Interview with Lucy Adams – ‘A Metre of Air’.

When Lucy Adams isn’t thinking or dreaming about skateboarding, she’s probably out skating.

From ditching swimming lessons to go skate as a kid, being the only girl at UK comps and getting hooked up by her first sponsor Three Sixty Clothing in 2001. To making a proper name for herself on the competition circuit and being the first pro for Lovenskate after being hailed “the most deserving on the team” – (Stu, Lovenskate), and the release of her first deck with them in 2017 which resulted in amazing board sales.

Inspiring and paving the way for women and girls within the skate scene, it’s about time the light was shined on Lucy Adams. Filmed between 2018 and 2020, including footage from 2000 onwards and personal interviews with Lucy’s loved ones, ‘A Metre of Air’ is a documentary and skate part that every skater and every girl / woman should watch.

Lucy receives a crazy amount of interview requests so I was super lucky to be able to catch up with her and talk about her life in skateboarding. If you haven’t watched the doc already, I suggest you do it now. BAFTA award winner, Andy Evans portrays Lucy in a way that’ll leave you a life long fan of her. It’ll also leave you feeling ready to shred.

You’ve known Andy Evans for a while and have worked together before now, how did the idea to make this video come about?

 I’ve known Andy for about 7 years and we’ve worked together on a couple of bits before. Bits for his video, Jenna’s (Selby) video, and my little section that came out with my pro board in 2017.

The idea for this part was put to us by a guy we both know, a mutual friend who does some work for Red Bull. He said there was a particular sort of series called ‘Out of Frame’ and this sort of idea might be something that they’d like and would run as a piece like that. Me and Andy had already talked about filming another section but our friend just said why don’t you film it as a longer piece as it’s an interesting story. So basically that’s kinda how we got started. We started filming the skateboarding first anyway and provided Andy with some of the archive. It wasn’t until quite far in when he suggested doing some interviews with people.

There were talks of the documentary coming out on different platforms, how did you end up linking with Vague on this project?

A couple of platforms / brands said that they’d like to take it and were in support of it and then covid happened and what not, budgets got tightened and therefore it kind of fell by the way side and it was a bit disheartening, but I mean Reece at Vague approached me and said we’d love to see you film a part for us if you’d like to and I said funnily enough I’m sort of sitting on something. And so he was like if you don’t mind showing me I’ll have a look. Then he showed Guy and Hannah at Vague and they were so into it and were so supportive and said that they’d love to take it and do what they can to push it out so I was more than happy that someone was stoked on it. And I love Vague. I love the fact that the magazine is really pushing to be more diverse and featuring different skate communities.

Massive congrats for you and your wife becoming parents! Is the arrival of your baby the reason there was a little delay in ‘A Metre of Air’ coming out? And your decision to step down from your position as Chair of Skateboard England and Skateboard GB?

Thanks for your kind words about Sonny. His arrival wasn’t the reason that the documentary got delayed, but yes it was a huge part of the reason I stepped down as Chair. The role was really demanding and because it’s a voluntary role, to give all your spare time to something like that when you wanna go skateboarding and you wanna do other things too. Knowing that you’re gonna step into the hardest thing you’ve ever done within your personal, family life. I just wanted to give my all to being a parent and any sort of spare time I was gonna have after his arrival I wanted to make sure that I could skate and do the thing that I love. So yeah that was a massive part of the decision to step down. I would have liked to of seen it through to past Tokyo and through to the end of the funding bid that we were doing but it was just sort of another year too far. But I remain a strong supporter and have helped Skateboard GB still in developing their strategy and receive the funding that they just have from UK Sport to go through to the Paris cycle, so I really hope there’s more opportunities and that I can get involved, maybe in an employed capacity somewhere down the line.

Sport was a huge part of yours and your family’s life growing up, you must be grateful for your parents being so supportive, do you hope to pass on the same passion for sport to your child, particularly skateboarding?

Yeah absolutely, I mean my wife loves sport and psychical activity too. She’s a great crossfitter and an amazing weightlifter and I’m pretty sure Sonny will inherit her strength and our passion for being active. We both love the outdoors so he’s definitely going to be exposed to all of that, and hopefully he wants to take something up that gives him some really cool life skills and that he enjoys and he can do with friends. Yeah, hopefully it’s skating, hopefully he gets the bug!

When Crawley skatepark was built, you were told “don’t come back to the park unless you get a skateboard”. Do you think getting a bit of agro from dudes at the park, along with your determined and serious personality when it comes to skateboarding has helped in your progression and success throughout the last 20+ years?

