Words and interview by Ben Powell. Backside tail from the archivist himself, photo: Andy Wissman
Even in this post-Olympic age, skateboarding’s history is of very little interest to the vast majority. The importance of who initially worked out you could jump a child’s toy into the air with just your feet, or which architecture played host to paradigm shifting acts of progression are (understandably) a long way from entering the public consciousness, in the same vein as who scored that winning goal in which year’s football cup is general knowledge.
For those drenched in the minutiae of skateboarding however, the idea such attention to detail is futile – simply because of its irrelevance to the outside world – is unworthy of consideration. This level of devotion is reassuringly common in skate culture and rightly inspires awe in fellow travellers.
Milton Bradley’s NBD Archive project (@nbd_archive) falls into such a devotional category and drew intrigue from the first encounter. That a grown man, with children and real-life responsibilities, could be inspired to take on a project of such immensity, for no personal gain beyond the joy of discovery, represented something truly special.
The completist’s thirst which birthed the eventual, Instagram-platformed project took root during Milton’s teenage years in the midwest. “My friends and I were devouring the video output of the late-1980s: Powell-Peralta’s Public Domain, World Industries’ Rubbish Heap and the H-Street videos [Shackle Me Not and Hokus Pokus]. At that point in skateboarding history, videos were one giant bag of new tricks and things to do,” says Milton.
As friends drifted from skating, his video infatuation increased, building a huge VHS collection then “plugging holes” in it during the early days of Limewire as he moved into his mid 20s. Around this time, Milton had a revelation. If one owned every skate video ever made – or as near enough – it would be possible to accurately “Create a timeline of the emergence of certain tricks and the trends around their invention and documentation,” he summarises. “Writing it out like that definitely adds an atmosphere of obsessiveness to it but, in essence, that was the beginning of the NBD Archive concept.”
It soon transpired that early-2000s file sharing and video uploads were just too ad hoc to enable him to get anywhere near this goal and thus, his earliest attempts at skateboarding data capture were discarded.
Fast forward to 2010 and a slightly older Milton joins Instagram, enjoying its almost skate-centric user base in those early days of platform. By November 2017, the usual winter withdrawals from skating are setting in and Mr and Mrs Bradley are also expecting their second child. “I’m staring down the barrel of spending a lot more time at home and not having a lot of time to skate,” says Milton. “I had a lot on my mind, as well as some intense insomnia. Before I knew it, I’d started taking notes on skate videos NBDs purely out of an urge to do something with my time that I thought I’d enjoy.”
With content saturation at unprecedented levels, yet a more profound history interest emerging amongst our culture, the time was right to pull out the spreadsheets and embark on this Herculean sieving of four decades of video output. “My intention was never to determine who invented this or that trick, nor was that data locatable. I wanted to find out when certain tricks were first documented and presented to the world on video, as achievable things.”
As the data itself is indigestible without the relevant video evidence, Milton explains that, “Instagram was an economical way for me to present the idea, as well as creating it as an open forum through comments and feedback, so as to allow it to be forever-evolving, quality controlled via peer review.”
Social media – Instagram in particular – is blamed for many of the ills supposedly diluting the cultural purity of modern day skateboarding. But the flipside of the amplification of ego or cringe the platform enables are projects like NBD Archive – existing for no reason other than to delight aficionados and geeks and to illuminate alternative narratives for the joy of it. The pioneering Modernist architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said, “God is in the details.” With NBD Archive, Natas Kapaus is in there too.
Fitting words from Natas to kick this thing off. Frontside grab circa 1989. scan: Chrome Ball
To clarify, are you part of ‘the skate industry’?
I had a few minor jobs many moons ago, but would never have said I was any part of ‘the industry’. I’m currently just a dad enjoying family life, hoping to skate whenever I can. Through running NBD Archive a number of notable skaters and industry people have reached out to help find videos, or clarify certain topics, which I’m eternally grateful for.
