Sidewalk Magazine - Issue 217 - October 2014
Skate Photography by Rob Shaw
So Rianne, I guess we should start by discussing 2014. What was going on in your life 10 years ago?
I’m pretty sure 2014 was when I first moved to Brighton for uni. Before that, actually, I’d stopped skating for a few years. After skating all of my life in Bournemouth, I’d got to that age, around 18, where you start drinking and I started hanging out with girls more, who didn’t skate. A load of people from Bournemouth had dropped out of the scene as well. It was all because of moving to Brighton that I started skating again, because the skatepark is the easiest place to make friends in a new city. I needed to learn some new tricks (laughs), so I made myself learn how to boardslide and kickflip before I left Bournemouth. I remember, actually, this Unicorn Skate Jam was a few months into me being able to even boardslide or kickflip, and I feel like at that time I’d progressed quite a lot, and quite quickly.
And that progression was as a direct result of you moving to Brighton?
I think so, yeah. I was skating The Level all day, every day, but I didn’t even have any friends at The Level back then, really, because I’d only just moved there. I was literally skating on my own, which, in a way, was more productive. You don’t get distracted by getting beers in or going to go to the pub. Josie Millard was skating a lot at The Level at the time, so we started hanging out together; often we’d meet up quite early in the morning, before it got busy. I did make some really good friends after a while, and everyone was so supportive of female skateboarding in Brighton.
So what can you tell us about the 2014 Unicorn Jam at Mile End?
I think there might have been a couple of them, but this was the first one I went to. I remember this particular day, the sun was shining, it was so hot for England. It was back when the girl skate community was really small, and because there wasn’t much going on for us, it seemed like everyone made such a big effort to go places, and be together. There were girls from all the way up north, from as far as Leeds and beyond; they’d come down to London for one day. I came from Brighton, there were people from Cornwall… all of the different areas of the U.K. that are so far apart, but having everyone there made it feel like we were part of some secret little club. At the time, at uni, a lot of my friends weren’t into skateboarding, and at the skatepark in Brighton I didn’t have loads of friends to skate with because I was in a new city, so these girls jams were an escape, in a way. You were hanging out with people who were all on the same wavelength, and because we all lived so far apart and there was only a few of us, it felt like this little close-knit community that no one else really knew about.
It’s been said so much that back then, you could literally fit the female skate community of the country into one room. But the females who were skating were so dedicated to it, that if anyone was putting on an event or working on a project, it seemed that literally the whole female scene would get behind it, and make it the best it could possibly be.
Nowadays every city has got a girl gang, but back then it was so different. Girls have got other girls to skate with now, so there’s not this great need to travel halfway across the country to skate with other females, because you’ve got other females to skate with on your doorstep. I get why it’s not how it used to be, and that’s obviously a good thing for female skateboarding and the progression of it all, but at the same time, I can’t help but miss having that close-knit community where everyone did bother to get together. We always spoke about it back in the day, that female skateboarding would go the same way as male skateboarding, and it would get less niche, and it would grow, and with that growth it would become less personal, and less of a close-knit group.
Before heading to Mile End for the Unicorn Jam in 2014, had you travelled to many other skate jams?
I’d gone to one of the Pioneer events that Jenna Selby organised when I was 14 or 15, but I was at an age where my mum had to drive me there, and I was too embarrassed for her to even come in to the park, so I think she went into St Albans for the day, to drink coffee and read her book (laughs). That was the first time I met Danni (Gallacher), Lucy Adams, Sam Bruce and Helena Long. They were all a bit older than me, and it’s weird to think now that I’m aged 30, but I was the young one back then, the youngest turning up to skate. They were probably like, “who’s this girl?” When you’re 15 and someone is 21, they seem like an adult compared to you, when you’re still in school, been driven about by your mum (laughs).
What can you remember about the skating that was going on at the Unicorn Jam?
