There is a version of skateboarding history that starts in California and stays there. Swimming pools, sunshine, the Bones Brigade. All part of it, of course. But if you skated in Britain in the eighties, the pavement was often wet, the nearest decent spot was miles away and the magazine that understood your world was RAD.
Read And Destroy had something the American skate magazines could not give us: our own scene staring back from the page. British skaters, British spots, the kind of light that makes you wonder whether anyone should be out with a camera at all. It did not need to pretend every session happened under a blue sky.
Tim Leighton-Boyce’s photographs helped give the magazine its look. Wig Worland was another of the people who shaped its voice. RAD felt close to the skating because the people making it knew the spots and the skaters. You could open an issue and recognise the sort of place you might actually have skated, even if you had never been to that particular town.
That mattered. A magazine can make a scene feel real to the people inside it. RAD gave space to British names, including Bod Boyle and Colin Kennedy, alongside the American stars everyone knew. There was no need to choose between them. You could be obsessed with Rodney Mullen or Steve Caballero and still want to see what was happening at Southbank or Rom skatepark.
The Bones Brigade films reached kids here too. The Bones Brigade Video Show, Future Primitive and The Search for Animal Chin travelled far beyond California. The tricks were the draw, but so was the idea that skating could have its own films, jokes, characters and places. RAD helped give the British version of that world somewhere to live.
It is tempting to turn every old skate magazine into a relic. That sells it short. For the kid who bought an issue from the newsagent, it was news. Who was skating, what they were doing, where they were doing it and whether you could persuade your mates to try something similar that weekend. The pages got folded and passed around because somebody actually wanted to read them.
Old copies have survived because people kept them. They are a record of a British skate scene that did not always get noticed from across the Atlantic, complete with the photographs, adverts and voices of the time. The book Read and Destroy: The Story of RAD Magazine is there if you want to dig further into the magazine’s history.
We have put an original RAD issue together with a Read and Destroy T shirt and sticker set in our Read and Destroy bundle. It is a little piece of the scene as it looked on paper, back when you could not scroll past it.