Jeff Grosso’s ‘Loveletters To Skateboarding’ focused on the idea of “who did it first?” but tended to be mainly via the medium skate photography. Do you see what you’re doing as in some way culturally connected?
I’m a huge fan of SixStair, the Loveletters, and Jeff Grosso so, in doing NBD Archive, I was wary of making any claims as to being “the guy” with the definitive origin stories of particular tricks. I’d never claim what I’m doing is in any way near the same level of cultural importance as ‘Loveletters’ but, yes, I feel there’s a connection. The huge difference is that Grosso lived in the midst of that mid-80s boom of professional skateboarding as one of its major characters. The life experience he had is an irreplaceable perspective that’s been presented and shared, as well as the fellow pros and ams who tell those stories with him on there. As such, the Loveletters are priceless. I’m just a 46-year-old man child in middle-America whose first newly purchased pro board happened to be a Grosso.
As to trick inventors or invention, that’s not what the project is getting at. Determining what tricks the general public would see based on the year the video came out is really the only thing I’m trying to work out and present. The title of the Instagram account definitely confuses people but I think most rational skaters know if you’re not Rodney Mullen, Natas [Kaupas], Daewon [Song], Tony Hawk, Bob Burnquist or Mark Gonzales then NBD in the sense of “Never Been Done” [in a trick’s entirety] can’t really apply.
It’s an even mess of celebrating the individual(s) as well as progression of certain tricks. How the tricks are being presented is something I’ve wanted to take some time to rethink. Overall, I’m just winging it really. But it’s been interesting to chart the progression of certain tricks as they unfolded on video.
“By the time the Bones Brigade were on The Search for Animal Chin, the skate video is established as the major vehicle to promote and advertise your company, as well as to document trick progression.” The Bones Brigade Video Show by Powell Peralta (1984). One of the first examples of ‘the skate video’ format as we know it.
You’ve clearly set your project out as “NBDs on video” rather than other types of skate media. Necessarily, this means your trawl through skate history begins with the skate video as we understand it in a modern sense. When do you see that era beginning and which videos set the template for what was to come?
In my opinion, the ‘skate video’ era began in the early ‘80s but there were ‘skate films’ made prior to that date. What constitutes a ‘skate video’ was something I grappled with when deciding at what point in history to start collecting data for this project.
The timeframe where the ollie came along seemed like the best place to start. I’ve searched whatever skateboard films I know of from ’78 on for tricks and that has some flawed logic when trying to narrow down the complete origin of every trick. I’m thinking along the lines of Ty-slides specifically, which were known to have been invented [by Ty Page] before the ollie but are more of a direct cousin to a slide shove-it or – on transition – the lipslide and disaster as we now know them were kind of happening before/during the development of the ollie by Alan Gelfand.
I’d argue Powell’s Skateboarding in the ’80s [1982] is the first skate video, despite most historians pointing to The Bones Brigade Video Show and Skate Visions [both 1984]. Almost simultaneously we have the invention of the ollie, which becomes the basis of the street-skating paradigm-shift, and a related paradigm shift from the motion picture style skate media of the ‘70s – to something more recognisable as the modern, trick-orientated ‘skate video’. By the time the Bones Brigade were on The Search for Animal Chin [1987], the skate video is established as the major vehicle to promote and advertise your company, as well as to document trick progression.
The flip-side to the polished Powell Peralta template is the raw, completely trick-focused H-Street template with Shackle Me Not, which drops in 1988. Those two approaches became the sustained medium through which skate companies and skate culture documented itself in moving image form until the internet standalone section takes over, fifteen years later.
So, to answer your question, I’d say the beginning of the era of skateboard history dominated by the skate video is somewhere within the 1978 – 1984 timeframe.
Shackle Me Not by Tony Magnusson and Mike Ternasky. Landing four years after The Bones Brigade Video Show, H-Street offered a progressive antithesis to Powell’s ‘blockbuster’ productions.
