MY STYLE JOURNEY: PART 3 – 93 ‘TIL INFINITY

Life is full of defining moments. I’m talking about those key turning points and situations that seem insignificant at the time yet in hindsight those events can often mark the most significant changes in your direction. Here’s a really corny analogy but sometimes I feel like a ball on a pool table. I feel like my collisions with the other people in life are similar to when a game of pool is played – those interactions can send you ricocheting off in a seemingly random direction. This post more or less sets the landscape for my graffiti and Hip-Hop world in Auckland city as I was coming up. A lot of characters are well known now but at this time we were all little punk-ass kids finding our way.

A selection of albums we were listening to in 1993. Not all of them were released that year but this is essentially my life’s soundtrack in my early teens.

1993 was one of the most pivotal years of my life when I look back on it. As I mentioned in the last post it was my first year of High School and I attended Western Springs College in central Auckland. It was there that I met a lot of people who really helped me refine my tastes in music and art. The school itself always held a reputation for celebrating creativity and so my mother felt it was the natural choice of the secondary schools in walking distance. During that time, there was no strict school zoning as such and so Western Springs had students from a wide range of neighbourhoods, which varied from lower, working and middle class areas through to reasonably affluent parts of town. The school population was made of people from Western Springs, Pt Chev, Mt Albert, Kingsland, Morningside, Sandringham, Grey Lynn, Ponsonby, St Marys Bay, Herne Bay, Freemans Bay, Westmere, Avondale, Waterview, New Lynn, Glen Eden, Devonport, Takapuna… The list goes on. Aucklander’s will appreciate how crazy a mix that is.

Aside from Bonus and Bart, there were many other taggers and people at Springs that would come to emerge as personalities within the Auckland graffiti and Hip-Hop scenes. Risk (DFH, MCF) was two years ahead of me and was already famous amongst our peers for his versatility in tagging styles and his fearless approach to skating. He seemed impervious to pain – one of his party tricks involved bottling himself repeatedly without even flinching. Ironically, he is now a glass artist. I recently saw an article on him where he was quoted as saying: “I used to be famous for breaking it not making it!” which I thought was brilliant. Early in my 3^rd Form year, Risk and Bart invited me to skip school with them and chill in the park for the afternoon, smoking weed and tagging in vivid all over an over grown flax bush. Perhaps it was the smoke – actually I know it wasn’t but I just sat there in awe of their ability to pull out tag after tag – each different to the last. They did them linked, backwards, upside down… They made it look so effortless – like it was breathing to them.  Actually, a fair number of the Auckland KOA kids went to my school. From memory there was Erupt (also a class mate from Kowhai Intermediate), Rapid, Junkie, Varns, Kurupt and Avias. A few of those guys made my first two years at school pretty hard but eventually became good friends during 4^th and 5^th form.

Gasp RFC was a year older than me and in my form class. He had been writing Rocket the year before that, mainly with a kid from my area called Dylan -he wrote Sneak. Dylan played a rather major role in motivating me to actually get out tagging – I mean properly, as in at night with real spray paint. I came up with a few names that year – my first name I tagged about was Scribbles, sometimes shortened to Scribs. I even played with the name Scribe (imagine that!). The reason I absolutely had to have a name with ‘S’s’ in it was because of the yin-yang S’s that were current at that time – popularised mainly by the crew ‘Ebony Society’. Our early tags were mostly around school, down at the spacies at the Morningside shops or along the tracks at the local train station.  Eventually I moved on from those names and tagged Twice and then Meth (totally bitten from Method Man… Shame!). That was until sometime towards the end of 1994 or early 1995 when I finally settled on the name Askew.  I got that name from a Freestyle Fellowship lyric in the song Park Bench People. I chose to stick with it immediately loving the symmetry that was possible with that letter combination.

Chilling with Dylan. I don’t know why we each have a pair of headphones on. I also can’t begin to tell you how much my mothers fluro green, purple and pink paint job on my bedroom walls tormented me!

Those that know me well will tell you that my first element was MC-ing. Ever since 1990 when I was in standard 4, I had been trying to make music. I started out making 4 bar tape loops from the beginning of my favourite rap songs and writing verses to those. I then acquired my Stepfathers rather basic drum machine and started sequencing beats on that. I also learnt piano since I was Eight years old and used to practise on a Synthesizer. It had a sequencer on it and so what I did was make my bass lines and general melodies on that. The main concern though was that the drum sounds were unauthentic and I knew it, so I would manually synch the drum machine and synthesizer (which took work!) and then rap over the top of those in my bedroom. To encourage me my Stepfather set up a simple PA in my room with a microphone to practise with, even though they had to deal with the annoying ruckus that ensued. I often tried to rope all my neighbourhood friends into rapping with me, going as far as to write all their verses for them. No one had the same enthusiasm for making music as me and so it became a solitary pursuit… That was until I started High School and I found a tight bunch of friends with a kindred love of Hip-Hop.

