A few weeks ago Mark Suciu, Julian Klein and Jazz Leeb spent some time in London. Here’s some of the footage their buddy Justin Albert managed to get of them and some of the locals they were hanging out with (Kyron Davis, Chris Mann, Ben Rowles).

Here’s a sick little edit of Lucas Puig and & Andrew Brophy skating the first samples of the Cliché x Fourstar boards late last year in Japan. That Lucas line with the switch flip nosegrind revert is absolutely ridiculous…

For some reason this thing made me want to rewatch Lucas’ part in KAMH:

In April 2012, the Magenta boys (Leo Valls, Soy Panday, Vivien Feil, Jimmy Lannon, Zach Lyons) flew to San Francisco to meet up with local friends, skate the city’s unique hills and film the sequel to their 2011 SF HILL STREET BLUES video.

Yoan Taillandier is definitely one of the best filmers at the moment…

The first photo that comes to my mind when someone asks me about a favourite photo of mine from past years, is this one. I met Kristian in Barcelona around 2003-2004, and I was lucky to go out to get some photos with him a few times over the next few years. It was shot in downtown Barcelona, whilst skating with Kristian and Dani (Lebrón). The noise of Kristian jumping on the board and pushing caused the pigeons to fly off, after which they decided to turn around to the left, flying between his backside flip and my lens. When this type of thing happens – especially when you shoot on film – you are never sure how it’s going to come out. Were the pigeons in the picture or not? And, if so, how where were they positioned? You’re always hoping that something nice was frozen in the frame, but often the result can be quite hard to predict. I needed a few looks at the negative, a couple days later, to see that the image had come out even better than I expected.

I think in most cases, certainly when shooting skateboarding, shots from above are the best angles. Or maybe it’s just an angle you don’t find that often and that makes it look better. Whatever the reason is, I think in this particular case it worked perfectly to show just how hard was the place was to skate – something [skateboard] photography can lack sometimes. This was my first and only trip to Bulgaria, it was for a vert demo and local contest that Kingpin had set up. The demo was far away from civilization, and the only ‘street’ skating that we found was this ditch. The ground was so rough that you could barely call it ‘ground’, and this big bank you could easily call a ‘wall’. I wish I could shoot everywhere from above, unfortunately out budgets don’t stretch a helicopter yet.

This was a day of skating broken up by bouts of rain on a tour in Casa da Musica, Porto, and these feet belong to Karsten Heinrichs. He was passionate about the art of Bonsai and I’d say skateboarding fell below or at best on par with Bonsai trees on his list of loves. Just as we’d decided to head off to a bar to drown our sorrows about the rain, he took off his tee shirt and shoes and proceeded to skate down the now slippery bank which acted more like a waterslide whenever he fell off his board – which was pretty often. One of the most fun moments on a board I’ve seen.

Of the photos I’m most proud of over the past ten years, rarely do the ones with the hardest tricks rank high. I’ve always thought skate photos are often too focused on the trick – which is totally understandable – but I’ve always enjoyed seeing a photo published when it isn’t necessarily just the documentation of a hard trick. That’s why I was glad to get this one as a double page in Kingpin, back in 2002. In fact, it was my first trip with a camera and it was really badly organised. I only had a telephone number of a supposed local, someone whom I’d never met – who I called using a public telephone by the way, since most cellphones didn’t work outside your own country by then, or at least mine didn’t anyway… Luckily that number turned out to be a very helpful veteran local who gathered a few friends to help me out with getting some photos for the article, and young Marcelo was one of them.

Ten years ago I was invited to take photos on a trip to Tenerife with the then Adidas European team. Except for Juju (Julian Bachelier), who I’d met before through Antiz, I didn’t know anyone. We were stood in a house surrounded by banana fields, the owner had rented the house for 4 people to stay, and we turned out to be 10. We had to watch so as not to be seen by the lady when she came by for a surprise visit to make sure the house was in one piece. It was fun, we had our own hide & seek game going for ten days straight. We did well, I think, and although I’m sure the lady suspected something, we played our game properly and she didn’t catch us. That was, until the end of the trip. When, after endless nights of chain-drinking six-packs, BBQ’s, and cumulative hangovers, we were finally caught. By the time she arrived that last morning, which I honestly don’t remember at all, she found the house upside down. The 3 sofas were filled with stinky, drunken, snoring dudes. The floor was flooded with empty bottles of wine and cans of beer, ashtrays everywhere with butts of hash joints. Sleeping bags stuffed with human bodies stretched from the front door to the kitchen. The corridor full of bags and dirty socks from 3 different countries. The backyard was showing signs of several straight nights BBQing. The beds were filled with 2 or 3 people each. The walls on the top terrace had been skated, probably by Seb and Antony, who fell asleep right beside it. That trip was one for posterity. Here’s younger versions of some of the people who formed that epic trip: Julien Bachelier, Seb Daurel, Torsten Frank, Lem Villemin, Jascha Muller, Pierre Prospero, Guillaume Dulout, Daniel Von Bernstorff and Antony Lopez. Good times.