Inset below: Mike Kepper, frontside boardslide by Bryce Kanights, Thrasher Magazine, 1992 – Milton’s favorite skate photo.
From a documentation point of view, do you see video as more intrinsically true or reliable than photography?
One just provides more proof of the landing. Well, unless it’s a sequence… As we know due to various interviews that have surfaced, some of those infamous magazine sequences offering “proof” of tricks being landed were actually edited or “faked” – if you want to be militant about it.
access to magazines in the same magnitude I did with videos. I felt it would be impossible to know which photos were makes and which weren’t because so much magazine coverage happened without a videographer present and also because I didn’t have the contacts to be able to check on the landed or not landed status of every photograph.
With video, there just isn’t the same uncertainty about whether or not the tricks have been landed – for the most part anyhow. If you eliminate photography and analyse only video, it removes a lot of uncertainties.
For the record, from an aesthetic perspective, photography trumps video in my opinion. Photography is simply more beautiful to me.
What criteria have you used for a video’s inclusion in the project? You refer to plenty which aren’t company videos – spanning contest, local videos, and so on.
I try to post anything I can find of a trick, even if it’s some local homie video I’ve found on YouTube. That said, it can be hard to date local videos that are uploaded to YouTube so out of necessity, the focus is mostly on historical ‘industry’ releases which have a discernible release date.
That’s really just a consequence of needing reliable timeframe data as to be able to make an attempt at saying when a trick was first documented. If I’m not even sure on a release date, that’s impossible. Obviously that does mean that I include videos by truck brands, hardware brands, wheel brands, soft goods companies and any of the large-scale contest video of the 1980s made by the likes of NSA, Unreel, Simitar, etc.
Shop videos have been included in the database too, as long as I can definitively date their release. I’ve used magazine video reviews and team changes to date video releases too at times. The criteria is fairly open as long as I can guarantee date of release basically.
Raw footage of Natas during the filming of Speed Freaks, courtesy of ‘Real Surf Stories’ whose sister channel ‘Real Skate Stories’ is another must for history buffs and features a near two-hour long cut of this footage.
What was the starting point in terms of tricks and why did you pick that particular trick to begin the project?
The first post was Natas’ famous frontside flip on a quarter pipe from Santa Cruz’s Speed Freaks [’89]. I’d assume all who saw that when it came out were blown away by everything Natas did. Like me, I think a lot of people would have also assumed it was the first documented kickflip turning in the frontside direction – I wrote as much in the original caption for that first NBD Archive post.
It quickly transpired he’d had already done a frontside flip on a bank in Mack Dawg’s 1988 video, Sick Boys. That’s just one example of how complicated trying to call this stuff can be, although making that basic mistake on my very first post was pretty embarrassing.
It did set the tone that I was open to correction and information from people, despite me being the one that found this specific error. Although I felt somewhat redeemed when a media outlet published an article about frontside flips and missed out Natas’ one from Sick Boys too. That made me believe there was some degree of importance to what I was doing, for sure.
With modern street-related tricks, have you found establishing the true innovators or inventors any easier than Grosso did with vert and transition?
The methods I’m applying to gauge video releases can’t predict invention at all, even though I’d love all this work to be able to do so. It would be incorrect to claim the invention of a trick just based on early video documentation of it being done.
A perfect example of incorrectly attributing the invention of a trick – based on which video came out first, is the switch 360 flip. Jed Walters’ in Love Child [Word Industries, ’92] was seen by the public before Guy Mariano’s in Tim and Henry’s Pack of Lies [Blind, ’92]. Without the behind-the-scenes knowledge that’s been put on record through interviews since, you could have maybe assumed Jed invented it. Luckily, we have now have the journalism of the likes of Chrome Ball and Muckmouth that has made some of that historical nuance clear.
