Why freestyle?
For me, personally? Because there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s pure kinetic energy – constant movement with no downtime – and there’s always more to do, and try, and explore, and experiment with. One day I can do nothing but footwork, the next, nothing but big 720 shuvits and 360 double fingerflips.
But for the industry and larger culture of skateboarding? Because not everyone has access to a vert ramp or wants to jump down stairs. Freestyle needs to exist to keep skateboarding diverse.
You’ve been wearing many hats for freestyle, including pro skater, content maker (for Broken Fingers, Freestyle Tricktips), contest judge and MC, stockist, and more. What has been the most challenging role? What have you enjoyed the most?
Honestly, the most challenging of the lot is the combination of my roles at Moonshine and Offset; the business side of skateboarding is an absolute headache. For Moonshine, it starts with actually getting the product right – lots of theorising, testing, checking, designing, and so on – and then the stress of getting it made and ensuring it all passes quality control (one new woodshop we tried produced an entire batch of decks that basically had to go straight in the bin, they were so bad).
Then on the Offset side of things, there’s all the hassle of logistics (imports, shipping, tax and duty, stock control), coupled with wanting to do it right. I try to test everything I want to sell, or at the very least hand it to someone I know [who] can test it for me. There’s a lot of badly made products out there, and more than once I’ve been burned by something that seemed great on paper but turned out to be bloody terrible.
Freestyle Tricktips isn’t easy either, but for a very different reason: every single trick I cover takes literally weeks of thinking and considering from every angle. I didn’t want to just ‘create content’ simply to please an algorithm and drive sales; it’d obviously have been a lot easier to do the old fashioned ‘pop the tail, flick your foot, wait until you see the griptape, put your feet on it, roll away smooth’ cop-out of a video, end with a good ol’ ‘like, share, and subscribe!’, churn ’em out at a rate of one a week, and watch the ad revenue and board sales roll in, but I wanted to make sure people didn’t have to make the same mistakes I did when learning these things. I really try to cover ever major detail and point out stuff other videos just won’t consider, and that takes AGES to work out and plan.
Honestly, these two things make being a ‘pro skater’ seem simple by comparison. 720 shuvits? Way less stressful than endless piles of customs documents and trying to explain all the ways a kickback can go wrong.
As for fun? I’ve really enjoyed MCing while I’ve been on the injury bench for the last year or so. I’m always suprised people let me anywhere near a microphone, never mind actually enjoying my bizarre ramblings. Being able to hype people up, highlight things people might miss or not know, and joke around with friends at the same time is a real pleasure for me, and I hope I can keep doing it for the foreseeable future.
Ah Moonshine. How did you end up helming the freestyle side of that?
The story behind that is a bit of a winding one.
When Moonshine started, it was Adam [Nanaa]’s plan to do a very eighties company – shapes only, no street skaters. He used to ride for Zorlac in the eighties and wanted to recreate that vibe, so he started making boards for a lot of his favourite vert skaters, new and old.
Chris Hudson started handling the European side of things for him, and while we’d crossed paths a couple of times, it never went anywhere until the NASS Festival in the UK in 2015. A bunch of us were doing freestyle demos there, and my friend Fairbro went over to the vert ramp between freestyle sessions to check it out. He was quite drunk, got talking to Hudson (who was also quite drunk), and basically said, ‘Oi! Why doesn’t Moonshine do freestyle? You should talk to my mate Tony.’
Needless to say, Chris did, and then he talked to Adam, and Adam said, ‘Yeah, I love freestyle. Let’s do it. Tony, you run the freestyle side of things. Tell me what you need. Pick your team, design the decks, and I’ll make it happen.’
Two or three years later, post-Brexit, Chris Hudson bowed out (things were getting too expensive and difficult), and I stepped in to handle the European business entirely, that’s basically how Offset started. A couple of years after that, Adam decided he’d had enough of the vert side of things, and dumped the whole vert team, leaving Moonshine as an entirely freestyle company barring the odd guest model for vert legends.
