Skate culture: No comply
Somerset House’s exhibition explores the impact of skateboarding in the UK.
Written by Craig Berry
Designer & Writer
In one of my first ‘proper’ fine art classes in about 2011 we were given a brief for a new project; it was simply called “Passions and Obsessions”. For this project, we had to (as you might guess) focus on our own passions and obsessions, each person in the class picking their own and immersing themselves in that to create a piece (or series) of artwork*.
Upon being given that brief, I knew instantly what I was going to do because at that time I felt like my world revolved around skateboarding; the sport, the culture, the fashion, the people. The everything. It was an easy decision for me.
*Unfortunately, I don’t carry my fine art sketchbooks from 2011 around with me, but my response to this brief lives in my parent’s loft.
I’d gotten into skateboarding through a school friend a few years earlier when I was about 15 or so. I can clearly remember getting the bus to Liverpool, near where we lived, with a pocket full of money (probably about £100) and going straight to the local skate shop, Lost Art, to pick out and buy my first proper skateboard. It was my first time in that shop or any skate-shop for that matter and I was dwarfed by the rows upon rows of colourful boards on the walls, shoes on the shelves, the other people hanging out in there and ’90s hip-hop blasting out of the speakers from a skate film running on the tv.
Somewhere in my parent’s garage, the board that I bought back then, an orange and blue Girl Skateboards “’93 ’til” design, that still lives today albeit scratched and scuffed to death. Amazingly some of the other parts I bought on that day still live to this day on my current board.
Back then, being in that culture felt amazing. It was the first thing I can remember being properly into; before music, before design, before everything that I’m into now (not before playing Call of Duty on the PS3 but that surely doesn’t count). Through skateboarding I was discovering and developing my music taste with lots of ‘90s and ‘00s hip-hop, punk and other alternative music from skate films and with my limited budget, developing my fashion sense by trying to dress like skaters in skate videos and magazines. Both of these inadvertently; I was like a sponge soaking it all up.
Admittedly I was never very good at skating, actually, I was pretty bad, but it didn’t really matter; I just wanted to be involved in it in some way.
Despite having progressed my music and fashion taste since then, (I’d like to think at least anyway) I do believe the foundations of what I listen to and how I dress now are those years being obsessed with skateboarding. Those years were about four or five, spanning from high school, college and art school, it was when I went to university that the obsession sadly but naturally faded away. But never died.
Living in halls and moving around multiple houses, I had a skateboard in my room. Moving to Amsterdam I didn’t have one for a while but eventually, I had to buy a new one and even shipped it back to the UK when moving back in 2020. Over those times I would watch skate films every now and then as well as still follow accounts like The Berrics and Thrasher on Instagram as well as discover local scenes and stores like Welcome in Leeds and POP in Amsterdam.
Having never lost the love of, and for, skateboarding, when I saw an upcoming exhibition about it earlier this year at Somerset House, it was a must-see. The exhibition, No Comply was on show from July to September 2020 and focused on “the phenomena of skateboarding and the impact of its culture and communities on the UK over the past 45 years” through film, sound, art, fashion, design, photography, archival material and stories. The name of the exhibition, No Comply is both a skateboarding trick but also defines the rebellious, counter-culture aspect of skating.
Arranged over three rooms, each focusing on a specific aspect. The first, City as Playground invites visitors to discover how skaters work with urban landscapes and environments, repurposing and reclaiming these spaces with creativity, captured through photography while inviting visitors to reimagine the city themselves.
The second, Doing it with others explores skateboarding’s influence in fashion and video game culture and how the subculture’s identity grows and the third space Doing it for yourself shining a spotlight in skate communities in the UK from inspiring initiatives to the preservation of sites where communities have been formed and maintained and successful campaigns of creative spaces. The three rooms together define the subculture’s ethos.
With lots (and I mean lots) of things on display, to look at and to read, I wanted to share some of the things that stuck with me in the exhibition and to talk about them from my perspective, as a skateboarding lover.
Sony VX1000
One of the most important parts of skate culture is not a skateboard or a skateboarder but the camera through which skate culture is captured and shared, the Sony DCR-VX1000 digital Handycam camcorder, or the VX1000 for short. Now I can’t confess to knowing loads about video cameras or filming but the VX1000 is iconic in skateboarding, introduced in 1995 as a consumer home-video camera it has since been replaced in most of society by phone cameras, capable of holding days of footage at 12 million pixels which fit in your pocket. But not in skateboarding.
Skate filmers choose the hefty VX1000 (with a massive fish-eye lens), a weighty, top-mounted handle, yet durable, stable and affordable camera that records to mini-DV tape; still today as the preferred option to shoot skate footage because it still works, but also for respect to the culture.
Full-length skate films progressed and defined modern skateboarding and In the early 2000s as the VX1000 became more and more popular it helped to pave the way. Iconic films like Girl – Yeah Right! (2003), Baker – Baker 3 (2005) and Lakai – Fully Flared (2007) gave a raw insight into skateboarding and its characters and crews, especially with these examples, in the US.