Socrates Leal, Jake Rosenberg [World Industries and H-Street turned early Plan B filmers, respectively] and others have also been so friendly in helping establish video release timelines too. That level of in-depth discussion doesn’t exist for every trick though so the outcome of the data I present is just what the general public would have been able to see if they had access to every video as it came out.
Mini Guy Mariano with perhaps the first ever switch 360 kickflip, 15 seconds into Tim and Henry’s Pack Of Lies – a video whose format we can see the influence of in recent releases including Emerica’s Green and This, Vans’ Alright, OK and, mostly directly, F.A.’s Dancing On Thin Ice.
You’re clearly personally invested in this project. Would you describe yourself as a historian of skateboarding culture?
I’ve always been fascinated by the culture and, obviously, I still am. I struggle with any label because I know what I’ve been doing isn’t perfect and those imperfections have caused mistakes. That’s another positive side of NBD Archive being in the public space of Instagram where errors can be corrected by whomever happens to notice. From my point of view, I think this information is important and is something that skateboarders have consistently been thinking about and debating since the explosion of ‘new’ tricks, brought about by the development of street as the most popular discipline of skateboarding.
We ought to bring up Rodney Mullen at this stage as his presence looms over the entire evolution of skateboarding tricks, really. That infamous ‘The House That Rodney Built’ advert rightly attributes so many firsts to him. How do you go about acknowledging Mullen without kind of hobbling this whole project? Is that where the notion of “first example of a trick on film” really comes in?
As you’ve mentioned it, take the ‘The House That Rodney Built’ ad – heelflips and 360 flips were invented in ’82 and ’83 respectively by Mullen but there aren’t many skate videos, nor Rodney Mullen video parts, to check. Other folks filmed those tricks and have them in videos before him but Mullen’s shadow sits above all of those early video appearances of tricks he made up.
Can you talk me through some of your own favourite discoveries so far? I enjoyed seeing confirmation about the hardflip, I remember reading both Daewon and Mullen attributing that to Dan Gallagher previously so it was amazing to see the evidence.
The hardflip is a perfect example of lore and behind-the-scenes knowledge being important. I’ve been privy to the lore of skateboarding just by being around skateboarding but I’d have never personally known about the story of Dan Gallagher doing hardflips before anyone else without the journalism and interviews that exist today. As far as I know, he doesn’t have one on video – that I could find – before Daewon’s famous one in Love Child but the invention of the trick has been attributed to him by Mullen and Daewon so it’s incontestable.
The hardflip that may have ruffled some feathers was Shawn Mandoli’s over a hip in the unreleased Venture video Jacob Rosenberg uploaded a few years ago. After Mandoli’s was posted two decades after being originally filmed in 1991, it was theoretically possible that his could have been done before Daewon’s but as the Venture video was never officially released it was a piece of history that slipped through the cracks. It’s those kinds of nuances that keep me interested.
A further part of the story of hardflips would be Mike Carroll saying he saw his brother Greg Carroll doing them in the late ‘80s during a Weekend Buzz interview. Just around one trick that’s completely ubiquitous today, you have all these conflicting narratives about whose was documented first. It’s fascinating to me.
Venture Trucks catchline might be ‘awake’ but their proofreader was asleep at the wheel on this one. Saecha Clarke boardslides a handrail, setting a precedent for women-led NBDs (footage here). ph: unknown, scan: Vert Is Dead
One of the notable finds I got the most excited about was a clip of Saecha Clarke boardsliding a handrail. She was honestly quite the enigma for back then and I was always amazed by that Venture ad. That image is definitely imprinted in my brain. That find led to reaching out and asking if she wanted to do an interview. She was down and I was so psyched.
I feel this opened up a whole other avenue of research as the narrative following the historical progression of female skateboarding hasn’t been explored much, until the last decade or so.
I have two daughters so, personally, my own increased awareness and interest in women’s skateboarding and its history has grown alongside a surge in skate culture, generally. It’s a super important component of the project. I hope it goes to show I’m really reaching to have the least amount of bias when it comes to this research.
