[ JAPANESE / ENGLISH ]

Photos_Bryce Golder
Special thanks_Harvest Dist.

 

VHSMAG (V)：　How has Japan treated you? How was street skating in Tokyo compared to other places?

Ben Lawrie (BL)：　It's been a really cool experience that I'm super thankful for, but it's also been really tough to skate. Illegal to sit down, illegal to skate, can't push down the street… get booted for doing absolutely nothing from everywhere (laughs). But the spots are super sick.

V：　I heard that you guys had something with the police on the first day.

BL：　Yeah, on the first day we went to this spot, I think it was at some sort of business hotel. I guess we waxed it, and Digby and Dean were skating. And then the cops came, they were really pushing for Geoff (Campbell) to have to pay for all the damages when it was clearly already waxed.

Raph Langslow (RL)：　I don't think the police minded that much, but it was the guy that came out from the Hotel.

BL：　Yeah, he was trying to tell the cops that we had done all the damage to it when it was already looking exactly the same and it was pretty intense. Scary for a first experience. It really threw me off. It made it super scary to do any skating after that or deal with the cops.

RL：　Other than that, it's been pretty good.

 

V：　Tell us the story behind the brand name Hoddle.

BL：　It was started back in 2015 by Keegan Walker RIP and Dale Van Iersel. It's named after The Hoddle Grid. Robert Hoddle was a city planner that designed the street layout in Melbourne. As the Streets run north to south and east to west like New York. It's super easy to figure out where you are and how to get around because everything is a grid. It’s associated with a broader image of Melbourne. So many of the famous Melbourne skate spots fall inside the CBD (Central business district) the Hoddle Grid where we grew up skating.

V：　Hoddle’s first full-length Heavy Mayo was released in 2021 and it premiered on the second anniversary of Hoddle’s founder Keegan Walker’s passing. Raph, you have his name tattooed on your body.

RL：　Yeah, I did that after he passed away. I've known Keegan for quite a long time. When I was a kid he was like, “Maybe this can happen one day,” and he ended up asking me. We did some really cool trips while he was still around. A lot of cool memories with Keegan.

 

 

V：　Was Hoddle your first board sponsor?

RL：　Yeah, I mean, first proper board sponsor for sure.

BL：　Well, what was your first board sponsor?

RL：　Me and Ben both skated for this brand called Smoke Beer Skateboards (laughs).

BL：　We had to pay for the boards as well. They were 40 bucks each. Telling my mom that I've got this sponsor, it's called Smoke Beer. And the graphic had ciggie and beer cans on it and it had a magazine called Flasher Magazine. It had a girl flexing her titties. My mom wasn't too impressed. I almost got kicked off by putting a DGK sticker on my board. It's like, "Well you're kicking me off, but I already paid for the boards. What's going on here?"

V：　Ben wasn't on the team yet but you guys went to LA last year. What was Kevin Shealy doing dropping a bottle on an iPhone in the beginning of the video?

RL：　The story is Eli, one of our friends who has done artworks for Hoddle in the past. He got really obsessed with Footprint insoles. We were doing drop tests with things and I guess somebody thought it was a good idea to drop a beer bottle on a phone. It was Caeylen's and he ran that iPhone for two weeks after that (laughs).

 

V：　That caballerial ender was sick.

RL：　That was a really wild session. We had Neckface on the sesh, he was doing traffic control wearing hi-vis. It was like 5pm on Friday or something and there was lots of traffic. I don't know why I thought caballerial was a good idea (laughs).

V：　It seems you like to spin your body. Your ender in the recent Carhartt video was a back 3, which was super sick.

RL：　I've only got a few tricks and I can't really flip my board (laughs). Carhartt asked us to make a little clip. That was just filming with Geoff in the city, in the Hoddle Grid. I mean, that's what we do pretty much every day.

 

V：　So Geoff made that video and then he's doing the Internet Birthday series as well. It's nice that we get to see a lot of Australian scene.

RL：　Yeah, he's got a Thrasher series that he's doing. He's starting to do a few trips as well with that stuff. We did the stuff in New Zealand and then we went back to New Zealand, north Island to Auckland at the start of the year.

