THRASH NIKE VAGRANT (AND FRIENDS)

In our modern day world of constantly updated media, though released only two weeks ago this is relatively 'old news' by now. However it's also Grant Taylor and is therefore exempt from most of the rules surrounding skateboarding. Whilst the whole world has bared witness to Anti Hero's Destination Unknown and then some by now. We feel that Grant's debut for his new shoe with Nike SB didn't get the complete attention it deserved with one trick in particular keeping us up at night. See if you can guess what it is?
Actually that was a bad suggestion, there are many things in there probably keeping a lot of skateboarders up at night, wishfully thinking of the day where they may blast a Frontside Air so beautiful. What I was getting at however, is this. When properly taking a standard wall ride into consideration, it does not make sense that you can climb a vertical surface on your four wheeled item of joy. However, as the wallride continues to continues to soar in popularity, this wonderment is somewhat lost, much like the magic of the no-comply, one could argue... Grant Taylor however, is like Batman. He is the skateboarder that skateboarding needs (there are many more but Grant is pretty high up there), your favourite skateboarders favourite transition skater. Grant takes everything to the next level, faster, his airs more tweaked, grinds that little bit longer and in this case, his wallrides even more insane. Look closely, no hand on the wall either, an impressive feat for the most standard of Backside Wallrides. Unless you were living under a rock all summer then you were probably very aware that Jake Phelps and his crew of beer shotgunning, transition slaying, heavy hitters took various UK parks by storm a few months ago. Including Grant himself along with Raven Tershy and Ronnie Sandoval. For those like myself who were lucky enough to witness them skate in person, the most accurate description of the three of them tearing up transition was like witnessing Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa.
Whilst at the Warrington stop of this tour I bumped into Grant and was beyond stoked to get a photo with him as minutes earlier he had been followed into the giant rhythm section vert, with complete reckless abandon by Raven Tershy only paying attention to the iPhone in his hand whilst following Grant around for about 10 minutes. Venturing outside I bumped into Grant again and was pleasantly declined (hand shaken, first bumped, pat on the back and 'take care' said - fuck not meeting your heroes) a quick interview with him probably for the better as he was a more than a few cans deep by now to say the least... Funnily enough, I then strolled across Raven Tershy sharing a peace pipe with our own shop rider Martyn Hill who was more than happy to chat for a couple of minutes about his experience on our shores for the previous week which you can read below. Introduce yourself man. How’s it going, I’m Raven Tershy. What do you think of England? It’s been amazing man. We’ve been here a week, this is the first day it rained so I think we got lucky on that. We got to skate Romford, Harrow, Tottenham DIY; all these epic, like old skate parks I always wanted to skate so, the tours been sick. People are super cool, food’s good (laughs). Which has been your favourite out of everything so far? I think probably either Romford or the Tottenham one, just cause we got to barbeque late night at Tottenham till’ like, we were there until like three in the morning cooking food. Had a big old fire, just the vibes were tight. Who’s killed it the hardest? Shit, everybody man! P-Stone has been holding the crew together, keeping a tight ship. Uh, Ronnie and Grant have been killing it – Div killed it the hardest today though, Div Adam, he came down for a couple of days. The dude’s a machine. Yeah he’s a fucking animal! So you’ve hit a lot of transition, but what about the street spots. How do they compare to American ones? We haven’t really skated too many street spots, we got to skate Southbank in London which was cool – a couple of little ledges and banks here and there. Mostly we’ve just been going to parks. I’ve seen a lot of cool street, we went to this spot today in Liverpool, these little banks that go all the way down the hill. But we got rained out, that would’ve been sick to skate. What did you think to Newbird, Liverpool's DIY park? Oh yeah, it was rained out, it looked so fun though! I wish we could have got to skate that. Would you come back to England again? Oh for sure man, I’ll be back! (laughs) Words by Farran Golding. Grant Taylor Blazer Low & Thrasher Magazine/Clothing available in store and online.