Unreleased Simon Evans footage from 1994 San Francisco

If you can get past all the cat photos, the internet contains some real nuggets of cultural archaeology. Like this recently unearthed footage of Simon Evans doing the do in mid-90’s SF.

Now, I am sharing this in the full knowledge that Simon will be embarrassed about it surfacing, but that is because I am also well aware that there are many more people who will enjoy and appreciate it.

Whether he acknowledges it or not, Evans was one of the most influential skaters of early-90’s Britain, but since his whole mid-90’s Stateside career was spent riding for the low-key and low-budget Experience Skateboards (who never made a video), footage of him is scarce. Very scarce. In fact, until now, I think the sum total of it was a few tricks in a New Deal video and a few more in some early 411s.

He never had a full video part, and even though I lived with him for years, I still only managed to snipe one trick of him for the Howard House video ‘A Decade Late’. This stuff trumps all that, and it’s two decades late.

So, without hyping it too much, here is some nice vintage street skating, filmed by Alex Terekov (of the Russian Twins) and edited by Adam Schneider. Spend two minutes in a simpler time, when nollie hardflips were brand new.

I have always been a fan of Simon’s work, be it in skateboarding, writing, or his current incarnation as a fine artist. He does things with taste and character.

Even so, like I said, he’s prob’ly gonna hate seeing this…

Sorry, Simon.

-Richard Hart

Simon Evans in his studio, Brooklyn, 2015; photo: Hart

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