Fiasco Skateboarding.com – Live from the South Coast

Is the best way to describe the past two weeks. I don’t know how they’ve slipped away from me so quickly without realising though, this summer is going too quick.

Two Fridays ago I went to Hospitality at Fabric to see HIGH CONTRAST / LONDON ELEKTRICITY / NETSKY / DANNY BYRD / NERO / TC FEAT. JAKES / BROOKES BROTHERS / MRSA / MC WREC / SP:MC / MC AD, who didn’t hesitate to deliver the goods, all the goods. It was such a randomly sick night – after polishing off a bottle of whisky on the coach up there, I met my good friend James who had just come back from travelling around the world. We acquired some ice cold Stellas from an offie and spent the last of the summer evening jamming in Trafalgar square. Here we met some girls who turned out were also going to Fabric, and one of them claimed to be friends with Netsky after meeting him in Plymouth and keeping in touch via email. With doubts in my mind; “Yeah aright, introduce me to Netsky tonight and I’ll buy you a drink”. We left Trafalgar and proceeded to represent cliché British drunken yobs on our way to Farringdon. A short while after Netsky’s set (which was a banger) I bumped into one of the girls who we were were with after loosing her for a while; “Max, this is Borris”. Looked at the person she was next to – definitely standing there having a drink with Netsky. They both then left for a quiet drink, which was when I met High Contrast, (picture in here somewhere, not gonna post it up directly), shook Tony Colman’s hand, then when they returned I got a cheeky signature and left the club chatting to him. Claim to faaame. A few hours of Saturday morning were then spent lying in the sun by The London Eye, where we saw this bloke who looked about 35, shirt off, bent over the railings projectiling into The Thames. Looked over to us “6 months bender that is… *wipes mouth* I’ve been pissed everyday for 6 months”. He then proceeded to crack open another Strongbow Black, bearing in mind this was at about 7.30 in the morning. Sick night.

3 weeks late!

On Monday morning we left ASDA and hit the road 3 hours behind schedule. Many beers, toilet breaks, wrong turns and Welsh jokes later we arrived in the middle of a field somewhere in the Welsh countryside. Here we were faced with the most disorganised and stressful entrance to a festival you could ever imagine. It was a park & ride jobby to where the actual festival was, but there was about 1 one coach every half an hour, and with apparently 17,000 students heading there (although I think that’s a huge exaggeration) some people were queuing for seven hours. By sunset we had gradually lost about 2 crates worth of beer, and I managed to loose my sleeping bag and all of my food, but we were in. The festival itself was brilliant, but I suppose you’d be hard pressed to go to a festival and have a bad time. The weather was sick, the vibes were sick, camping in a ten tent circle was sick and the music was sick. Chase & Status headlined the last night on the main stage and absolutely killed it, Beardyman thoroughly impressed me creating tunes from loops of sounds he recorded right there on the spot, Sub Focus, High Contrast and Annie Mac were standardly good but I was most impressed with Dan Le Sac & Scroobius Pip, you may recognise this one:

I hate the point of a festival when it’s the morning of the last day, you don’t want it to end but everyone’s packing up their stuff, no one wants to know you anymore and that remains is a field full of evidence that a lot of people had a very nutty week.

So we spent four days in Amsterdam last week. I’d definitely recommend the city to anyone, even if you’re not the kind to want to take advantage of the things that are legal there. The only word to describe it is beautiful; the canals, lovely weather, chilled out atmosphere and the lack of cars make it a pleasure to go anywhere in the city. On the first day we met up with one of our mate’s cousin, who took us on a proper chill boat ride around Amsterdam, which was amazing. Unfortunately it’s the kind of place that rinses your wallet without you realising, by the third day I had to ration my money and ended up not being able to eat, and a couple of people we were with ended up with no where to sleep on the last night. Here are my photos taken on my SLR, and once I get the memory card off of Scotty I’ll have a few more to share:

When I woke up back in England I was greeted with grey sky and drizzle, as well as a voicemail from Bournemouth Uni saying that they haven’t automatically received my results through UCAS. The College website was unsurprisingly not working, so I had to hack it up to Guildford to get my results:

Stoked. Now I’m off for a skate.