That opens up the question of whether our culture ought to explore the idea of a separate category of NBD regarding the first ever documentation of tricks on video by women. What are your thoughts on that?
I agree, absolutely. The fact this isn’t already part of skate lore is a testament to the reality that the history of women’s skateboarding was left out of the official narrative to a huge extent until recently. Saecha Clarke and Jaime Reyes are two women that I’ve highlighted on NBD Archive so far but I hope to include many more as I progress with the project.
Cara-Beth Burnside and Jaime Reyes, the first women to take the cover of Thrasher Magazine in August 1989 and April 1994. Photos by Dan Cavalheiro and Scott Star, respectively. Both covers courtesy of the Thrasher archive. Jaime was the first woman to log a switch backside tailslide on video, as seen in 411VM #31 (1998).
We’ve ventured into specific skater territory now so I’m duty bound to ask about Shiloh Greathouse. You published an entire mag about his contributions to the skateboarding canon and his numerous firsts on video, why did you pick him specifically?
It was purely organic. After interviewing Saecha, I kind of got a thirst for it. Once her interview came out, she suggested I do an interview with Shiloh and put me in touch with him. Once he agreed, I started working on an illustration to go alongside the interview and wanted to use his photo from the Big Brother #1 cover.
After sitting there for a few weeks, working on that cover image I got hyped and decided I might as well just make an entire print magazine. With Shiloh on board for an interview, I figured I could just mimic some of the layout of the first Big Brother to present the interview as he’d been such an important skater in those seminal World Industries/Big Brother days.
The interview turned out really long, but I wanted to have as much of it in there as I could, because Shiloh hadn’t really gone on any of the podcasts and done a really in depth interview in a few years. Shout out to Chrome Ball and Muckmouth for their pieces with him.
I was a huge fan of Shiloh from [his parts in] Love Child, New World Order, Trilogy and his later era with Bueno and TransWorld’s First Love. I wanted to pay homage and in a fun way and I was hoping us older folks would enjoy the blatant nostalgia of using the Big Brother format whilst also showing newer kids how influential Shiloh was.
There was a specific era of skate videos which foregrounded NBDs and trick progression over everything else. I’m thinking the likes of New Deal’s Da Deal is Dead and Damon Byrd in Union Wheel’s Right to Skate. From your analytical perspective, these must be a minefield of data?
Oh yeah, the 1992 – ’93 era. Whilst I agree, I also think that that era’s obsession with super technical tricks gets overplayed to an extent. A good example would be Powell’s most technically-minded video Hot Batch [’92] you have dudes like Wade Speyer and Chris Senn skating full speed alongside all the crazy, late flip stuff Hot Batch is remembered for.
That era is exactly how you described it but you have people who don’t fit that ’92/’93 stereotype whatsoever, appearing on all the videos that are remembered as being the low point of the “Big Pants Small Wheels” era. There were pros bending towards tech but still doing it with speed and finesse like Daewon, Eric Koston, Jeremy Wray, Henry Sanchez, Tim Gavin, Shiloh Greathouse, Alfonso Rawls, Ronnie Creager, Dan Peterka, Ray Barbee and more.
Was all the trick innovation from then repeatable? Probably not. The stranger pressure flip and late tricks disappeared after that time, only to reappear twenty years later on Instagram by skaters who weren’t around the first time.
That era’s stigma may be completely defined by the Damon Byrd’s Right to Skate video part but, with him, it’s almost like taking a soundbite out of context to make someone look like they’re saying something they weren’t. I was a huge fan of the Gullwing Trucks video, Full Power Trip. Damon Byrd is in that too and already skating hyper tech back in 1990. The reality is that Damon Byrd was an ATV despite being known as the poster boy for early-90s super tech. That dude’s story on video is very meaningful to skateboarding as a whole. Whatever trick was deemed “illegal” or “too much” at some point will be seen by a kid, ten years later, and be put back into skating with their own twist on it.