We need to mention Georgie Winter; she won the best trick comp on the hip, with a shove-it heel. I remember Lucy Adams gave me props that day; she said, “I saw you a down rail on your last Insta vid”, and she gave me props. I was like, “I’ve made it; Lucy Adams respects me” (laughs). Looking at the article, Helena is wearing the classic Helena Long outfit: beanie, longsleeve t-shirt, Dickies and Vans. This girl as well, Charlotte ‘Twig’ Brennan, from Romford. She was cool. She stopped skating a few years after this competition. Even though Romford is really close to London, I wasn’t expecting her to be there.
Had you met Twig before?
I hadn’t, but around the time that this Unicorn Jam happened, it was the start of Instagram videos being a thing, when you could upload a 10 second video, and that’s when you started to know of other girl skateboarders from around the country, and not just the skaters you’d meet at the comps; you started to see girls you’d never heard of skating online. I think that’s mainly why this jam was a special one, because all of the other jams that you went to, you already knew the girls, whereas this one, it was the first time you’d see girls you’d never met, but you knew who they were and what tricks they could do without ever having met them in person. That was a weird concept before the explosion of social media. I remember really looking up to Twig on Instagram, and as you can see here, she could do all of these plants, and she was really gnarly in the bowl, and when I met her, I was like, “oh, it’s you!”
It wasn’t just the skating that was being pushed on social media, either. Instagram allowed all of these comps to be widely advertised, so more people would come. It’s weird, because now the advertising is there, but less people turn up to events. People can’t be bothered to travel the distances. Before Instagram, the St Albans jam, the only way I found out about that was by going on Google and searching for words like ‘U.K. girl skateboarders’, and trying to find some information about people who were similar to me. I found Danni’s standalone Girl Skate U.K. website, saw a poster for the St Albans comp, then begged my mum to take me (laughs).
It really did feel like if you wanted to be with a large number of other female skateboarders, you had to travel those distances to be present at events like the St Albans comps, Unicorn Jams, and Danni’s Girl Skate U.K. events.
These days you’d call it the competition circuit, but back then I don’t think it was so much that; people were just eager to skate with likeminded people, and to be able to see skateboarding at a higher level. You were so used to seeing skateboarding at your local level, that you needed to go to these events to be inspired.
It’s important for people to feel welcomed and safe at events, too. Like you were saying earlier about the Kings Park jam in 2008, where you were getting grief from the guy on the mic, simply for being there and being female.
At least that shows how we’ve come on in leaps and bounds since then. Some of the boys, they remember who it was… a guy called Porno Paul. He was like, “aww, can you drop in? Come on, drop in then!” Whilst it was pissing it down with rain, and I was trying to mind my own business and keep my skateboard dry. It was super embarrassing, aged 15, being called out like that over a microphone. Things have changed, though, and for the better. Look at Cal (Callun Loomes) with Get Gesta; he massively helped female skateboarding in the U.K., I feel. I don’t think people would have fucked with female skateboarders half as much, or it would have taken people way longer to realise about us, if it wasn’t for Cal spending all of his own money, to go to all of these places, filming me, Zeta (Rush), Savannah (Stacey-Keenan), Stef (Nurding), all of us, putting us in the videos, putting us out there on the Instagram, and back then, the Get Lesta Instagram was popping, even to the point where U.S. companies like Primitive were seeing our clips. Cal really helped girl skateboarding in the U.K., more so than any other motherfucker at that time (laughs).
Rianne feebles her way around the Mile End clam whilst basking in some vintage 2014 vitamin D. Photo: Rob Shaw.
Do you remember this feeble photo at the Unicorn Jam being shot?
I don’t. Who shot it?
It was Rob Shaw.
Ah, well I think he just shot it in the competition, to be fair, because I remember being really surprised when this came out. Someone told me about it beforehand, like, “oh, you’re in Sidewalk”, and then I was really stoked that this was the first photo in the article as well. Like when you turn the page, that was the first photo you see; I remember that being a big thing in my head. I think all of these photos were shot mid comp, because you can see in Helena’s, there’s no one in the background. What’s nice about them is the fact that they are all action shots from the comp, not just, “I saw you do this trick in your run, can we take a photo of it?” These are actually the tricks from the competition. There were only three people in each heat as well, I think, so you had space. It wasn’t a jam where everyone was going for it, it was a set out competition with a best trick jam, and they had a boys best trick jam at the end as well. Even though it was a girls comp, a lot of lads turned up to support it.
