Nick Zorlac on the DIY ethic behind Death Skateboards’ 15 years of ordinary madness

Harrow, in Proper North London, is a funny old place. It is at once moneyed and moody, both part of the city and strangely isolated from it.

 Within the world of skateboarding, it has had a storied significance, not least as the one- time centre of the British skateboarding industry (which seems implausible even as I type it), but also because it is the seat of one of the most rowdy, grassroots, DIY scenes; one which grew out of the shadows of the warehouses and the sports cars to become an anti- brand which has outlived all the gloss and cool guys who surfed the wave of a pumping economy during one of skateboarding’s periodic flirtations with mainstream youth culture.

Death Skateboards has survived it all, walking at a tangent from the limelight and speaking its own language of Harrow Privileges and DIY operations, of Houses of Doom and family. They inspire clannish loyalty from their ratty following, sponsor more riders than pretty much everyone else put together at the moment, and in their own unassuming way they have come to characterise British skateboarding at its most resilient and boisterous.

 The chap behind this whole circus is Nick Zorlac, a resolutely unfashionable Italian rascal who created Power Distribution in 1996, a precursor to Death Skateboards which took on and outlived most of the bigger players in the game since then. Their suburban Harrow headquarters is part distribution centre, part playground and part strays’ home. It is seldom quiet there, but we gamble on a soaking afternoon close to the weekend to meet the man himself on his manor. Zorlac swings open the front door, nods us in, advises giving the bog ‘a minute’, sticks on a skate DVD and makes a cup of splosh.

 Death are fifteen years old this year, a relative lifetime in a culture which turns over most of its practitioners in 5- yearly cycles as pain, girls, and pleasures of the flesh weed out the passengers. They recently premiered their latest (and best) video ‘Ordinary Madness’ as ever at the Trinity pub in Harrow before taking it up and down the UK with a 20- strong squad in tow. This they achieved at a time when even the sportswear brands are paying their riders in product and talking about budget cuts.

How exactly do they manage to continually reach into their reserves of passion to keep on pushing all this time?

“‘Honestly? Fuck knows… (Rolls the idea around)…  I’ll tell you what, OK: I. Love. Skateboarding. And I like, with Death, doing stuff that I like. It’s my vision of skateboarding… not trying to cater to the latest trend, not trying to pander to anybody. I do what I enjoy, and I put out what I want to see. It’s my version of skateboarding.”

UK legend, and veteran of the Harrow boom years, Stevie Thompson says of Death ‘What makes them so strong is that they are consistent.’

 I tell Zorlac this and add my own tuppence; that their monochromatic team boards, frill- free videos and scene loyalty (including the issuing of Harrow Privileges, a kind of unofficial pass system) has bucked the trend of change for change’s sake, celebrity filmers and Instagram fame.

“You say we’re strong and that’s a compliment; sales have been pretty consistent down the years but that doesn’t alone tell you the strength of a brand. I don’t know why we’re still going, but one thing we are is consistent. And the other thing- fuck me- the riders are fucking amazing. I wish I had a big load of money to give them because they are incredible. The riders make everything work.  I can only do what I can do, we only have a certain turnover- but I’ll tell you what, if someone sponsored by a sporting goods company was paid the same proportion of their turnover as we do ours, they’d be doing alright. So I feel like we do our bit on that front”.

This sense of fair play returns the conversation to the theme of loyalty.  Not only within the Death squad itself, but through his Power Distribution network Zorlac has worked with the same people over and over for years; staying true to the brands and riders through thick and thin- Consolidated, Heroin, Landscape and Kill City Skateboards being principle among them. He ‘rarely kicks anyone off’, hence having to sort out two football teams worth of skaters with product regularly, and never engages in the murky practice of poaching riders from other teams.

“Richie Jackson sat me down after the (Ordinary Madness) premiere and said ‘I want to talk to you’ and I thought ‘Here we go- what have I done?’ and he said ‘I want to thank you for the encouragement you gave me, it’s helped me down the path I’m now on’.  I thought that was really nice of him, I wasn’t aware I had… must’ve done, I suppose.”

The establishment of Power Distribution (‘A play on the idea of the distribution of power in skateboarding at that time’) and what would become Death Skateboards stems from what he perceived to be missing from skateboarding then:

“Death was a response to the continual mainstream pronouncements that skateboarding was dead. A lot of skateboarding was owned by people who didn’t skate, businessmen who were bringing in motivational speakers and consultants. In the beginning we didn’t even have boards, just T- shirts and stickers. I stuck one on the door of a shop and weeks later the owner called me saying kids were asking for these Death boards. It went from there.”

Throughout the intervening decade and a half, British skateboarding has seen many seasons come and go- magazines, legit brands, shady businessmen and upstart talents have all been processed by the meat grinder,  the post-  Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater popularity explosion (think snowboarding and Jenny Jones x 100) and the mushrooming skatepark boom have all left the landscape looking very different than it did a generation or three back when they set sail, but the brand remains at heart a family affair.

Now, words like family and heart get bandied about in the realm of youth marketing a lot (there is even a skate shoe called ‘The Passion’, I kid you not), but consider this: the House Of Doom (now in its third incarnation) has been not only a clubhouse but a home to many of the Death Squad for various periods of time- sometimes under stairs, sometimes in sheds- a home nonetheless. 

“It’s a very stable environment here” he says, relaxing from the presence of the tape recorder somewhat. “The riders know they can come and stay here. Maybe I’m like a father figure to some of them…it’s not like a new team manager comes on board every year and starts making changes and kicking people off- it’s me.” The assumption is that this statement has its own resonance, and truth be told it does. Skateboarding is littered with tales of gifted people who got royally screwed, or left by the roadside when their luck turned, so for someone to stand behind their offering in all weathers is rare indeed.

Surprisingly tidy for a building that’s only guaranteed permanent resident is a (female) cat called Dave, the House of Doom also boasts a spanking new mini ramp out back, bought and paid for by Monster Energy Drink.  Talk turns to the possibilities of the future for Death (“I would love to do an insane world tour, but I haven’t got the firepower right now.”) and how to juggle the economics of sponsoring half the countryside with an economic environment where it’s not unusual for shops to go bankrupt owing fortunes to brands and distributors alike.

It is during this stretch of the conversation that an unprompted digression about the modish debate about corporate co- branding versus ‘keeping it real’, the opportunities and the drawbacks, occurs.

“Can I say something about energy drinks? They don’t make skateboards; they don’t try to market any clothing or boards through skate shops. So they aren’t trying to take anything out of the marketplace…they aren’t trying to take these guys’ (gestures to the ranks of boards that surround him) jobs or any other skateboarder’s jobs. Pepsi and Coke sponsored skateboarding in the ‘70s, so if these brands want to help us out like with the new mini- ramp out back, its guilt- free for me.”

Outside the office, the gathering storm is beginning to sound sinister and enough time is judged to have passed to risk trying the bog after all. We begin to disengage by asking, in the end, what the rationale behind running such a high- risk, low return business is.

“If you looked at the profit and loss sheets on owning a skateboarding company, you would say ‘Can It’… but I started out wanting to give a chance to underdogs, I suppose. I’ve always liked underdogs; and I feel like I’ve done that.”

Steadying my nerve for the forces of nature I may be about to experience both without and within, I rise before being asked to sit down and record one final thing.

“I wanted to say this- thanks to everybody who has supported us, or skated with us down the years. The kids that buy our boards, everyone: thanks.”

For such is the currency of roots.

 - Death Skateboards feature for Huck Magazine, 2014