Despite having obviously and almost infinitely better quality cameras you’ll still see the latest skate films shot on or in a VX1000 style; sacrificing intense HD quality for keeping it real. If someone lands something mental in a skate film, do you really care about the film quality? No, you shouldn’t.
Below is a great video showing how to actually use the VX1000, with a huge fish-eye, by the iconic filmer Ryan “Beagle” Ewing. Even if you don’t film, or even don’t skate, it’s a great bit of education.
Reece Leung
As important as skate films are for documenting skate culture, photography is just as important, be it for ads on billboards or magazine covers; being able to capture a moment in time of a skater in action is something special. There is a definite ‘technique’ to skate photography but numerous photographers have created their own style and are just as talented as the skaters they’re capturing.
Of the selection of skate photographers from the UK in the exhibition, Leeds based Reece Leung is the one that stands out for me. As well as capturing skaters doing tricks with great, dynamic angles; Leung’s photographs also give a great sense of scale. As great as a fish-eye lens is, sometimes you need to take a step back and capture everything.
What’s also amazing about the UK skate scene and photography is seeing places that you know and have been to or seen numerous times and seeing how skaters can reinterpret it into a skateable spot, the more obscure the better; it really shows the eye of a skater and their imagination and of course skill and talent to pull it off. Having lived in Leeds for a few years, many of the spots in Leung’s photos, I know well.
Palace Skateboards
It’s impossible to talk about the UK skate scene without mentioning the brand Palace Skateboards aka Palace. Started by Levent “Lev” Tanju and his skate team, Palace Wayward Boys Choir in 2009, Palace began printing big and bold graphic t-shirts to be sold in London skate shops, to now having four physical stores globally in London, New York, Tokyo and Los Angeles, each as elaborate as the other. Palace is easily one of the biggest brands in skateboarding now, arguably the biggest.
In an interview with Glasscord Magazine, Tanju said how and why he started Palace.
“I had a gap decade after college, just skating and doing fun shit. Then one day I decided that I was a bum and I had to do something. I started designing some board graphics for people I live with. Then half way through designing them I thought to myself that maybe I should just start a skate company.”
Palace has a quite distinctive style of clothing, gone are the days of just printing t-shirts but now each season brings hundreds of items; t-shirts, jumpers, tracksuits, shoes, skateboards, records, socks; pretty much whatever clothing you can think of, Palace will do it.
Many of these clothes have a strong ’90s aesthetic to them; referencing that era and time with their design and pop culture reference. The signature and most recognisable Palace clothing pieces are their ‘Tri-Ferg t-shirt; each emblazoned with a huge impossible triangle (Penrose triangle) on the back. What started off as a simple design has since become a canvas and space to fill with anything and everything. Hundreds of iterations have been released, similar in a way to Supreme’s box logo t-shirts, sometimes simple, sometimes loud, sometimes humorous and sometimes a bit stupid. These huge triangles on the back are intentionally huge with Tanju saying:
“That was a big thing for me. I told the factory: ‘Can you make the logo as big as it will go on the back of the shirt, as far as the seam will allow …’ I’m quite a garish person, I think.”
This huge design and the number of variations and comical examples show how Palace doesn’t take itself too seriously. You can see for yourself the amounts of variations in this archive.
This Tri-Ferg design was created by Fergus “Fergadelic” Purcell, a graphic designer with experience in the fashion industry. Of the Tri-Ferg/Penrose triangle design, he said that he wanted “to make a logo that had connotations of the infinite and of constant flux and movement.”
Ever since I saw Palace I loved it, I think I bought my first Tri-Ferg t-shirt in about 2012; a white one with a “surf-co” design (I’ve always thought it was a piss-take of surf companies) and since then I’ve had about 12 other Tri-Ferg designs as well as 10+ other Palace designs including one NYPD badge parody design and another that just says VHS: VERY HEAVY SHIT.
It was around this time in 2012 that I started getting into graphic design and studying it at college and seeing this world of graphic print t-shirts I was amazed, paired with the great fit of the t-shirts themselves; I’ve always loved a slightly looser and oversized fit which Palace just gets. On display at the exhibition was a number of these earlier designs as well as acetates and sketches showing the design process.
I’ve since sold almost all of my Palace t-shirts (I’ve still got the surf-co and VHS ones) for more than I ever paid for them — such is the way for these hyped skate/streetwear brands — because it’s not necessarily my style to wear loud t-shirts anymore. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like the brand anymore, on the contrary, it’s still one of my favourite brands to just watch what they do.
Palace are the kings of collaboration in my eyes; sure they follow the recipe of brands like Supreme creating obscure collaborations but Palace seem to have more fun with it. Every season brings a hoard of collaborations (sometimes it feels like every week) with some making sense like shoes with Adidas, jeans with Evisu and ’90s style football shirts with Umbro. Some, however, make slightly less sense like road cycling jerseys with Rapha, wine with Harrods and silk shirts with Ralph Lauren.
These kinds of collaborations both show respect for the subcultures that skateboarding sits alongside but also show again that they don’t take themselves seriously, I see this as a sign of their Britishness and having a sense of humour that lots of other brands just don’t get or have.
