Blondey McCoy:

Figure-Eight Days

Even if you’re inclined to stick to what or where you know, you can’t stop discovering London. At ground level alone, it’s a labyrinth, stepped by heroes and villains of a hundred prior ages we know just the right amount about.

I grew up here, and I rather took for granted how organic the layout is, and what that means, until I first went to New York. Another great city—and I’m not knocking it… at least, not right now—but Second Avenue inevitably meeting 102nd Street means a different kind of poetry.

It absolutely is both nostalgic and ironic and crucially so. There are three reasons we look to quintessential, traditional Britain. First, because it’s conventional, and therefore an unlikely source of inspiration for a contemporary brand rooted in skateboarding. It’s an entire world, ripe for subversion—and, as anyone who knows me will tell you, fun is essential for me.

Second, because it isn’t all necessarily subversive. This Britain may be a fairy tale, but it’s one we’ve been told—and one our real lives have been intertwined with from the outset. So, alongside all the pisstaking, there’s also deep-rooted pride and reverence.

Third—and this is what really matters to most people—because it looks good. It did in the past and it will in the future, and who—who isn’t already wearing a cross-body bum bag and joggers with a thick plastisol print across the crotch—could really argue with that?

Becoming a father to two, then three, then four young children—all quite suddenly; leaving the company that had sponsored me
throughout my own childhood; independently relaunching the business of THAMES which, I can tell you, still has little to no cruise-control functionality all of this was not a backdrop. It was, and had to be, my whole life. And the truth is that, for a time, skateboarding was barely even a tangential consideration. It wasn’t escapism, as it perhaps could have been, but another responsibility something I did, and therefore had to keep doing and proving coinciding with product releases that had been set in what felt like a previous life. I did enjoy the act itself in those years I almost always do but I never did it without a reason, and that changes things. I didn’t touch my board for, I think, seven months after completing the last “reason,” a part I released on my 27th birthday. That’s the longest interval I’ve taken in these 19-odd years, and apparently it was what I needed. What I’ve rediscovered and now consciously protect is even greater than what I had as a kid, before I got sponsored.

I did a bit of voiceover for the intro of that
part—a renewed stance on skating: if it isn’t fun, it’s dumb; i.e., I am not going to neglect my kids, or neglect my business, or not finish this comedy series, or whatever else, because I’m trying a trick under a bridge in the middle of nowhere, day and night for a week, if I’m not even enjoying it. I said that in May 2024, and meant it—hence the interval.

Yes. It’s not always about formal exercise… much of my “physical practice” is incidental. But I wake up—having actually gone to bed
at some point—and I feel ready to attack the day. This appetite for life comes directly from having nearly lost it. I wasn’t just wasting time; I was regularly facing near-death experiences. Remembering those moments, and realizing how little they ultimately mattered, has had a profound effect on me.

Even if you’re inclined to stick to what or where you know, you can’t stop discovering London. At ground level alone, it’s a labyrinth, stepped by heroes and villains of a hundred prior ages we know just the right amount about.

I grew up here, and I rather took for granted how organic the layout is, and what that means, until I first went to New York. Another great city—and I’m not knocking it… at least, not right now—but Second Avenue inevitably meeting 102nd Street means a different kind of poetry.

I think, overall, at this moment, it’s more important for the kids to see people having a go than for those people to succeed. As for skating, I was never a stuntman. I fall a lot, but if you analyze it, I rarely fall on anything truly precarious; I just love a good tumble.

When I’m skating, I feel like a child who just wants to do battle in their own world and on their own terms usually with themselves.

It’s what makes everything else all the big stuff that’s totally out of your control simply fall away. I guess it’s about as close as someone like me can get to meditation.

I love being at South Bank early in the morning, just watching everyone else head to work. Is that a sin? I love undoing a good workout with a full English, and, for good measure, a doughnut at Bruno’s. I love the pelicans at St James’s Park. It’s the perfect figure-eight circuit to catch up with a friend and to have serious conversations, too, as sometimes we must. The Diana Memorial Fountain in summer, speaking of circuits. Sometimes I visit my friend Mark Sullivan at his antique shop, because you meet people there you’d never meet otherwise. Personally, I might waste time with him throwing a half-full water bottle through high goals in scaffolding, or just bouncing it off a wall—or take my family to Bentley & Skinner, the jewellers, and let each of them pick one thing, then leave because I’ve left my card at home. I like to take in maybe thirty minutes of art at a time, or the first half of a ballet. Sometimes more, but when I have free time for that, it’s usually with the kids—and they’re only so sophisticated. After the ramp, or after I’ve made them pancakes, we might watch a full disc of Looney Tunes on the sofa. I’d end the day at Simpson’s or Rules, preferably having really earned it. Though, in truth, my day really ends on the bench of my terrace with my wife—but you’re definitely not invited to that.

THAMES needs a real shop now. We do good business out of The Front Room not just for a 200-square-foot space on the second floor of an office building, open only in typical office hour but it is a pilgrimage for the already converted, not something that can be chanced upon. I feel that in THAMES we’ve done a lot of the hard wor or, rather, that we have the elements which can’t simply be willed. We have the right people, who from the jewellers to the skaters are right with each other; certainly we know what we are, and what our purpose is. We are building a world to live in and delight in, and the time is right, I think, for anyone and everyone to discover that.
Because we have these fundamentals in place, and because I now have the inclination, we can do on the skate side what perhaps was expected in the very beginning: a full team, and, with them, fresh impetus for more boards, more trips testing those boards, more videos, and more magazines, and so on. I want to have in this business a varied framework for exercise, more than a responsibility. I want, in ten years’ time, to be doing more of what makes me forget what year it even is.