I’m sure in early-90s folks who were the “tastemakers” of the time were looking at early grabs and wallrides, saying that era is over and those tricks will leave no legacy. The tricks were made fun of, essentially. But here you have it today where the next generation adapts those tricks and you end up with an influential skater like Kevin Rodrigues filming modern parts full of early grabs and wallrides. Everything comes full circle, eventually.
Then you have the treasure trove of progression via a visionary like Mike Ternasky and the skaters he surrounded himself with. I’m thinking the first two Plan B videos and Life’s A Soldier’s Story [’91] in particular.
With Plan B’s Questionable and Virtual Reality you see the ultimate styles in skateboarding. All those dudes were the chosen ones of that moment and were all being filmed by the best in the business – Dan Sturt, Rosenberg, Ternasky, [David] Schlossbach. It’s an amazing documentation of the skaters doing the most progressive tricks with more finesse than anyone, that’s why they’re so revered today.
I loved the Life video too, Sean Sheffey’s part – like those Plan B videos, will forever be talked about. Sheffey broke down some walls with how fast and powerful he was. The fakie ollie over the picnic table, the back tail on the table – tricks that laid out the template for cutting-edge street skating, that everyone else followed, and he was doing it in 1991. His part also helped enshrine certain objects like the hydrant, the picnic table and the handrail as classic obstacles, which were used to put progression into context. When you think about how important the picnic table went on to be in terms of skate videos and trick progression, you have to go back to skaters like Sean Sheffey and Matt Hensley and recognize they were the people who turned those everyday objects into the magical skateboard proving grounds that they ended up as.
From Stereo rider, to TransWorld videographer, to Alien Workshop lensman, to producing the definitive standalone video part and making music videos for Cat Power – Greg Hunt’s career is one impeccably tasteful NBD. 5-0 fakie and lipslide on his favourite SF spot during A Visual Sound for his 1998 TWS ‘Pro Spotlight’, photos: Mike Blabac and Gabe Morford, respectively.
Given your interest in this area of skate history, what’s your take on Stereo’s A Visual Sound [’94] and their response to the inward-looking tech era? Did it seem necessary to you?
Honestly, when it came out, it wasn’t my thing even though I was a huge Jason Lee fan. It was just something I didn’t get as a narrow-minded, late-teenager obsessed with new tricks. But in hindsight, yes – it was completely necessary. A lot of skateboarding got ugly for a minute, then Stereo came out swinging with a cohesive message through the skating and their imagery with that video. Style can be the defining factor of any trick, no matter how tech it gets so, yeah, those videos which kind of reset how we look at skating are so important. Eastern Exposure 3 [Dan Wolfe, ’96] created a similar paradigm shift of what skateboarding can look like, a few years later, in my opinion.
As a Brit, I’ve been stoked to see Alex Moul begin to appear quite often in your feed of late. Were you aware of his early career prior to doing this?
I was definitely not super schooled in how much Alex Moul had done, historically, prior to starting this project but I did have a copy of Viewfinder from the early 2000s, which had a lot of Alex on it. His earlier stuff was new to me though and finding the back noseblunt on the handrail from Playing Fields [’97] was amazing.
I’d never seen or heard of his earlier Rollersnakes stuff until starting this though and it’s so rad. The stuff I’ve never seen until doing this crazy dive into “what exists” is a more fun part of the note taking and research. The back tail on that rail [at Oxford Library] from 540 stoked me out; stoked for Alex and just stoked that this weird thing may bring to light some of the more obscure thing like that in our culture. These comparisons allow for the dismantling of that US-dominated vantage point which I feel is still the way our history is presented.
You’ve used the word ‘data’ a lot during our conversation and it’s clear you’re building up a huge database through this NBD Archive project. Do you plan to make this available somewhere?