He’s been very supportive of freestyle from the get-go. He’s given me the carte blanche to put anyone on the team I wanted; he forked out ludicrous amounts of money on bespoke moulds when I said we needed them; he came out to the World Round-Up in 2017 to hang out – the only event sponsor who did, I should note – and has often said to me that the freestyle team is everything he wanted the vert team to be when he first started. Like I said earlier, it’s not always the easiest job, but it’s satisfying and we’ve done a lot of good stuff together over the years, and that couldn’t have happened if Adam hadn’t taken that big chance on me (and on freestyle in general) back in 2015. I’ll always be thankful to him for that.
Moonshine has a particular board design and aesthetic. Can you describe what makes a typical Moonshine deck?
On the shape side of things, it was my top priority that the decks all had to make sense. I wanted to do things that other companies weren’t doing (or at least they weren’t before we did), and the decks had to actively benefit the tricks, style, and body shape of the rider whose name was on it. We’re not going to put out any deck unless it has a reason to exist, in effect. I didn’t want to just do generic shapes cut out of a street mould, or eighties throwback shapes that make all the same mistakes and have learnt nothing from the last thirty-five years of freestyle.
Another thing that I was dead against was making one deck for the rider, but another deck with the same graphic to sell to the consumer. That’s far more common in skateboarding than you think; people want to skate like their favourite pro and buy the deck with their name on it to try to emulate them, completely unaware the pro is skating something totally different. If you want to skate like Toshiaki Fujii, you should be able to buy the exact same deck Toshiaki Fujii uses. That just makes sense. That’s also why there’s no 7.6″ or 8″ version of my shape available, despite people constantly asking for it – that wouldn’t work for my tricks…I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
As for the graphics: they’ve changed a lot in the last ten years. Our original artist, Chris Alliston (IG: @chris.j.alliston), was doing these really intricate line drawings in pen and ink when we first started making freestyle decks, and over the years his style has evolved along with Moonshine and the team, which has been great to see.
David Paul Seymour (IG: @davidpaulseymour) has done a bunch of great graphics for us, too; he did the art for the Kill Your Idols (a deck which started as a joke and a big middle finger to the eighties fetishists, but is now so popular it’s probably going to hang around forever) and the Felix Jonsson decks, which are two of my favourite graphics ever.
We’ve also got Peter Andersson to do some watercolour graphics for Mirei and Ikkei as an experiment, which was really interesting to do – I don’t think watercolour paintings have been used on a deck before.
At any rate, all of those decks centre around an animal that, in one way or another, reflects something about the rider. But in the last year or so, we started working with Coffee Time (IG: @mr_coffee_time), a great artist in France that Stephane of Putain! introduced me to, and we’ve basically given him free rein to do some fantastic art based on mythological figures instead of animals; he did Nick Beaulieu’s latest deck and Carmen’s new one, and he absolutely knocked them out of the park.
That said, the only really guiding principles for art are:
- no blood, guts, and cheap eighties skeleton graphics, and
- no childish cartoony nonsense.
Everything else is basically on the table if we like the idea and it looks good. We’ve obviously already got some more art concepts knocking about, and I might genuinely think the next one might well be the best one yet…but I guess everyone says that, huh?
OK, last question: Josh Dunstone said you threw him into a bin once. What in the kangaroo was that all about?
Honestly? I don’t remember. I’m not going to try to pretend I didn’t, and I’m sure he can’t pretend he didn’t deserve it in that moment. Frankly, I’m just disappointed in myself. I mean, *once*? He deserves binning a few more times than that. These are rookie numbers in this racket. Gotta get those numbers up.
Connect: Tony Gale (IG: @coldkennels) wears many hats in the freestyle skateboarding community. If you didn’t know about his Freestyle Tricktips, you must check them out. Tony’s offered to come over and help organise an Australian freestyle contest, except for the fact that flights from Europe to Australia are stupidly expensive and we have too many things that can kill us (sharks, snakes, spiders, jellyfish).