BL：　It's sick that he can bring a bunch of friends from Melbourne, instead of just using Nike riders. It kind of feels like a Nike trip with Digby and Shaun (laughs).

 

 

V：　Ben, you had an edit from Hoddle in July and it's called No Place Like Home. Tell us about the story behind the title.

BL：　Well, Hoddle's always been my favourite brand since it started. Hoddle is Melbourne and Melbourne's my favourite place in the world, and I would never want to live anywhere else. It's so great to skate for Hoddle and it feels like I have always been involved with them even though I haven't skated for them. And it feels like I'm home again.

V：　You took a year break from skateboarding, right?

BL：　Yeah, I was just super burnt out and I sort of realised that I wasn't skating for myself anymore. I didn't know who I was other than a 12-year-old kid. I got stuck in that brain and I needed to grow up a little bit, but in a good way.

V：　But part of it was an injury, right?

BL：　Well, it wasn't even really an injury. I had a really bad heel bruise and I couldn't skate for a few weeks, and then I just didn't want to go skating again. Before that I probably would've just skated, but I just realised, "Wait, I don't feel like skating so I don't have to go skate." And then that became three months, and then it became six months, and then I felt like I wanted to sort of skate again, but it felt like too much of a big deal to go skating. If I went skating once, then everyone would have all these expectations of me or something. I overthought it a lot, but then eventually I was like, "Fuck it, I'm going to go skate. I don't really care." I just went to City park and couldn't even do 50-50s and shit, but it didn't matter because I just wanted to have fun again. Because I never didn't skate. I literally skated every single day since the first day I skated when I was 12. I would roll my ankle so bad and it would be a balloon and I would go skate the next day and roll the ankle again immediately. And then I would just start skating switch and just keep trying to skate and I would probably roll the other ankle and I probably would be trying to skate with no ankles (laughs). I was just making it way harder for myself when I really needed to learn how to chill. You can learn how to skate, but you also have to learn how to not skate. That was the hardest thing for me, finding the balance.

V：　You said in the Thrasher interview that you were kind of avoiding friends during the break. Raph, what was it like for you, seeing Ben off the board?

RL：　It was definitely the talk of the town. Everybody was kind of saying, "Where's Ben? He's never going to skate again." But I knew he's going to skate again. It was a pretty strange experience not to have Ben in the city going skating every day for sure.

BL：　I always knew I was going to skate again. But yeah, I remember hearing so many weird stories coming back to me. People were like, "Oh, I heard he got his girlfriend pregnant now he has to work full time because he has to pay for her to have a baby." Just heaps of random stories and I'm like, "Who's making up all these stories?" But it's kind of cool that people are thinking into it that hard.

RL：　It wasn't even in Melbourne. I remember going to Copenhagen that year and all of these pro skaters being like, "Yeah, what's up with that Lincoln Square kid? Where is he?"

BL：　Even when I went to Copenhagen after I started skating again, Mike Arnold came up to me and he was like, "You're from Australia, right?" And I was like, "Yeah, I'm from Australia." And he was like, "What's up with that Lincoln child?" But I thought he was asking me, "What's the deal with your nickname? What does it mean?" And so I was like, "Oh, I just grew up skating at this place called Lincoln Square. No one knew my name. I didn't talk much. And they just started calling me Lincoln Child." He was like, "What? You're the Lincoln Child!?" It was so funny. Such a random experience, but I've had so many random things like that. Even Tom Penny in Copenhagen, similar story. He was like, "Oh, are you from Australia? Melbourne?" And he was like, "I was there not long ago. We were skating at this spot, the long ledge that goes over the three block. There was this kid there that was super sick. He was back tailing it." Just saying all this stuff. And then I was like, "Man, that was me! You gave me a towel and I still have it!" He gave me a towel to dry the ledge to do the back tail.

Bryce Golder (BG)：　When you went away from skating, it pissed people off because they're not as good as you. People would wish they could just sit on a back tail and stuff. But obviously it's more than that.

BL：　I can't do much other than just to hold a grind. I've barely landed any tricks down a set of stairs. I want to be able to jump like Raph. We need to swap a couple tricks, we need to come to the middle somewhere (laughs).

V：　Obviously everyone was super stoked when you came back, right?

