Non Stop Fitting Room Archive Part 3: The Westside Bar Years

This final post of photos and magazine clippings that have graced the walls of Non Stop's fitting rooms for around a decade turns to a period of particular fond memories for brothers of a certain age.  Many look back on the very late 90s-early 2000s as a God-forsaken era of swishy pants, Muska-beats and Osiris shoes, and the first burst of skateboarding's most recent era of major mainstream popularity with Tony Hawk's Pro-Skater.  In Nottingham, we accept all these things as true and awful but maybe aren't quite as able to erase the bad memories at the risk of losing some good ones. 

 

I really wish I could claim to have spent that entire period worshipping only Keenan, Gino and Kalis and respectfully dressing in the manner of a late-90s east coast rap guy.  But many skaters in Nottingham swallowed Osiris, Shorty's et al in a big way.  Myself and many of my contemporaries were swishy pants-ed to the max.  There were air-tech fabric Osiris t-shirts, Pete Smolik signature 'sag-no-drag' cargo pants, and many of the shoes that have appeared in Jenkem's two collections of the worst skate shoes of all time (nasty DCs..  check; Osiris D3s...  in multiple colourways....  check).

 

But skating in our fair city during this time was amazing, and Non Stop - with their long-time staffers' admitted fondness for all things very baggy, shiny and hip-hop - were in their heyday, with a super good team and a secret weapon just across from their St James' street premises: West Side Bar.  This grubby dive would have been unremarkable, and 6 days of the week it was: providing cheaper-than-average booze to Midlands drinkers to fuel a night's shouting and fighting.  It is no surprise that the place has since been replaced by several different Aussie themed sports-bars solely dedicated to getting meatheads drunk.  But on Thursday nights back then, Non Stop and the city's skateboarding fraternity took over.  This was also the heyday of really good, just-out-of-the-underground UK rap - and not too many years from the golden era of New York rap of skate video fame, so all us (mostly) middle class whiteboys could get our thug on to Nas, Wu Tang, Mobb Deep, Taskforce, Jehst, Roots Manuva, Mud Fam, Brain Tax, Black Star etc. etc. without a hint of irony or risk of being seen by civilians.  I believe our younger bredren do something similar at Phlebas these days... except the girl:dude ratio is significantly more favourable for them than it was for us.  Chicks prefer Clarke's shoes and 5-panel caps to bright yellow t-shirts, Argos bling and track pants every time.

 

Skating was pretty heavy in Notts at the time too - with a concentration of dudes in their prime who pretty much pulled off the hella-baggy/hella-swishy thing and looked kind-of-pretty-good with it: Gaz Jenkins, Sam Culshaw and Craig Smedley to name the obvious ones - certainly the ones who could rock the most jewellery in Westside on a Thursday and not look as ridiculous as the rest of us.  We also had some good-for-the-time spots - especially a huge warehouse with one wall ripped off, that quickly gained ledges and flat banks to accompany a natural kicker (see below), gaps and jump ramps up to huge metal-cased machinery.  The story of that place is for another time - and it got a 'bit too serious' for many, with dudes actually getting down there for 7.00am (Hardflip Lee, where you at?) to train before everyone else turned up.  So here's some photos from Non Stop's archives:

 

 

 

 

Sam Culshaw floats one of his perfect tres flips out of the warehouse natural kicker, in a not-really-too-bad-for-the-time pair of sneakers.  No wonder he's made a living out of trainers since.  This made up the contents spread in Sidewalk.

 

 

A favourite nincompoop, Unabomber's Christopher 'Bambi' Price backlipping a bench (that used to be at Clarendon) from the same kicker as above.  Appeared in Sidewalk in the news section.

 

 

Smedley switch hard-flipping the grass gap at the school just off Lenton/Radford Boulevard - for his Sidewalk interview in December 2000.

 

 

And now for the... errr... lifestyle pics.  You know who you are.

