Here in Britain, we freestylers often spend too much time holed up in little spaces sheltering from the rain on our own, trying our best to practise tricks and routines. So, when we have an excuse, we have a get-together. Needless to say, when my girlfriend announced she was travelling to London on the 30th of October, I could only think of one thing – let’s gather the troops and have ourselves a Halloween jam!
The basic concept behind a British freestyle jam is simple – discuss different places to hold it (only to settle on Southbank/Shell Centre again), set a date that someone will always whine about, tell loads of people about it but expect at least three people to miss it, and then finally spend the entire day mocking each other and making stupid inside jokes that aren’t actually funny. Generally you can also expect the weather to be terrible, but unusually for the end of October, the sun was out and it felt more like July than July did.
Arriving at Southbank is always weird. The place is dank, dark and covered in dust. It instantly disgusts a lot of people, and when the first thing you see is Callum Bowran doing a heelie towards you as fast as he can, it doesn’t really make you feel any better about the whole thing.
Anyways, Southbank lends itself quite well to freestyle, providing your best tricks aren’t pogos or footwork, which kinda left Callum stuck. However, it was good to share flip trick ideas with Darran Nolan (whose tricks often flip too fast to see) and just generally goofing around with Johnny G (Or Guy John, as he’s known to everyone else) and the ever-silent Matt Wells. However, no matter how fun the coconut wheelies were in there, the place was filling up with street skaters and it was far too dark to shoot photos, so we relocated to the Shell Centre. Again.
I actually really like the Shell Centre. It reminds me of home – a dodgy unlevel floor with cracks so large you stick on every other trick. I was hoping my 42 mm wheels would cope better than the 30mm wheels I was riding at the comp in August, but I still had some problems. Here, though, Callum and Matt really came into their own. Matt, however, seems to be losing his unique static board-climbing style in favour of Darran-inspired ollie flip technikery. He was still blasting out some of his patented Matt flips though (Butterflips with a half fingerflip instead of landing on the truck), which are always nice. I think what made them even better was the fact he had his boxers scarily high and his jeans disturbingly low for extra style points.
I have no idea what Darran was doing – as usual – and Johnny was as stylish as ever. I think they both spent more time mocking my board than actually skating though. Meanwhile, Filmer Guy Dave proved he has more than one skill by linking together some nice wrap arounds and boneless variations throughout the day despite trying to adjust from a Capital freestyle mini to the ECS single kick. And myself? I finally figured out how to do fakie FS caspers (with some inspiration from Callum) and managed to snatch some fakie M-80’s out of nowhere. Always good. Somewhere along the line Adam Levy joined our motley crew too, and I think it’s safe to say that not only is he the most comfortable person I know riding around on his hands, but he’s definitely cleaned up his style in general. I’m just waiting for him to start doing rolling English handstands. Anytime soon, I swear.
The rest of my time was spent either taking pictures or playing stupid games with Callum like “see who can do a fakie M-80 first”, “Follow the leader” (where you have to do every move the leader does until he bails, then you take over), “Teach Callum 360 shove it variations”, and of course, the trusty classic, SKATE; I think I abused Callum’s inability to do kickflip variants a bit too much though.
So, after this (probably much too long) article, what have we learnt?
- Callum can’t do any kickflip variations.
- Trick related games mean learning lots of new tricks.
- Ash has a tendency to miss jams I can actually attend.
- Batteries for cameras always run out far too quickly. There was going to be far more pictures. I blame Kodak.
- Anyone can hold a Jam and have a great time. Call some mates, arrange a time and a place, and go roll!