BL：　Yeah, and it's good to clear the air and make sure that everyone knows that I wasn't trying to ditch them. I was just trying to figure out how to deal with not skating and I couldn't handle seeing my friends and telling me that I should be skating, even though that's not on them telling me. I just couldn't handle it out of my own stuff. It's good to be able to come back and reignite the friendships.

 

V：　Tell us about the back tail big spin out in that video. You popped it super high.

BL：　That was the last day I could film a trick for that little Hoddle video. I desperately needed to get one more trick because there's not many tricks in that video. It really needed one more trick. So we went to that spot in the morning and I was trying to kickflip back tail it, and we got kicked out straight away. So we went to the State Library and I was trying another trick and I fell really bad and landed with my back on a skate stopper. I was in so much pain but I knew I had to go try something else so we went back to the Fed Square. I fell so bad again and I basically broke my wrist, trying to do the back tail biggie. And then, so I was trying the back tail biggie where I couldn't fall. I think that's why I ended up doing it like that. I had to do it in a weird way because I couldn't risk falling over. I had to make sure I caught it really high, it had to get stuck to my feet, otherwise there was no way I would be able to stomp it. Super lucky that I landed it. That spot is a big bust in Melbourne. It's been there forever and no one's really skated it. Shaun Paul front tailed it a few years ago, but that's the only trick that had been done before that. So super stoked to get that trick.

V：　That looked so different, the way the board rotated.

BL：　I always try do flip out tricks like they're flip tricks. I want to catch all my flip out tricks at the same height, at least as the ledge. That's what I'm thinking. Otherwise I'm not going to be happy with it.

V：　Sick. Along with Pass~Port, Hoddle is doing things to support the Australian indigenous community.

BG：　Yeah, we've done it in the past, fundraising t-shirts and whatnot. It's always a thing to try and do more essentially. Everyone kind of tries to do their best with all that.

BL：　I think it's important to remember that the land we're on isn't our land. It's more of a Melbourne thing, Melbourne and Sydney. I don't even think it's fair to claim being Australian. It's super sad how Aboriginal people were treated. You have to really respect and you have to at least acknowledge it. Whatever you're doing, you're making a profit from being in Australia, which isn't really fair to all the Aboriginal people. It's super important to know about it and putting it out there so people can think about it a little bit.

V：　Raph, I read in the Slam interview that you were or are working at the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria).

RL：　I guess since I've had more opportunities with the skate stuff, I haven't really worked for the last year or so but I was working at the NGV, which is the main gallery in Melbourne. It was like events set up and packed down and it worked really well with skating. It was kind of like seasonal work. Caeylen works in a lot of art galleries around town, so I started doing some more install work with him, hanging paintings. You're surrounded by art, which is really cool.

BL：　And you studied and you love art.

RL：　Yeah, I was also studying painting at the university in Melbourne, VCA, but I dropped out.

BL：　You don't have to tell people you dropped out, you can just claim you studied.

RL：　(Laughs). I guess the skate stuff again, I started getting more opportunities with that. If I can travel around and go to museums overseas and see all the artwork that we're learning about at school in real life that would be great. In a few years when the knees are a bit sore, maybe go back and make some more paintings.

BL：　The other sick thing is, we're supporting the Melbourne artists and people from around Australia.

BG：　Big skateboard network really. Some people have moved on from skating to art. You can reconnect and work with them to make graphics and stuff. Good network for sure.

V：　Nice. Let's wrap this up. What's next?

BL：　Hopefully Raph and I'll get to work on something together in the future.

RL：　I think we'll just keep filming with Geoff for the Internet Birthday stuff, skating in Melbourne. Hopefully a Hoddle part together with Ben.

BG：　That'd be cute. You guys can mix up your tricks, Ben can do the long Slides and Raph can do the Spins.

BL：　Exactly. That's how we're going to get the best of both worlds.

RL：　Yeah, do something together.

BL：　We can use AI to swap our faces out!

 

Raph Langslow @raphaellangslow
Ben Lawrie @lincoln_square

Raph and Ben are both members of Hoddle, holding it down in Melbourne, Australia. Go check out their skating in Hoddle edits and Internet Birthday series.