Long Live Southbank
It’s also impossible to talk about UK skate culture without mentioning the ‘Mecca’ of skateboarding in the UK, the Southbank in London and more specifically the Undercroft at the Southbank Centre.
Since the 1970s the undercover, reappropriated concrete banks has been recognised as the home of British skateboarding. The previously unused space beneath the Hayward Gallery was perfect with its smooth, flat concrete similar to Californian style ramps (the original home of skateboarding coming from surfers) and being covered was ideal for unpredictable British weather.
Over 40 years it has been used consistently, initially by skateboarders but later by BMX bike riders, in-line roller skaters, graffiti artists, street dancers, musicians and videographers. Walk past on any day of the week at almost any time and you’ll see a mix of all these people, of all ages tearing it up. Although, its future was at stake a few years ago, and probably still is.
The space that it’s in is also perfect prime real estate for building developers and investors (as is any land in Central London really). In 2013 the Southbank Centre unveiled its Festival Wing plans which saw two new buildings being built above and alongside the nearby Queen Elizabeth Hall which would be part-funded by turning the Undercroft space into a commercial restaurant and retail spaces aka more shops and more restaurants that the Southbank didn’t (and still doesn’t) need.
Despite offering a new location under the nearby Hungerford Bridge, the skaters felt it was a totally different space technically and lacked the unique heritage of the Undercroft site. Because of this, the non-profit organisation, Long Live Southbank aka LLSB, was set up to campaign against the redevelopment of the Undercroft site.
Through campaigning, raising money and gathering signatures of people opposing the plans, including the support of MP’s (including a once-influential Mayor or London, future Prime Minister), architectural groups (more against the development of the building for aesthetic terms not necessarily the preservation of a skate site) and local councils, the site’s application was accepted to be listed as an Asset of Community Value under the Localism Act 2011, later in 2013.
Because of this and additional pressure, in 2014, LLSB signed a Section 106 agreement with the Southbank Centre guaranteeing the space’s long-term future and the Festival Wing proposals were withdrawn by Southbank Centre. This campaign work shows the respect that generations have for the famous site in London and the UK; it also shows how grassroots campaigns can overturn the big dogs and beat them.
For now, LLSB continues to campaign to safeguard the space and help the community continue to evolve creatively; even working together with the Southbank Centre on joint fundraising campaigns. You can’t help but think though, eventually, someone will come with enough money and firepower and the Undercroft and the home of skateboarding in the UK will be at risk once again.
Ben Raemers
Despite not being as big as the USA for its export of renowned skaters, there have been plenty of skaters to come from the UK who’ve stood out, the likes of Danny Brady, Nick Jensen, a few of the Palace guys and Geoff Rowley. One of the most recent British export skaters, Ben Raemers was described as “one of the most talented skaters to come from the UK”, but sadly took his own life in 2019, aged 29.
Born in Essex in 1990, Raemers started skating at the age of 10, 14 he was competing in some of the UK’s biggest competitions and by 18 he was getting the attention of skate brands in America like Converse and board manufacturer, Enjoi. But this wasn’t a normal thing, as professional skater, James Threlfall explains; “It is not common for British names to gain commercial success with huge American brands”.
Through these brands Raemers became a professional, dedicating his life and time to skating, filming video parts and shooting photos; he made the Thrasher magazine cover twice, first in 2011 and then in 2017, one of only a few British skaters to get this “honour”.
“Ben Raemers blurs lines on the daily. He’s not simply a street skater or just a transition skater. If you see him on the streets, expect to see him take a high jump onto something overlooked by the rest. If you see him in ditches, pools or parks, sit down and enjoi the show. Raemers rips transitions the way they were meant to be — in all directions, at high speeds and with enough creative juice to quench your most inventive thirst. Watch his In Transition part from the Berrics, or any of his enjoi parts, for a sample of how his Old English ways inspire skaters the world over, on the regular. Whatever you do, though, don’t worry about understanding him verbally. His words may roll off his tongue in a way that sounds a little twisted, but his ability on board is universal.”
Ben Raemers Dew Tour skater profile
In 2019 Raemers took his own life because of mental health reasons; this video below does a better job of explaining what and why in a better way than I ever could.
Raemer’s family have since set up the Ben Raemers Foundation to maintain his legacy and to help prevent further suicide and mental health issues in the skateboarding community through creating social media content to raise awareness of mental health issues, making films highlighting skaters’ personal journeys in mental health and delivering suicide prevention training to skate teams and crews, managers, professional skateboarders, photographers and skate shops across the globe.
Raemers is remembered in this exhibition right at the end, a fitting tribute through a powerful portrait photograph by Leo Sharp which shows his fun-loving personality. A quote from a young Raemers in the 2006 skate film, This ’N’ That accompanies the photo and also summarises him beautifully.
“It’s a lovely day, the birds are singing, the sun is shining. What more could you ask for?”
No Comply at Somerset House was on display from July 19th to September 19th 2021. Further information can be found at the Somerset House website.
Read more blog posts on craig-berry.co.uk or my Medium page.