 

 



Non Stop Fitting Room Archive Part 2: The Rock City Skate 'festivals'



Posts over the summer have fallen to a level of infrequency comparable to Frozen in Carbonite, without the admirable quality control.  Too much actual skateboarding in the here-and-now has left little time to post 'owt about way-back-when.  Perhaps the only disadvantage of the amazing summer we've had in the UK.

 

 

Anyway, back to getting some of those photos that have been languishing in the gloom of Non Stop's fitting rooms back into the electronic light of day.  The next three posts relate to some particularly fond memories:  the first two relate to themes of macro importance to skating in Big Notts in the late 90s and early 200s; the third has more personal appeal to a small group of us.
 

The Rock City Skate Festivals - 1997-1999

For two/three years running (depending on whether you count the last one, which kind of got cancelled after being moved to the ice stadium) the owners of hair-metal-sticky-floor teenage drinking venue Rock City took leave of their senses and allowed Non Stop to organise a skate jam/booze-addled party inside the nightclub.  In the first one, the Panic-Blueprint team showed up to promote their first vid, Mixed Media...  and Paul Shier kickflip-50-50'd the edge of the main-stage out of a sketchy kicker.  Sidewalk have already reminisced on how mental these events were...  unlikely to ever happen again given skating is now so much more visible.  The venue literally didn't know what they were letting themselves in for - a couple of hundred nobs took over the place and used it as a massive skatepark, most of them drunk out of their minds.  The midlands were introduced to Pritchard's Welsh genitalia.  I remember learning to ollie by repeatedly jumping onto then off the stage of Disco 2, not really distracted by Feeder trying to dreary their way through middle-of-the-road indie-rock on the same stage at the time.
 

And some dude took a bunch of black-and-white pictures...  no one remembers who.  I checked with Horsley....  it wasn't him or any other Sidewalk-affiliates, so I guess its OK to post them.
[ADDENDUM TO THIS SHIZNITZ: I've just found out that the man behind these photographs is none other than my good buddy and raddest dad Ben Taylor, source of unfailing positivity and owner of a floaty, fruity flow on his plank.  Not sure how he found time to take these snaps - for a photography course, I believe - given I clearly remember him shredding hard throughout the event whilst dressed as Toymachine-era Brian Anderson).

Pics above and below: Lil' Jon Weatherall by the looks of it, performing tres flips to fakie, presumably in the first and second years - unless he went for a t-shirt change.

And the unmistakable form of Craig Smedley smashing a frontside flip - in the era in which he was in his element - white DC Syntaxes, massive jeans, white tees.  He had every flip trick correct, and still has.



The Non Stop fitting room archives: Part 1

Not so long ago, Non Stop Sports, OG Nottingham skate emporium and lunchtime lurking destination of choice, undertook a major refurb - transforming itself from the gloomy den of wonder that typified indie skateshops of  the 1990s to a modern-day airy, white-washed boutique perfect for displaying trainers and 5-panels to entrance time-served skaters and fashion bastards alike.  It is now somewhere my wife is happy to stand with me while I shoot the breeze with Robin, Ant, Elliott et al - when she previously felt a panic-inducing lack of air and sunlight.  Good work brothers.  Go there to get all the good stuff.

From the mid-1990s until the early 2000s, the walls of Non Stop's two fitting rooms were where we shared our photos of skating accomplishments, and where Non Stop staffers dutifully curated the achievements of Nottingham-based heavy-hitters - so badly composed photos of your mate from Beeston could sit comfortably alongside pictures of Gaz Jenkins conquering mighty rails and stairsets.  That the new, improved and updated Non Stop no longer has a place for possibly germ-ridden layers of incremental photo montage is probably no bad thing - both for the respiratory health of Robin and co, but also because the new generation are prolific in sharing their recent achievements via Instagram and Facebook, and through the city's excellent Varial photo magazine.