Hey there, how’s it going? Long time no see…

Sorry for the disgusting lack of posts recently; since Global I haven’t really calmed down, so let’s start from the top:

I haven’t got any photos or videos from Global as my digital camera, phone, wallet and bag were all stolen from inside my tent while I was asleep in it on the first night; good times. Although I found my bag a few metres from my tent in the morning, with the wallet still inside with everything in it, which I was stoked on, god knows where my phone and camera have ended up. That proper pissed me off because I took some sick photos and videos which will never be seen again, and I got split up from everyone for a good couple of hours on Saturday and I had no way of getting hold of them. To make matters worse, before being allowed into the festival I got 24 beers taken off of me (the only festival I’ve ever herd of where you can’t take drink into the camp site with you!) so therefore had to pay £40 for a crate of 24, and I also got fully strip searched. And to make matters even worse, when we dragged our abused bodies and all of our stuff back to my mate’s car on Sunday morning we were greeted with a smashed lock and the lack of my sat-nav and my mate’s iPod touch. This resulted is us getting so lost on the way home and somehow we ended up in central London, which we weren’t supposed to go anywhere near. 8 hours later I was returned home and proceeded to have a well deserved shower, and then finally bed after being awake for 37 hours. Despite everything that went wrong and how much money was robbed from me, it was still hands down one of, if not the best weekend of my life so far.

Andy C, DJ Hype, Chase & Status, Caspa, Rusko, High Contrast, Friction, Fabio & Grooverider, Noisia, Hazard, Sub Focus, Armin Van Buuren, Prodigy, Pendulum, Scratch Perverts and Paul Van Dyke were just some of the people we saw. A fat line up if I’ve ever seen one. The weekend was made better by a group of quality Northern girls who camped next to us who I stayed up all night with on the Saturday, a group of 16ish proper ‘lads’ who camped a couple of tents away and all of the quality people who are always at festivals. Writing this has got me hyped for festival number three!

The week after was spent lying in, chilling during the day then going out every night, although I did go for a skate on the Friday with Smither where we attempted to get some footage, but failed. This time last week I again didn’t sleep for about 37 hours after a massive party on Brighton beach with about 5000 or so people (apparently) and 7 or 8 rigs set up, which was a recipe for a good night. My mate’s parents then went on holiday for a week, so we got our money’s worth.

Wednesday I went for a skate again, this time in some actual warm sun, and heard on the grape vine that Thursday was due to be hot and sunny so we decided that Dorchester was in order. After driving for about an hour without Bettie Sue’s unquestionably advanced scene of direction, cloud turned into rain, rain turned into monsoon, road turned into a river. After just over 2 hours we reached the skatepark, stretched our legs, marvelled at the fun we could of had, badmouthed BBC weather for a bit then got back into the car again to head home. We were greeted by large amounts of rush hour traffic on the way out and after being in the car for about 6 hours we returned home, after accomplishing sweet fuck all and burning twenty quid’s worth of petrol, good times. To make matter’s worse (again) my iPod finally completely packed up the other week, so the only music in my car for this journey came from Smither’s “Best of the 80′s” triple disk compilation. I’m not gonna lie though, Total Eclipse Of The Heart at full volume was the best 6 minutes of the day.

So there you have it, story of my life. Hopefully I’ll have some footage for you sometime this week, if not I’ll try and keep posting about something or another.

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Haven’t been on the internet in a while so this new edit I came across over on Strong Island, featuring a few clips of Jak, amongst others, is probably old news:

Can’t wait for his 6:57 part!

Got back last night from 4 days of basking in the glorious sunshine, drinking ridiculous amounts of shant and spending my life savings on shit food. Was such a sick weekend!

