Please enjoy 3½ minutes of me rollerblading to an Altered Images song.

I rollerblade now. This is, what I'm (half) jokingly calling, my mid-life crisis. I started back in 2018* on a whim after I found some skates on Amazon for £70. We were still living in Glasgow, Beth was a few months old, I was out of shape and completely bored with being terrible at skateboarding.

FFWD to 2021 and I own 7 pairs of skates and visit the skatepark on my lunchbreak every day. I've lost 2 stone and have a fairly successful little Instagram account for my skate clips. Coincidentally, rollerblading is having a moment and the direction of the scene, after 20 years of being... questionable, is pretty cool and interesting.

Monoroll is a result of conversations with some skate-mates on an extremely nerdy Slack where we decided to work on solo video projects through the summer months. Nathan put one out a few months back and Jeremy has one pencilled in for later in September.

The main goal was to have a reason to skate and to try new things. I pushed myself fairly hard but decided against trying anything I considered too dangerous (no big jumps, no handrails). I know I could do better, I know I could go bigger but with the time I had and the risks I was willing to take, I'm happy with how it turned out.

Most tricks took me over an hour to land successfully, some took several hours over multiple trips to a spot. I wish I could go back and refilm a couple but, hey ho, done beats perfect.

The song is a bit weird and I worry that the lyrics imply I'm escaping from something / someone but there's not much more to the choice beyond it kinda clicking with the energy of the clips. I knew I wanted something Scottish and I knew it had to be fairly lighthearted.

If you'd like to follow my adventures on skates, the @safetygrab Instagram account is where everything lives.

Thanks to Alex for being amazingly patient with me throughout the summer as I jumped on every single opportunity I had to skate. Thanks to the pals on Slack for the encouragement too.

* I was part of the 90s rollerblading boom and skated heavily between 1995 and 1998. The muscle memory was still there 20 years later.

Hijack by Marden Hill

This is a risky post for someone who likes to imagine his entire audience is made up of snobby teenagers. I'm going to, tentatively, raise the subject of... um, acid jazz.

Oh, and if that isn't enough, I'm getting there via aggressive rollerblading.

...

*cough*

...

Righto, now that it's only us cool kids left - I'll continue.

Over time, I've slowly been collecting a number of obscure-ish songs based mostly on nostalgia for my early teens. Back then (1995-6), I, like many of my friends, got into the inline-skating boom in a BIG way. I wore the gear, had the moves and watched the videos.

Through these videos (think 30 mins of dudes jumping down stairs) I got my first introduction to music proper. Before then, I'd had little exposure to anything beyond Disney theme tunes or my little Michael Jackson cassette. Hearing something new - a surprisingly mixed bag of pop-punk, hip-hop and unexpected gems got me psyched in a way that only a kid with a wallet-chain can be. Through many, many many repeat viewings, I knew all the words to every song and loved them with all my XXL-covered heart.

Myself, circa 1996. Note the pink t-shirt / cut-off white jeans / kneepads on my shins(?) / claw arm style

Revisiting this soundtrack of my youth, if you will, has not been easy (I've hunted before). Many of the tracks were obscure even in 1996, let alone after nearly 2 decades. Some were only released on small US / Canadian labels and, with limited access to the (often uncredited) videos, I'm often searching by little more than a handful of lyrics and a misremembered melody. I never bought CDs back then, y'see. They were too hard to find and too expensive.

Anyway, to the aforementioned acid jazz (Hijack by Marden Hill above / below). This track, which I discovered through the intro to the 1996 classic* Hoax 3: Broken English, has proven to be one of the most elusive. Unlike the other music featured in the video, the intro had no artist credit. Searching for the lyrics "You're taking over, I'm taking orders, you're taking all of my time" proved fruitless and name-that-song apps yielded no results.

Hoax 3: Broken English intro

My desire to find the tune soon outgrew all fondness I had for it and "Hoax 3 intro" quickly wormed its way to the top of my "music to get" list. Over the course of months, nay, years, I'd frequently take a little time to sniff around YouTube comments and messageboards to see if I could get any closer.

Then, last week, a breakthrough! Midomi recognised the track! I had a name (Hijack), I had an artist (Marden Hill) and the hunt, for the most part, was over.

Marden Hill, from what I can tell, were a prolific UK-based acid jazz outfit that some credit as being the first band to be labelled "trip-hop". They haven't been active since 2002 and possess neither website nor Wikipedia page. There's a nice wee discussion about from 2008 over at Soundological which includes a recent comment from bandmember Kevin Saunders. The internet is a wonderful thing.

Despite my discovery, Hijack remained slippery. It wasn't in the UK iTunes or Amazon MP3 stores (yet it was, infuriatingly, available in the US) and other, less honest, means of procurement turned up dead ends due, I guess, to the track being a bit of a niche commodity nowadays. The album it comes from, Blown Away, was available but, Christ, did I want an hour of this stuff? It's a fair stretch from my usual tastes and there's only so much flute a man can take. Add that I've not bought a full album for one song (remember that?) in years. It felt crazy... almost nostalgic.

I weighed up my options - wait it out a little longer, hoping that it either becomes available on iTunes / through some music nerd's blog or (and this is what I did) bite the bullet and pick up a second-hand copy of Blown Away through Amazon Marketplace for £8.20.

So, yeah, the CD arrived today, intact but with (appropriately) dusty joint-totin' cover art. I popped it into my computer and invited Marden Hill to sit alongside Punky Brüster, Herbalizer and The Cherry Poppin' Daddies in my "Skate Video Nostalgia" playlist. And, y'know what? After a couple of spins, I've decided it was worth every penny.

*I'm only half-kidding with this. I may be all about skateboarding nowadays but, honestly, Hoax 3 was a thing of beauty. It a was wonderfully rich (I might be wrong, but I think they used film rather than video) tour of the world, full of colourful European streets and bleached-out American schoolyards. You can watch the full thing here.