Corrosive Materials

The Terrible Company is (somehow) celebrating it’s 20th anniversary of creating Coventry and Warwickshire skateboarding content this year. As part of this, I thought I would archive some missing back entries from the Terribleco catalogue online. For the first time ever, I’ve finally put the 2007 Terribleco video “Corrosive Materials” online. Before, you could only watch this thing on DVD. Now you can watch it on here. Isn’t the internet great?

The Story of Corrosive Materials

The short version of this is that Corrosive Materials was a bit of a love letter to Enjoi’s “Bag Of Suck”. At the time I was heavily influenced by both Louie Barletta and Jerry Hsu, and Enjoi’s 2006 full length video left an undeniable mark on me both in my skateboarding and my film-making.

This influence is incredibly obvious if you’re paying attention: hand-made physical title cards, montages from the local skatepark where people all hit the same obstacle one after the other, the music selection, my fashion sense (and even the tricks I was doing). All of this was a very poor imitation of Bag Of Suck, but done with pure love for what Matt Eversole had made for the Panda-branded company.

And to go back to something I just mentioned above – I was watching my part before I wrote this and DAMN 2007 Ade had actual street tricks. There’s still a lot of skatepark footage in here (because there always is in my videos), but there is a surprising amount of neat, inventive street footage in my part, as well as actual, honest to god good flip tricks that would take me forever to land now (there’s even a fakie 360 flip), and even some ledge tricks that go beyond my basic go to tricks of Frontside 5050s and Boardslides. I can’t remember the last time I did a Frontside 5-0 on a ledge, but this video is proof that I definitely did one at some point, and there’s even the cheekiest and sketchiest Fakie Nosegrind.

2007 was a really weird time for these sorts of scene videos. They kinda featured everyone (as much as they could) and were packed to the brim with full sections. Not every trick was worth your time, but the videos I remember from similar groups like Gnargore or Lesta On Lock (Get Lesta’s previous incarnation) had similar quality of tricks, and similar run times. It’s weird to see a video like this at an hour in length now, but back then it was the norm. I think the bar was set by every big company putting out an hour long DVD.

Corrosive Materials also began what would become a huge link between Terribleco and Coventry skater owned shop Ride. I filmed some stuff for Jim The Skin during the making of Corrosive Materials (mentioned in my blog post about the Ride Day Trip tour video), and in turn Matt Aldersley, Tez Aldersley and Daryl Nobbs, who were all on the Ride team at the time, made appearances in this video with full parts.

I could sit here and wax lyrical about Corrosive Materials all day, but the truth is that the video is a bit of a blind spot in my back catalogue. There’s still very much an element of this blog trying to find it’s feet – it hasn’t really got a voice of it’s own (it’s voice so heavily influenced by Bag Of Suck) and it’s a midpoint in a transition.

It honestly wasn’t until maybe 2 years later that Terribleco really landed on a brand that was all it’s own, but if you’re in here looking for some history about Coventry skateboarding, and want to see a bunch of people you probably know now doing tricks that are completely surprising and not the kind of tricks they do now (I’m still stoked that I could even land a fakie tre flip in a line for this video), then check it out.