Here and there I try to think of a way to have it more presentable and particularly more searchable and SEO friendly. Instagram was just the fastest, easiest way to get this idea out on a platform to see if anyone gave a fuck.
Part of me simply wanted to experiment with a page that thoughtfully posted about skateboard video clips, in a positive manner. It’s easy to keep it positive when you’re just stating findings.
There’s no master plan. I have pipe dreams of turning this into a not-for-profit educational entity but I work a full-time job and have two young kids so it’s hard to find time to take any further steps. I also still enjoy skateboarding in the bit of time I have to do it. Basically, I blame skateboarding for getting in the way of me taking NBD Archive in a different direction. And I’m totally fine with that. I’m 46 so I cherish any session I have now and I’ve got a great group of dudes my age that are really enjoying skating, building old-man-size DIYs and still learning new tricks, to us. It’s an addiction I can’t shake.
Spreads from NBD Archive’s Shiloh Greathouse interview ‘zine, a nod to Big Brother #1
How can people reading this get involved with the ongoing NBD Archive project?
Firstly, I should thank those who already have got involved – there’s too many to list but they know who they are. Eternal gratitude to the folk who digitised videos and sent them to me, big shout out the guy in the UK [@pullingteeth20] who sends over scans of R.a.D. Magazine with super detailed release information of some videos. That’s priceless info to me and I still get excited when new information comes into the situation and of course stoked when people get a super rare video to me.
The biggest assistance I ask for publicly can be found on the account with some of the more boring posts with a graphic of the year and a list of all the videos that I know of came out that year. Those highlighted in red are the ones I still need. That’s also an attempt at transparency, saying which videos haven’t been reviewed so there’s a possibility that the story changes if those videos are found. That’s happened with some tricks called throughout the project as I found these [once] unfindable-to-me videos.
Another thing I could use help with, but feel like an ass asking, is access to more research materials. Magazines specifically but they’re so ridiculously expensive and not as simple as just copying a VHS or DVD. I’ve built some of my collection back and lately had great deals on mags from Look Back Library to help fill holes in my collection.
I’m always open to suggestions on tricks. I’m just not really open to someone sending me or tagging me on a post of a brand-new phone clip on Instagram. It’s flattering but it just seems like whoever does that doesn’t understand what I’m doing. Which is fine. I try to make it clear that the purpose of NBD Archive is to look from the past, forward and I’m still only noting the year 2004 now with at least 45 more videos from that year to note.
All social media platforms hosting full skate videos have the issue that they could be taken down and never really seen again. I knew the creation of Instagram in 2010 presented this problem so my goal has always been to get to 2010 in taking notes and analysing data. I’ll stop at that point.
Where do you and NBD Archive go from here?
I’m super psyched on some individuals who reached out for interviews. Hopefully those will get going soon and be presented in some entertaining formats. Another print project may happen eventually.
Beyond that, I’m going to keep chugging along with the Instagram page and hopefully find more enjoyable ways to present the information and findings I come across. Cross-referencing more of the print material I’ve mentioned, further information will hopefully be obtained beyond just video release dates information. More specifically, when tricks were first photographed too, maybe.
All in all, I just want to keep it fun and hopefully entertaining for those that are interested.
Ending where we began with Natas Kaupas, this time Santa Cruz’s Streets Of Fire – a favourite of all involved with this interview.
Follow the efforts of NBD Archive (and pitch in with a DM if you’ve got the scoop on a trick) at @nbd_archive.
Previous interviews by Ben Powell: Mike Manzoori, Long Live Southbank with Louis Woodhead and Stuart Maclure, Thesis: Nick Jensen, Dan ‘Jagger’ Ball, Brad Johnson, Darren Pearcy, Swift Blazer
Related: An Interview with Bobshirt’s Tim Anderson – “For every era, that’s the golden era.”, Ben’s piece on “Already Been Done vs Never Been Done” for Free Skate Mag