In late 1999 I moved from Perth to Sydney where I to was work as a web-producer for a company called K-Grind. It was a “multi-faceted youth website”, that was bankrolled by Macquarie Bank. It was maybe ten years too early! The site was way too heavy for the bandwidth of the time. After blowing ten million squids in under a year, with not one cent of revenue returned, unsurprisingly Macquarie pulled the plug. This left me unemployed (apart from some meagre skateboard $) in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

Luckily one day early in my unemployment, while at a shifty Internet café near central station, I saw an email from Matt Coyte, who was then the editor of Australian Skateboard Magazine, which was one of EMAP’s “core youth and action sports titles”. Matt had an interesting proposal for me; he thought that I could be the editor of ASM. It was a pretty heavy offer, as at the time the mag was at a serious all-time low and was cheese balling it’s way into the gutter of skate history. I figured it would be a good challenge, and I needed work, so I planned to give it a shot.

In the Halls of Emap I met some amazing people. Most of them were in the same room as me. One person who was a huge influence was my mate Campbell Milligan. We basically got to know each other because we were constantly receiving each other’s phone calls due to our similarity in name. Campbell was the art director for Waves at the time. He helped provide the creative inspiration for the mag, and boy did I wish he was the art director for ASM! As time went on (18 months) I felt like I had improved the mag a whole lot, and advertising was picking up as a result. My new art director (Christian Campano) and I had a tight little ship going, but fiction with the management were frying us all to a pulp. To our amazement Campbell left to start Monster Children. For me to leave I had to be happy with the next editor. I picked a friend who at the time was the current Juice warehouse dude: the hilarious Sean Holland. I knew that despite lack of editing experience his pure love for skateboarding would pave the way for the mag. It did, and the mag went from strength to strength, only held back by the company behind it. Sean stuck it out for three years before bailing to start his own title.

Fast forward the clock just under a decade and it is amazing to see how many independent titles have been spawned from that office of only five people. Waves ex-ed Sam Macintosh started Stab, Sean Holland is the founder and editor of the Skateboarder’s Journal, Campbell Milligan is the founding art director of Monster Children and I have co-founded Staple Magazine. I’m looking up at the words above and I see I have totally gone off on a tangent. All I really wanted to say is that there is a cool interview with Campbell over here at Pedestrian TV. Thanks for the inspiration lad!