Throughout 2023 we’re celebrating 20 years of The Terrible Company – and today we’re looking back at this certified banger of a video. Batface was absolutely notorious around these parts in 2009; a combination of the heaviest crew we had rolled with in a video yet, and the incredibly stupid, simple name.
This video had the distinct honour of being the third Terribleco video to get a review in Sidewalk, and I was extremely proud of the way this review nails what The Terrible Company is about. If you want to see what Ben Powell & company thought of our little video nasty, read on – And then keep reading for some thoughts around the quintessential Terrible Company production.
Batface
by Terribleco
What Is It?
Following on from ‘Guitar Solos With Skateboards’, ‘Batface’ is the latest addition to Ade The Terrible’s strictly DIY Coventry video catalogue. This is also the second Terribleco DVD release of 2009 – have some of that!
Who’s On It?
All your favourite Coventry area heads and extended family types, including Joxa, Daryl Nobbs, Becky Jacques, Rosko, Ade The Terrible, Tony Lui, Lewis Homer and others.
Highlights
If you’re in searching for slow-mo HD dolly shots and people pushing down the street, motion graphics and switch flip krizzlas then I wouldn’t take your jacket off, because you won’t be staying. If you’re craving primarily raw and realistic skating from the streets and parks of Coventry, GG Allin, and occasional clips from low budget horror B-movies, then pull yourself up a seat because Ade’s got a right treat in store for you.
How do fakie early grab and finger flip variations on four foot quarters sound? If that caught your attention then you’ll love Lewis Homer.
Warrior Princess Becky Jacques bangs out wallrides, mini ramp lines and blunt fakies on concrete quarters in her first full part. Go on Becky!
Rosko comes through with boneless 5050’s down Cov park hubbas and ends with a rad hippy jump to nosemanny, and Ade The Terrible gets stuck in at The Ripped and skates what looks like someone’s front room that’s been turned into a skatepark.
Front on Joxa, I dare you! He might not be holding down the curtains like he did on ‘GSWS’ but you can’t argue with a brutal 50 seconds of wallrides, horrible transitions, backyard pools and his “f**k you, I’m landing it” approach to skateboarding.
Joxa is followed by Tony Lui who flips his board a lot more than most others on the DVD, but also drops the odd handrail caveman and tackles Stoke Plaza on a Zarosh cruiser board.
Daryl Nobbs skates super fast, goes big, tweaks all his grabs, enjoys making as much noise as possible with his board, looks like a mini Andy Roy and always comes through with the raddest footage. His stuff on the whippy extension at Burton is dope.
Fakie murderflips on banks, late shuvits over walls, flips out of manuals, MK Buszy footage, switch hardflips down stairs and trainer tongues stuck out like it’s 1995? I’m starting to think that Ralph Cooper just quantum leaped his way into ‘Batface’ from some unseen late 90’s Ipswich scene video. Not what I was expecting to be watching on a Terribleco production, but an unexpected, savage way to round off proceedings anyway!
Overall
If you own any of Ade’s previous releases, or live in the Coventry area, then get one of these bad boys stuck to the inside of your DVD at your nearest convenience. There are only thirty copies in existence, and each one is hand numbered and comes housed in a dope little home made booklet. Good stuff as ever, Ade!
The story behind Batface
Batface is where you should start if you really want to know what The Terrible Company is all about. In my eyes, it absolutely nails the “mid-2000’s scene video experience” that was all the rage for low budget outfits like this blog at the time. Before the days of Get Lesta, Baghead Crew, Atlantic Drift et al raising the local scene video into an artform curated by the best filmographers this fair isle has to offer, stuff was far more raw, rough and scrappy.
This video sat amongst contemporaries from the likes of the Gnargore crew, representing the local skaters from our city in a relatable, low budget, non-serious manner, as well as cribbing from the beginnings of Get Lesta with Callun Loomes’ “Lesta On Lock” videos by pulling in names from slightly further afield. Coventry had accumulated quite the rogue’s gallery of imports by this point in time, with Joxa, Josh Walters and Becky Jaques regularly coming to the city to skate. In Joxa’s case, he lived here, having moved from Barrow In Furness a few years prior.
The other thing to point out about Batface was that it was likely the very last power hour video that I would put out. Guitar Solos With Skateboards had been a success with it’s “less is more” approach, clocking in at around half an hour. If you go by Forde Brookfield’s rule of “What constitutes a full length video”, the half hour mark is the bare minimum, and honestly this is the right balance to keep the pacing and energy up. Batface threw that out of the window for one last hurrah of the hour long epic scene videos of Terribleco’s past.
Stacked to the brim with full parts (12 in total), and many, many, many montages of other locals banging out their wildest tricks, Batface has all hands on deck. It’s inspiration comes largely from Horror B-Movies from the 70’s and 80’s, mixing skateboarding at the shittest spots you’ve ever seen, with gore, pure chaos and complete weirdness of out of context clips from film, TV and video games.
Similarly to Guitar Solos With Skateboards, there are echoes of inspiration from the likes of Heroin Skateboards “Live From Antarctica”, the Beez videos, Steve Reeves’ “Mall Grab”, and more – but Batface is a beast that stands on it’s own deformed, gnarled feet. It’s loud, brash, abbrasive, angry and bombastic in all the right ways.
It’s also worth calling out that Batface was basically the moment where Terribleco aligned with companies like Heathen Skateboards, Vans, Death, Rollersnakes and the like. The making of this video had me joining Heathen for part of their “Holy Mountain” tour (some second angles of tricks from that video can be seen in Batface), and the connection we had with people like Daryl Nobbs, Josh, Joxa and Becky at the time put the blog on the radar of these companies. This was the peak of Terribleco being fully ingrained in the UK skateboarding industry.
That’s not to discount the representation from within Coventry, though. As always for this time period, Ride were happy to throw their logo on the video and support it via the shop (Jim was always incredibly supportive of what we did with the videos). Swampy also had his “Faceplant Skateboards” brand as a supporter – A rad, DIY, backyard board company that supplied half of Coventry with spray painted boards in the late 2000’s.
I always had a lot of nostalgia for the video personally, as I held it up as a “golden example” of what this blog’s videos should be – but what has become more apparent through talking with long time friends as the 20th anniversary of this blog came around is that many others have a huge amount of fondness for this dumb, raw, hour long video.
It comes up consistently when people talk about their favourite videos from the blog, full parts from the video rank highly in the lists curated by others when they talk about Terribleco vids, and there are people who grew up skating when the video came out who say that Batface got them so hyped on the scene that they stuck around for the long haul as lifelong skaters (and eventually skaters in Terrible Company videos themselves) off the back of seeing it.
The reach of Batface spanned far outside of the confines of Coventry’s borders, with one of the video’s two premiere events taking place at Leicester’s Boardroom. After having 2 videos reviewed in Sidewalk, I was really stoked to have this video be the last impression on the UK skateboarding public that was published in the magazine. If you remember anything from my write up on Guitar Solos With Skateboards, it’s that “We’re just here to have a laugh, and we don’t get a shit if anyone else is in on the joke”. Having that ethos acknowledged and celebrated in Sidewalk is awesome.
So the TLDR is – Batface is peak Terrible Company. It’s a proper time capsule of what I hold up to be the best of mid-2000’s scene videos. It’s got some deep roots to what the UK skateboarding industry was all about back then. It’s the definitive place you should go to if you want to start at the very peak of this blog. It’s one of the videos I constantly strive to one up, and it had a huge impact on a generation of skateboarders from 2009. Not bad for a video with the dumbest DVD cover I’ve ever made.
The Terrible Company 
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