I was still pretty rubbish technically, but I made up for by liking to try going big. Strapping Young Lad, and this track in particular, was a classic pre-session fire-up.

 

My street skating 'career' ended in 1999 when I fell off a set of stairs at the primary school in Gisborne and crashed down a flight of about 8. It was at that moment I realised I'd lost my ability to bounce. I'd broken my wrist for the last time (I thought I had anyway) and no amount of Sepultura could get me back on the deck to do anything of size after that.

 

I bought a longboard, went to Uni, and chilled the fuck out.