However, some heavy shit went down in those more innocent, pre-digital times, when paucity of facilities kept us on the streets in our various suburbs every week night and then together in mass in the city centre every Sunday, as comrade D-Bevs so eloquently recalled in the recent 200th edition of Sidewalk.  Although we (and I mean me in particular) photographed this stuff with a level of incompetence that younger, more skilled local photo dudes like Tom Quigley would rightly delete without hesitation - we snapped away with a lot of heart, if not any working knowledge of exposure and shutter speeds.   The walls of Non Stop's fitting rooms thus acted as an archive of our youth and a pretty significant slice of time in Nottingham's skate history.

Ant Orton, long-time Nottingham skate socialite and Non Stop brother number 2, has been kind enough to 1) keep hold of all these old photos; and 2) lend them to me to share on this terrible blog.

So, with no further ado, here is the first batch of photos from them days.  Please bear in mind that many of these have been pinned to a wall for 10-15 years, have been drawn on, stickered over, etc.- they are what they are, old photos from a changing room wall - the skateboard version of damp porn found in bushes - so they are faded, ripped and marked.  They also make me really happy.

Ally Couch - front nosegrind/over-crook on the Sneinton school rail - famed for Rushbrooke's back 5.0 Sidewalk cover.  Photo credits for this one go to Michael Wright, who did and does know how to take a decent photograph

Matt Blanchfield, big popper from a recent poppa - over road cone and curb gap/into little ramp at the close of the 90s.

Paul Langlois (AKA 'Guernsey Paul'...  Nottingham's answer to JB Gillet), 50-50 across the driveway round-rail at Derby Storm, c. 98/99.  He tried this switch as well and dislocated a couple of fingers in the process.

Ally Couch, D-Bevs (in his 101 era Jason Dill/Billy Valdes phase) and Neil Turner - some pub in Lenton, probably around 2000-2002

Norseman

Stoked on this dude's interview in the latest Dank magazine....    an OG's OG, and there's ever fewer of those left these days.

Oslo 5 (Henning Braaten) from Cyclone on Vimeo.

Your virtual imprint is hella weak, son

Between 2006 and 2012, for some unknown reason, I put together a video edit or two a year, which hardly anyone saw...  probably with good reason.  But, despite my lack of Dan Wolfe/French Fred level skills, I still reckon some pretty good, fun, relateable... mainly 'low impact' can't Ollie up 'em/don't Ollie down 'em skating went down in front of my barely competent fisheye.

Whatever.  In the hope of motivating myself and others to get out and skate, travel and film this 'summer' (the jet stream is stuck in much the same place as it was last year, so prospects of a bbq/perfect blue-drenched summer are minimal), here's a few of the 'better' edits.

Winter 2011

An edit to welcome 42 skateshop, and to pull together footage from the late summer/autumn of that wash-out of a year (but not quite the deluge of 2012).  Ignorant to the politics of local commerce, I foolishly jointly dedicated this to both 42 and Non Stop - the two legit skate emporia in Nottingham town - and the latter were royally pissed at me for doing so. Sorry...  I will make it up to y'all with my planned 'changing room photo archive' edit.   You can't deny the dope Taskforce track though.



Summer 2010

Almost three year's ago now we went on a rad expedition around south Yorkshire, north Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire - which was a lot of fun. even if it resulted in x1 broken ankle.  This edit mainly covers that trip, which only seems like yesterday, meaning we should go again...  soon.

Long Eaton Rifles and West Bridgford Daggers 2010

Outputs from a rad year of Manchester and London weekend trips and skating local streets at night and the pre-slightly dodgy refit Lady Bay park in the day.