Within the first few months at WSC, I met Danny England and Guy Davey-Heap. For starters, they were infinitely more knowledgeable about Hip-Hop than I was and it showed. These kids were ahead of their time in regards to how they dressed, what they listened to and the way the conducted themselves. They were from Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and had attended Ponsonby Intermediate prior to Springs. There was certainly a lot of sizing each other up before we struck up a friendship and because of my naïve and generally scruffy way of dressing I know I was being judged. These guys wore flash sneakers and Workshop jeans, fitted hats and starter jackets. They always rocked backpacks and listened to walkmans with big Sony headphones. I wore a pair of imitation name brand sneakers or Chuck Taylors that were falling to pieces. My jeans were my Stepdad’s, I borrowed them because they were baggy and so I thought they looked cool, even though they were probably stonewashed and tapered.

We started talking because we all had a love of the Hip-Hop Music but it has to be said that they had far more discerning tastes than I did. For example, I would listen to everything from Public Enemy to Mc Hammer and everything in between regardless of whether it was commercial or otherwise. Rap was Rap to me and I was by no means a snob about it. They were elitist’s, they listened to groups like EPMD, Gangstarr, Pharcyde, Black Moon, A Tribe Called Quest, Leaders Of The New School… They knew their shit. I soon Learnt that Guy’s older brother was Oli Green from Urban Disturbance (early 90′s Hip-Hop group consisting of Oli Green, Zane Lowe and Rob Salmon) and a lot of the influences and tastes were trickling down from him to my crowd. (This is a whole other post so stay tuned).

Through Danny and Guy I met one of my very good friends Vents RTR, who was also much into all the same music and Fashion. He was two years ahead of us but had grown up with Guy, so he would often give us the time of day. Eventually we all became a very tight knit crew and our focus shifted quickly from just socialising to making music. This was the start of our infamous ciphers at the Ponsonby Community Centre. Danny’s mum ran the place and on the weekends she would allow us to use the facilities, sometimes we would literally camp out there from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. Between Danny and Dylan we had a complete DJ set up consisting of one Technics 1200 turntable and one miscellaneous belt driven turntable off a home stereo system plus a very basic mixer. I had the PA and a microphone and that was all we needed, the platform was set. We used to drink terrible cheap alcohol like Gimlets Vodka and Lime, Screwdriver and Bahamas ’62 and rap for hours. Occasionally we would be blessed with a visit from some of the older guys, for example I remember Che Fu during the Supergroove days rapping the verses that eventually became immortalised on DLT‘s track ‘Chains’. It’s almost surreal to fathom that when I look back now – considering how iconic an artist he is. Oli Green came to one cipher and drilled us about how to ‘really freestyle’ and told us we needed to bring something more honest with our subject matter and delivery. That is advice that could benefit many local artists still today.

http://www.vimeo.com/809827

Usually most nights ended when we were literally too messy to even talk, let alone deliver a coherent verse. Perhaps Danny and Dylan would have an argument about who was the DJ for the group and Dylan would storm out with his portion of the equipment. Either way, some times we would walk back to Kingsland and Morningside and drop some straights along the way, likely in Spraykote ‘Azure Blue’ or some ‘Dazzle’ – That’s what graffiti was to me then. It wasn’t structured or overly ambitious, it was just part of our chosen ‘lifestyle’.

I have to credit a small handful of people for really changing my outlook on graffiti around that time. Firstly, my friend Vinnie who wrote ‘Duck’ and another friend Liam who wrote D.Dare (after comic character Dan Dare) but eventually he changed it to Skare. They were the first people to show me ‘Subway Art’ and my first friends that started really drawing pieces with any real vigour. About this time Cripes (MCF) started attending our school – and he was another one with a very natural style and a lot more understanding of what graffiti was supposed to look like. About this time we actually consciously started thinking about doing pieces and wondering where and how to acquire enough paint to do so. About the same time, Webs was coming to a similar conclusion and he did a few basic bits and pieces around. This in turn motivated me to find some paint and do something slightly more elaborate than a tag – I did a filled in scroll with tags inside it and drop shadow. It could possibly have been the wackest thing ever painted in spray paint. Through Webs I met a kid named Shawn, who had spent some time at school in New York. He was interested in the same music as us and also dabbled a bit with graffiti. He introduced us to his friend who would eventually become known as Ikon RTR. From that point, literally everything changed.

To Be Continued…