Here’s a short clip of Dennis Busenitz skating 3rd and Army in his new shoe. Enjoy!

Cliché have just release this short Lucas Puig clip to introduce his new Adidas X Cliché board. Have you seen his Bon Voyage section yet?

Sidewalk kindly posted Benson’s section from Death’s Ordinary Madness a few hours ago and it’s amazing. I reckon he probably has my favorite bit in the video. There’s just something about how fearlessly he charges at the most unwelcoming concrete that I really enjoy. I’m also pretty stoked on a few of  his few unexpected moves (frontside nose pick, hurricane fakie etc…)

Sidewalk have just put up Boots’ part in Death’s “Ordinary Madness” and it’s definitely worth checking out. There’s a lot good skateboarding in there…

I know “The Garage” is supposed to be his skatepark but that doesn’t make this clip any less shocking. It’s one thing to be quick footed but this guy is on another level. He’s moving his legs so quickly that it looks like it’s been sped up! It’s not as if he was just doing ollies either, some of those tricks are pretty much the hardest moves that can be done on a bloody skateboard. Has anyone ever done a frontside halfcab flip five-o coming from the side before?

Alain Goikoetxea’s Volcom part.

I’m pretty sure Koston was referring to free online sections like this one he said “I hate for people to think skating is so disposable: those 5 minutes of footage are a couple of years of someone’s life” in his recent web interview. Alain’s one of Europe’s most well respected pros and to he’s been stacking up amazing footage for what seems like at least 4 years to make this happen. To think that these 5 and a half minutes Cardielesque savagery will probably be forgotten by most of us the minute we click on the new Suciu is painful. That cab back tail alone makes it deserve more than that to sit on the hellaclips front page next to some kid’s sponsor-me footage…

Benoît “Beñat” Stevenot in Anagram’s “Crazy Extreme Skate”.

I was unsure whether or not to post this because it’s more or less a leak from Anagram’s “Crazy Extreme Skate” video (that you can buy here), but I’m so intrigued by this guy that I just couldn’t resist. Plus it’s been online for almost a month and nobody seems to have complained. Seven or 8 years ago I was still convinced this “Beñat” from the French Basque Country was just an urban legend. I kept hearing stories about a gnarly looking skater with an earring who could do switch heelflip bluntslide pop outs and other crazy manoeuvres that I had a hard time believing. The fact that he was also supposed to be a butcher, skate reebok classics rather than skate shoes and not care being sponsored just added to the mythical character’s persona. Luckily for us he really did exist and he even ended up getting (Nike, Anagram and Hélas) which meant that people started filming him and 3 years ago French skateboarding was officially introduced to “Beñat”. The best thing about this is that his skating turned out to be exactly as I’d imagined it to be: violent. I can’t think of anyone else with the same sort of style…He brutalises ledges and stomps everything so insolently that you almost forget how much precision and delicacy it takes to do tricks like the switch backside 180 to front crook to fakie.

The Secret Basement video.

What I like about this one is that although it’s all filmed Vx and edited to a lot of nineties hip-hop, it doesn’t take the slightly contrived “90′s/raw/less is more ” approach too far. What I mean by this is that they don’t use the fact that they are skating good looking that most of us will never have seen before as an excuse to not do hard tricks. Marcos Gomez, Gerardo Anaya and Günes’ parts are particularly sick but the standard of skating is pretty  impressive throughout the video, especially considering it’s the first time we see anything from a lot of these guys. Bobby Puleo and Chewy have even got a few tricks in the friends section… I wish we would get to see this side of Spanish skateboarding more often!

Kilian Zehnder – LiveLifeSkate Part

I know a lot of you are going are probably going to ask yourselves “why is this in here? He’s just another super-kid skating a bunch of bland L.A spots…” Well I think there’s a little more to his skating than that. For instance I quite like his slightly stiff legged style and you can’t say he doesn’t have a good trick selection (front crook pop-over to fakie?!). Plus have any of you ever tried getting footage in L.A? When people say it’s hard to get stuff out there because of the hours you waste sitting in your car and the amount of times you get kicked out they aren’t exaggerating: it’s a nightmare. Personally I find it amazing that this 19 year old from Zurich managed to film an 8-minute part in L.A, no matter how easy it looks for him. It’s not like it’s 8 minutes of filler either, he’s doing switch frontside feeble pop outs in lines!

‘A Golden Egg’ by Jesse James and Chris Atherton.

I’m not even going to attempt to describe this thing…