Scotland and Barcelona 2006

In the summer of 2006, a disorganised minibus full of Nottingham half-wits worked their way up to and through Scotland, hanging with (and being terrified by) such gnarly luminaries as Div Adam and honorary Scott, Paul 'Man' Sylvester.  One of the best trips of my life, preceded by the last time I visited Barcelona un-injured.  Got married that year as well.....   2006 was a good year.  D Bevs and Ad K took some amazing photos of the Scotland mission as well, which are worth unearthing.  Some early Bambi and Golding here, for Unabomber fans.  Promise to self for 2013: edit more skating to Dalek.



Kids

If you have fond memories of the 1995 Harmony Korine/Larry Clarke film 'Kids', or the Mixtape-era heyday of NYC skateboarding and the original Zoo York thing in general, you'd be well-advised to spend a moment reading this 'almost twenty years' later' piece on Kids by Caroline Rothstein.  Interviews with legends like Peter Bici and Jefferson Pang give you a mix of behind-the-scenes testimonies and where-are-they-now stories.  And, of course, a lot of memories of the late, great Harold Hunter.

 

Maybe this isn't the 'best' section on Mixtape (for that, I can't decide between Anthony Correa or Robbie Gangemi), but its a vivid illustrator of what Josh Stewart said in the last issue of '43' about strong personalities shining through, making  someone's skating both great and memorable. 

 

 

r.i.p. HH and r.i.p. the OG Zoo we knew and loved.  Hope reading the above article on Kids, or watching any part of Mixtape reminds the streetwear financiers now in charge of Zoo what poor custodians they've been. 
P.S. Nice to see Pang and Bici both looking mighty healthy for being in their forties (seriously?!)...  hopefully that's a testament of the elixir of youth from shredding on a plank for years. 

Like a Flailing Seagull

I had been meaning to post this little lot for a while, but my dilapidated old scanner's been playing daft bastards.  

First of all we have two more Nottingham-based Sidewalk covers from the mid-to-late-90s:

On the left, Alan Rushbrooke eases a well-balanced backside 5.0 down the yellow Sneinton school rail.  This was from the first copy of Sidewalk I ever purchased myself (issue 14, March 1997), and I read and re-read it with new guy enthusiasm. The rail in question has seen quite a lot of action.  I think its last appearance in a mag involved a Chewy switch crook at some point in the mid-2000s.  A particular snap I'd like to put up is of Blonde Boozing & Bellowing Buffoon, Ali Couch and his fully committed frontside over-crook down this very rail - which I believe still graces the inside of one of the changing rooms in Non Stop.  Creepy...  that guy is looking at you when you try on a new pair of super tight fitting Nike SB/Levis jeans.

On the right, Harry 'the bastard' Bastard (given name Alan Cuthbertson) boosts an indie out of one of the awkward hips of the late Broadmarsh Banks.  This is from the Jan/Feb 1995 mag, predating my entry to this absurd pastime but included in a stash of mags given to me by a former Non Stop employee as he went about exorcising skateboarding from his life (I got the Keenan Milton RIP issue of Transworld in that bundle, so there are benefits to being nice to bitter ex-skaters).

Then we have 42's own Scotty Underdown's Jan/Feb 98 Haunts Interview - which a bunch of us have been reminiscing about lately (my buddy Jerry presents it as a divining rod for taste: if you don't think this is amazing, you're an idiot).  I apologise for the poor quality of a couple of the scans - the original mag isn't in the greatest of nick, as it was another read and re-read favourite, and notable for including the Jon Weatherall cover I posted a bit ago, a dope Carl Shipman DC ad,  a Tom Penny Radlands switch-frontside flip driveway clearance, and an early example of why Finland is worth watching if you're in anyway inclined towards appreciating the massive pop/hip-hop school of street skating (Mikko Kivikoski's 'First Offence' check out).  Anyway, Scotty's Haunts interview is amazing, as you can see for yourself...  particularly dig the front board on the back of a bench and the window ledge crook grind.  Fresh moves from 'handy-bendy-Ghandi'.  

Nottingham's full of similar high-ish window ledges just crying out for crooks, back smiths or front noseslides.