Our latest Five Faves is with Malmö, Sweden ambassador and WKND pro, Sarah Meurle. (Her Jenkem interview from a half-a-year back is great, in case you missed it.)
Ray Barbee — Powell Peralta: Ban This (1989)
I saw Ben Kadow actually chose Ray Barbee in Ban This, too.
I haven’t really watched many of his parts like a maniac — it was more that I had met Ray Barbee at this skate camp in Sweden when I was like 17, because I was skating for WeSC. [Ed. note: Barbee also skated for the Swedish brand WeSC at the time.] Meeting him definitely inspired me in some ways, and made me feel like he liked my skating, so after that, watching his parts, I was even more inspired. He was a good hype man, is what I’m trying to say. Learning no complies even more, I was definitely inspired by the lines he does in the streets here.
He’s doing what feels like neverending flatground on this flat board. I remeber trying to rewind what he was doing, and then going to do exactly that. There’s one where he does a back 180 no comply and reverts frontside, or he goes fakie, and no complies with his heel and grabs the board. There’s so many tricks that I had never even thought of. I went to the skate high school [Bryggeriets, in Malmö], and we had some skate history classes where we watched Video Days, but I never really watched the older stuff. This was cool to see, and the way they filmed back then — it’s all a bit magical, with the music and everything.
Elissa Steamer – Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3 – 411 Section (2001)
I started skating in 2002 or 2003, when I was 12, 13. I obviously wanted to choose an Elissa part, but the first footage I ever saw of her was a 411 Video Magazine edit inside of a Tony Hawk Pro Skater game. That was the only footage I had ever seen of a female skater. YouTube wasn’t around yet, so the only way to watch it was to press that button for all the extras with all the footage of the skaters in the game.
We had a couple of skate videos, but none of them had any women skaters. It begins with a short interview with her and then it’s a bunch of clips from different videos. It was a lot of big tricks that were hard to relate to, since I was just a beginner, but she still was the most relatable person in the game. She does this big nollie front 180 these stairs, and does a firecracker, and it was just so sick and powerful.
I didn’t see her other parts until two or three years later, with Welcome to Hell and Jump Off A Building. Those are obviously more “favorite” parts, and Jump Off a Building is favorite part of hers, but this is the one that I saw the most. Even though it isn’t really a “part,” it’s good because it’s a lot of clips you may not see as often. She charges, takes slams, and has such a natural style.
It was so sick to see her in the new Baker video — I was almost going to pick that one. She’s still killing it.
The first time I saw her… well, I didn’t meet her, but she was the only skater I was ever starstruck by. She came to Copenhagen Open in 2010, and I didn’t dare to go up to her and say anything, but I smiled at her, maybe ten meters apart, and she smiled back at me, and it was like I had met her. Now, I get to go on trips with her.
Mike Carroll — Girl: Yeah Right! (2003)
The videos that came out when I started skating were Yeah Right!, Flip Sorry and The DC Video. Yeah Right! was my favorite, and Mike Carroll had my favorite part. I thought it was really sick that he skated to Scarface, because I was a big Geto Boys fan at that age. I had two older brothers; they didn’t influence me to start skating, but they introduced me to a lot of hip-hop.
Obviously, he has a really good style, and his trick selection is really good. I don’t know if I took that much out of his skating personally — I always wanted to learn back smiths, but I never went that hard on it. I like his skating a lot because he does a lot of lines, and it feels like a lot of the other videos back then were just a lot of hucking. He has good flatground tricks; those are more relatable to me. He has this little edge; he doesn’t land things perfectly all the time, which adds to the style.
A lot of my favorite skaters are goofy skaters. I like Gino’s part in that video a lot, too.
Mongolia Section — Strongest of the Strange by Pontus Alv (2005)
(Part begins around the 2:07 mark)
Since I’m from Malmö, and I grew up in that skate scene, I was always really influenced by whatever Pontus [Alv] has done: his early videos, the ones that he made before Polar.
I think The Strongest of the Strange came out in 2005, and he gave me a disc copy at the skatepark. I had it at my house, and would watch it a lot. I can’t really choose a part from it — the whole video was something that I had never seen before. It’s a very artistic skate video, but I wanted to include it. I had not seen it in a long time, but I recently thought about this part from it where they’re in Mongolia, skating this old ramp in the middle of nowhere.
It really has so much emotion, and shows that skating can be something else besides the skating. It shows that skating can be done in a lot of different ways, and you can do it anywhere if you try — like there’s a frontside flip on a mini-ditch in there, and it’s just cows all around it. Those videos have this really Swedish, melacholic vibe that comes out of the darkness here or something. Even the Barcelona Sants line someone does in this video, it just looks really grey.
Brian Delatorre — MIA Skateshop: Welcome to MIA (2011)
It was hard, but I wanted to pick someone who I found a little later.
This part is 13 years old, but I watched this one a lot. It’s really fast, and it’s all lines. The nollie flip up the pavement is my favorite trick in the part — I think he does it twice in the part. It’s a lot of S.F. downhill lines, and New York footage, and I really like these two songs. They’re like Turkish folk songs and the second is a cover version of “To Love Somebody.” It definitely felt different for the time.
Previously: Vitória Mendonça, Andrew Wilson, Ben Kadow, Chandler Burton, Pedro Delfino, Johnny Wilson, Nick Michel, Wes Kremer, Jordan Trahan, Ariana Spencer, Elijah Odom, Greg Hunt, Zered Bassett, Neil Herrick, Trung Nguyen, Nick Boserio, Elissa Steamer, Casper Brooker, John Gardner, Bobshirt, Brandon Turner, Shari White, Nick Jensen, Tony Hawk, Naquan Rollings, Jack O’Grady, Josh Wilson, Maité Steenhoudt, Jahmir Brown, Una Farrar, Chris Jones, Mason Silva, Beatrice Domond, Mark Suciu, Justin Henry, Breana Geering, Sage Elsesser, Bobby Worrest, Nik Stain, Anthony Van Engelen, Dom Henry, Bing Liu, Andrew Reynolds, Cyrus Bennett, Jacob Harris, Jamal Smith, Paul Rodriguez, Gilbert Crockett, Ben Chadourne, Tom Knox, Louie Lopez, The Chrome Ball Incident, The Bunt, Lacey Baker, Andrew Allen, GX1000, Brian Anderson, Gino Iannucci, Josh Kalis, Sean Pablo, Wade Desarmo, Chris Milic, Chad Muska, Hjalte Halberg, Danny Brady, Bill Strobeck, Aaron Herrington, Jerry Hsu, Brad Cromer, Brandon Westgate, Jim Greco, Jake Johnson, Scott Johnston, Josh Stewart, Eric Koston, Karl Watson, Josh Friedberg, John Cardiel, Pontus Alv, Alex Olson, Jahmal Williams