Photos by Ryan Bradley
I tell you something, this blog is a funny old thing. I regularly check the stats, and the most popular blog post is a thing I wrote about jerry-rigging a VX to not need MiniDV tapes. Before that, it was a blog post about Independent changing their logo. It turns out that the main reason for this blog’s existence – content about the Coventry and Warwickshire skate scene – isn’t the main reason people visit this blog.
I knew all of this at the start of the year, but I doubled down on self-indulgent posts about the history of this blog’s contribution to that very same skate scene. There’s a reason for this: the measurement of “success” for The Terrible Company has never really been about a statistic that can be read on a WordPress dashboard. I witnessed the success of this blog in person at the Go Skateboarding Day event that Project No 5 put on at Fargo last month.
Making content about this scene starts and ends with the scene. Getting people to react to something on the Internet is like pulling teeth, and skateboarding’s power will always hold more sway out in the real world. The reason I post anything on here isn’t to get a monumental amount of eyeballs on what I’ve written, it’s to document and preserve the awesome feeling of being out there in the world sharing skateboarding with other skateboarders.
During the Go Skateboarding Day event, which inadvertently was also an unofficial celebration of 20 years of this blog, that’s exactly what went down. The amount of people I spoke with and caught up with from this blog’s past, present, and potential future, made me proud to be part of the Coventry skate scene and reenforced what I have spent 20 years making dumb skate videos about. Skateboarding is special like that.
And so here I am again, writing shit that is long as fuck and likely won’t be read by most of the visitors to this blog – but as I said this shit doesn’t exist for any other reason than posterity. Where does The Terrible Company go from here? Well….
We’re Done With The Past
The past 6 months have seen a wealth of content about the history of this blog. Yes, this was about pumping up my own ego, but also I realised that a lot of this blog’s history was scattered across various locations, websites, social media accounts and DVD’s many people hadn’t seen. All of these blog posts were an attempt to collate everything for posterity. There’s that word again, haha.
The bottom line is that I think we’re done looking at the past now. There are one or two outstanding posts to come – interviews or articles with friends who really wanted to contribute to the 20th anniversary – but after that I’m turning my attention to what’s next.
What I will say about this is that I am overwhelmed and a little ashamed of how much stuff this blog has done. I have a habit of rushing things out rather than sitting on things and taking my time to hone them. If you look at the history of this blog and the 20-odd full length videos I’ve made this is obvious. But the truth is I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s what makes Terribleco what it is.
Stoked On The Present
Right now there’s a bit of change in the air. In my personal life, I am about to start an exciting new job, so there’s been some quiet time whilst I adjust to that. But there’s a lot going on in the local skate scene that is exciting. The Go Skateboarding Day event was the tip of the iceberg: the beginning of a rad new era for Coventry Skateboarding. Coming soon, I’ll be putting together an edit of the day, mostly filmed by Jack Freeman – continuing the recent trend of this blog collaborating with other local filmers to showcase just how awesome this scene is.
The event also continued a great relationship this blog has formed with Coventry’s newest skate shop Project No. 5 – I’ve done a few cool projects with Henry now, and I am constantly surprised at how much he’s able to get done to support the scene.
Unfortunately it’s not all good news though. Rumours have been doing the rounds that long time OG Cov Skate shop and constant supporters of this blog Ride are to close their doors in September, and these rumours have been confirmed in person by Jim The Skin. I have a more detailed blog post coming soon about the shop’s collossal contribution to our skate scene, but for now I will say I am gutted to see the shop close. Jim The Skin has always been, and will always be, the godfather of Cov skateboarding and he has well and truly shown us all what a skate shop is meant to be.
As I said, there’s a feeling of change in the air. Not all of it seems good right now, but in time things will evolve and shift. Ride’s impact on Coventry Skateboarding is undeniable (I must have written about the shop a good dozen or so times in my write ups for the 20th anniversary of this blog), and as I mentioned, you won’t feel this impact just through online presence, it’s felt out there skateboarding in meat space.
The Future
So, after 20 years, what does a local skateboarding blog do to stay relevant? The answer is you tear down everything people thought they knew about you and build it up again.
During the Go Skateboarding Day event, I had a non stop loop of Terribleco videos playing on a TV in the sort of “entrance area” of our pop up skatepark. This was primarily to showcase the Terrible Company’s 20th Anniversary Spectacular, but there was a minute long clip that kept popping up teasing something new. This was a tease for my new work-in-progress video Pirate Broadcast.
I have talked a lot about rebooting the blog before – firstly with Cannonball Holocaust, and then with Dead & Loving It, and more recently with Ghostface. The term reboot doesn’t really mean a lot with skateboarding videos, but with Pirate Broadcast it is likely the best case example of a legitimate reboot of this blog’s mentality to making skateboarding videos.
For a start – Joxa, Chris Mander and myself are now off the table. We won’t be filming full parts for a Terribleco video again (or at least until my ego gets the better of me and I undo that “last part” rule I imposed on myself for Ghostface). The majority of people I am trying to film for Pirate Broadcast have either never had a full part in a Terrible Company video, or featured in minor capacity in Ghostface. There are a few returns planned from long time friends of the blog, but my hope is that enough time has past for some of these faces that their inclusion will seem new and interesting again.
Secondly, and perhaps the biggest shift for Terribleco, this video is street focused. Skatepark footage is being kept to a minimum, with the aim being to only reserve it for transition skaters. If that sounds like a cop out, then let me reassure you: currently the planned line up of skaters features 3 people out of 14 who I would class as “transition” or “skatepark” skaters, whilst the remaining 11 are heavily street oriented. I strongly believe this will improve the quality of the finished video – a change which was inspired by seeing Baghead’s “SATAN” and seeing just how rad a raw, rough, UK street video can be.
Thirdly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the lessons in video editing quality and presentation learned from Ghostface and The Terrible Company’s 20th Anniversary Spectacular will continue. The difference is, whereas these other videos were self-referential to other ideas used in Terribleco videos before, I decided to expand on the format of Ghostface and explore other areas of media.
Pirate Broadcast will feature themed sections like Ghostface, but this time I was determined to load the video with some much needed aggression and use the theme of “an interrupted public broadcast” to subvert expectations of what a skate video can be. I’ve often heard people say “Skate videos don’t really say anything, do they?”, and I was at least curious about trying to address that criticism.
Skateboarding is counter-cultural, so it’s time we started aiming it at the culture around us and using it to point out just how shit the world around us has become, and how fucking awesome skateboarding can be in helping us survive it. For those of you who subscribe to the Piers Morgan school of thinking, this does not mean “woke politics” shoved down your throat. I admit I am unapologetically left leaning, but I also believe skateboarding is meant to be a great unifier – any messaging in this video is designed to be subtle, broad, fair and most of all, should not detract from the skateboarding.
If you’re still interested, and haven’t cancelled me and this blog for being “all woke and shit”, then the only remaining thing to say is that Pirate Broadcast will be done when it’s done. Like Ghostface, this will be a long term project for The Terrible Company over the next couple of years, with regular, new episodes of Synergy dropping in the meantime to share offcuts, friends footage, and clips from skateparks (most likely featuring myself and Chris Mander).
As for blog posts, things will most definitely slow down. You can expect some commentary on key aspects of skateboarding’s vast Internet presence, some video reviews, and the occasional interview, but as I said at the top of this post, the real success of this blog is not the number of views I get on WordPress, it’s the connections I make out there actually skateboarding. And, as has always been the case for The Terrible Company, the results of that come in the form of the many, many, many videos I produce. Until next time… Keep on truckin’.
The Terrible Company 