Yeah, going to the skatepark and getting told to come back with a skateboard, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I do think that initial kind of banter was definitely prevalent at the skatepark at the time y’know? It definitely helped to make me more determined to carry on, and more than that it was being surrounded by people that were good at skateboarding, and that magic of seeing people doing tricks that I just thought were incredible. And that’s what made me more determined but seeing the attitude of those people learning those tricks as well, that rubs off on you and you think, yeah I wanna be here all day and go home with a bags of tricks that I didn’t think I could do that morning.

As well as your own achievements in skateboarding, you’ve massively paved the way for female skaters and girls wanting to play a part in the industry and community whilst being taken seriously. Is this something you hope the documentary will also help you continue to do, considering the number of videos like this, filmed over such a long time and so in-depth and personal is not exactly high right now?   

Yeah I hope that the documentary has inspired more people, especially women and girls to go out and film a part and get in the streets. Definitely instagram and tiktok and short clips of what you done two minutes ago is very high right now, but yeah hopefully it’s inspired people to take the time and put something together that you’re really, really proud of. And it’s hard. It’s hard waiting and wanting something to just come out and for people to see it, but in the end when you see it come together in one piece like that it’s quite motivating, and yeah I hope it does make people within the industry look at women and take them more seriously in terms of what they might be able to bring to the party y’know. Our brands, our media, everything’s still heavily male dominated in terms of staffing and that sort of area, so it would be good if it did showcase the fact that there are women out there that can do those jobs. It would be great to start to see a gender balance in those organisations and places that definitely haven’t before.

You got a photo doing an air out the jumpbox in a local Crawley paper when you were a kid, and you’ve said airs and grabs are the best thing about skateboarding. What’s your go to trick when you’ve left the notorious, crusty, Horsham curb and have hit up the skatepark?

It kind of depends where I go. If there’s a chance to be able to go in the air somewhere, yeah, I’m gonna be doing that. If I go to Crawley I’m on that jumpbox. If I was to go to the Level I’m airing out of that bowl. But equally I love to do noseslides, noseslide on the ledge is something that I’ll always go straight to. I love boardslides of any kind of variation so yeah you’ll probably find me either at the flatbar, the ledge, or the priority would be to be flying in the air.

Rad song choice for this vid by the way! Is there a reason it was chosen and what’s your favourite song to skate to?

I think it was about two years or at least eighteen months ago that we were looking at the song, and at the beginning when we still thought it could be done by Red Bull we had to go through library music and music that was cleared and obviously that sort of thing. And originally Andy did edit it to quite a funky track, but when I was a kid growing up, you watch skate videos and the soundtrack was something that made it so much more, it just added to it. Videos like ‘RDS’ and ‘Chomp on This’ with Ja Rule, Guns n Roses, Warren G and Dr Dre. It was just so much cooler to just have that song that then you could play and listen to in your car on your way to skating and stuff. I just wanted a song that was really cool, and I listen to Magic FM a lot and Smooth FM and I think Magic do a good job of playing some funky old 80’s tunes sometimes and I’d heard that song quite often and I loved it. I just loved the feel of it and the upbeat, motivating, pushing sound that it gave. So we floated that about and at the time we looked into clearing it and it was gonna be really expensive to do it all properly and get the rights for it so I was a bit gutted and thought we’re never gonna be able to use it. Then I thought I don’t really care, I’m gonna save up money and I’m gonna pay for it. In the end it kind of worked out that we could use it in a way, I don’t know about Youtube and music rights but it seems to be doing alright so lets not tempt fate and get it taken down but yeah I love the tune. When I’m skating I mostly like to listen to hip hop and just tunes that are more upbeat. I’m also a massive fan of Guns n Roses and ACDC type rock, that kinda stuff too. Anything that’s loud, got a good beat and is passionate really.

Do you have any skate related plans in the near future? Have you got any trips lined up or work with Vans and Girls Get on Board when we’re eventually allowed back out in the world?

In terms of skateboarding, nothing at the moment, I think everybody is staying pretty reserved in the fact that it might not happen so can’t plan stuff too much yet. I’ve got a couple of family holidays planned to my actual paradise, Fuerteventura. That’s where I feel like I do my best skateboarding and have the most relaxing time so I’m really looking forward to that. And I have started filming for another project, a little VX project, so hopefully by the end of the year there’ll be another little part that I put together so that’ll be rad. And very soon I have got another board coming out on Lovenskate and I’m really, really stoked to say that I’ll be working with Lizzie Heath (@starbuttonsparks) on that design, so I am so happy that that’s gonna come out in the next month or so.