That’s like the reverse of what it used to be. It always used to be the female comp would be tagged on at the side of the event - like NASS, or the U.K. Champs - whereas for this, the boys had a short comp that was run at the end.
It was the other way around, yeah. NASS, for instance, had us females waiting ’til midnight to start our competition one year, after the snakeboarders, may I add (laughs). The shop that used to be at Mile End, Parlour, that got robbed the day before the comp. So we all arrived and the shop had been smashed in, the place had just been raided. I think it was raided another once or twice before it moved. The mini ramp in the next archway over from the shop was open for this competition, and that was the only time I ever skated that ramp. And one story that I don’t mind you putting in for the lols, I remember skating that ramp, and you know when you jump off your board, and one of your feet manage to catch it again, and it sends you straight onto your back? As a woman, there’s a thing that happens when you do that, you let out a bit of wee, that was the first time that ever happened to me. For the rest of the day I was walking around like, “yep, I weed myself” (laughs).
I don’t think people would have fucked with female skateboarders half as much, or it would have taken people way longer to realise about us, if it wasn’t for Cal.
So between this feeble being published and today, in the intervening years, what have been some other standout photos that you’ve shot?
I didn’t get any other photos run until my First Light for Sidewalk, but that was after they stopped doing print, which I was a bit sad about. Is the Sidewalk site still online?
Nah, the website was taken offline a few weeks ago by the looks of it.
In which case, I need to ask CJ (Chris Johnson) to send me those photos, because I will have lost a lot of that stuff. Other than the First Light… I wish I could say, “then I had this photo, and this photo”, but back in the day, no companies or magazines were really that keen on us girl skateboarders (laughs). I had a few digital things, though. I had a full interview on the Girl Skate U.K. blog, but when girl skateboarding really started getting a lot of attention, Sidewalk had ended, and it was pretty much digital or nothing. Which girls had a First Light in the magazine?
Helena and Zeta both did for sure, Stef had an interview, Lucy had an interview as well but that ended up being online. I remember Becky Jaques had a full page photo in 2008 doing a rock fakie in Livi bowl, and that ended up being pretty controversial in some circles.
Yeah, but that would have been that old entitled mindset though, where everything that was printed was expected to be inspirational only to men. Not that there was much of a female scene back then, but you still want people to look through a magazine, see something and think, “yeah, that’s a bit of me”. Also, I’m sorry, but unless you were one of the top boy skateboarders back then, there would be a lot of boys who would see that and think, “fuck yeah!” That should also be inspiring to men, seeing a woman doing something like that. If anything, it might tighten your ball sack a bit more, make you want to step up your game. Not everyone has to be at that high level of skateboarding, but Becky skating Livi bowl… there’s both girls and boys looking at her doing that, and being inspired by it.
More recently, you had the cover of Vague, the issue after your full interview. Was the first you knew of it when you had the cake with the cover on it delivered to your house?
No, no. Rob did tell me beforehand, “if you get a photo that’s good enough, they will give you the cover”. When the interview came out, and they didn’t use that 50-50 photo, and it wasn’t on the cover either, I was a bit confused, like, “why wouldn’t you use it for the interview?” That was one of the best photos I’d shot; if it wasn’t for the cover, I still wanted it used in the interview. Then it turned up on the next cover. It’s the best thing I’ve achieved in skateboarding, at the end of the day (laughs). It wasn’t a particularly hard spot to skate, but Rob’s photo is so sick. And yeah, I had the cover delivered on a cake (laughs).
Did you eat it? I’d imagine it’s bizarre eating food with your face printed on it.
There was a barbecue going on at the Deaner the day it arrived, so I took it down there and let everyone else eat it. I think I managed to have a slice of it though (laughs).
Follow Rianne - @rianneskate
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