Cam and I got needlessly caned on the boat on the way there and after five minutes of arriving at the harbour Cam got pushed in with his brand new BlackBerry in his pocket. With no numbers of people Cam knew, we were left to fend for ourselves all weekend. We then set up our embarrassingly shit £10 ASDA tent amongst loads of expensive, proper 8 man tents, chucked our stuff in and proceeded to catch the last of Pendulum. Basement Jaxx followed, who were amazing, and the night went out with a bang when The Prodigy owned it:

I can’t remember what we did after this but it wasn’t anything as hectic as the next two nights. We headed back to our tent about 3 and proceeded to chat shit to the people in our neighbouring tents, who described Cam and I as “better than TV”. After waking up we returned to the boat to stock up on drink and after Cam had been in once before, he couldn’t get enough:

The rest of the day was spent wondering around drinking, soaking up what the festival had to offer. The Strongbow tent was rad; open plan with music & beanbags – ultimate cotch. We watched Calvin Harris, who was sick, and decided we’d rather party than watch Stereophonics after meeting a bloke from Newcastle who had lost all his mates. The three of us then drank a few pints in the Carling bar which was a massive open plan pub with sofas and an open mic, and then progressed into some night club which I didn’t know existed. We then bumped into Ross (skateboarder from some of my videos), who I had no idea was there. Some more stuff happened that I can’t remember but we ended the night sitting on a bench outside a burger van with some French fella who was 23 but looked about 30 and had learned all his English from American TV shows! We chatted to him for about 3 hours and returned to our tent at about 5, where we continued drinking for a bit while making diabolical roach-less fags out of torn up pocket Rizlas.

Sunday was spent doing the same as Saturday and during our daily trip back to the boat for more booze we were surprised with a proper sick air show, it was unbelievable how good the pilots were, especially with the synchronised choreography. We then watched some music for a change – you may recognise this. We were invited to a champagne bar by Simon (the person’s boat we came on) and after rinsing a £35 bottle of champers we met up again with Gwen, the Frenchman, outside the same burger van which I had though thought we had gotten friendly with the owner of, but later events proved me wrong. Long story short, there were about 10 of us sitting around this table, each of us knowing just one of the other people, all drinking our own drinks as well as this French vodka mix that Gwen had prepared us (1 litre vodka, 1 litre orange in a 2 litre water bottle) all singing, chanting and banging on the table. Eventually the owner of the burger van had enough of our constant demand for free food and rowdy behaviour and asked us to leave. So we then picked up the table (which belonged to the burger van) attempted to carry it to another location where we would be more welcome but didn’t even get it a foot when it completely fell apart. Inspired by the Basement Jaxx song that we were all singing five minutes before, we then proceeded to chant “Where’s your table at? Where’s your table at!” I was ridiculously drunk by the time we eventually left and I remember struggling to walk back to the campsite but don’t actually remember reaching it. I woke up laying half out of my tent and half in it, asked Cam what happened and he said “you fell over and wouldn’t wake up, I thought you were dead”.

So last Thursday Adam, Paget, Rob and I set off on the road to Skegness in my dangerously over filled car. Adam thought it would be a good idea to bring a full on holiday style suitcase with him, leaving almost no more room in the boot for anything else. With the parcel shelf half way up the back window, bags all over everywhere and the car looking like it had been lowered by a foot we set off on our 7 hour journey which was spent bullying Paget and listening to Biggie at full blast when stopped in traffic in a nice peaceful country village which we thought was the one out of Hot Fuzz.

The next couple of days were spent sessioning the plaza until close, rinsing Paget in the B&B, living off of Stella, Strongbow & Subway and spending too much money while out on the town. On Saturday morning we were once again woken up with a bang on the door by the B&B owner shouting “breakfast!” at stupid o’clock in the morning, I sat up and was greeted with a monster of hangovers and was not stoked about having to drive all the back, especially while Adam carried on the night before as he governed the stereo with dance anthems.