Do you think it will affect that promo much not having the Manny stuff in there?

Yes, in all honesty it will but it just means the rest of us have got to work harder doesn’t it? That one is for you, Conor (North).

I guess it’s been hard for you trying to get stuff filmed for Fabric because Get Lesta has no doubt been eating up most of your time for the past few years, right?

The thing with filming with Cal (Callun Loomes), is that to meet up with him I can get a cheap ride out of Mark Stern or Kiz (Kieran Wilcox) or someone like that. They live right by me so we can chip in a fiver or whatever, or sometimes nothing – sorry guys (laughs) – then we can drive directly to Leicester or wherever. There have only been eight times in the entire two years filming for this video that I’ve travelled on my own money; I just can’t afford it, it’s not achievable for me. Fabric can’t afford to pay for a coach every weekend to Sheffield or Newcastle, so that’s the main challenge.

I’ve got no filmer down here that I can film stuff with for Fabric, and that’s also a big issue. There was a little while where Baines lent Kieran his camera and then we went out filming for two weeks straight, every day, and we got a minute and half of footage in that time, but as soon as Baines needed the camera back then I had no one again.

You live in the middle of nowhere effectively, don’t you?

Yep, completely, in a place called Wicken, it’s eight miles outside of Milton Keynes, almost halfway between Milton Keynes and Northampton. I don’t drive and there are no buses from my village at all, at any time of day. It’s a £13 taxi either way to get to work and back, so I have no money (laughs).

As you live so far away from town, where do you skate? Do you not skate Milton Keynes most days?

I try really, really hard to avoid it. I’ll try skate Midlands way instead – Coventry, Leicester, Loughborough and places like that, and on occasion take a trip up to Sheffield. They’re the easiest and best places to skate. I will be out with Kieran mainly, my boy Jamie Staples, Joe Jarvis, Ash…the local boys, the Hornz Club.

How often do you see Rob (Selley) and Sean (Smith) these days?

Nowhere near as much as I’d like to. They’ve got their own things going on – Sean works a lot and Rob’s got a lovely little lad now and everything so they’re busy, but on occasions like today when you manage to drag them out, it’s always nice to see them.

That was Cal who got them out today, right?

Nah that was me, that was my doing (laughs), on the record. It was Cal encouraged, he told me to try get Rob out to come out and film a guest trick for my part, so I badgered him profusely and he somehow managed to get Sean out as well. I was surprised, but happy. It was good to see Sean doing switch back tails again – there’s nothing better is there? It’s the epitome of Milton Keynes isn’t it? Watching Sean skating the Theatre District…it makes you feel at home again (laughs).

Going back to Rob and Sean, do you think they were stoked turning up today and seeing that you’ve got the cover? That there’s someone else coming out of Milton Keynes who’s out there, getting coverage?

I hope so, and I’m sure they are, because obviously as I’ve said, even me being here now is down to Rob’s help and the way he hooked me up when I was younger. He pushed me really hard into the scene and really tried to make me known and be about, and if it wasn’t for that, nothing would’ve ever happened. I’d have been a skatepark kid with a fucked board for the rest of my days.

A lot of skaters will come up through a filmer or a photographer, and I know during your early days we were getting a lot of stuff sent through from Swampy, so many tech ledge sequences…

Swampy was the one who got me on DC, because he sent all of that stuff to Stenti (James Stentiford), he was my TM for maybe two months. That’s a funny story actually. I got the call when I was sat on the green drinking, underage, and I got a phone call from a number I didn’t know, I picked up he was all, “this is James Stentiford from DC” and was like, “fuck off, who is this?” then it took about eight times for me to realise that it really was him, by which point I felt like a bit of a bellend (laughs). “Oh, sorry man…” That must be a fairly told tale though mustn’t it? People not believing that someone would call them up to sponsor them, because it was so out of the blue. The only reason Stenti saw anything was because Swampy had been sending the photos to Leo (Sharp) and Leo was working for DC at the time, so he showed them to Stenti and he sorted me out from that. But obviously to me, I’d never sent any footage to DC; I didn’t know how sponsorship worked.

You can’t have it where DC in the UK doesn’t have someone from MK – they have to have someone; they’ve had three generations of it…

There’s footage of me as a kid skating these fat, fuck off Lynx, doing back foot flips. I had these tiny little legs and these huge shoes at the bottom of them, but DC was my shit, I loved it but that must have been the Milton Keynes influence, seeing Sean skating around wearing it I was obsessed straight away. Hence riding for them for so long.

And you’ve just been on that trip as well – the Special Delivery 2 Tour. How was that?

It was good fun: a lot of beer (laughs).

How long did you go on it for?

I think six days. I left early because the deadline for filming for the Get Lesta video was on that weekend, but I thought it was going to be four days because I only vaguely looked at the email before I went, and there were a few places where we were spending a few days, so I only brought four days worth of clothes, I was wearing the underwear and everything for days…I was stinking it up. There was a point where they had to get me a t-shirt from the London stock room because I was wearing the same t-shirt I had on when I skated Southbank. I was skating the stairs and there was glass at the bottom, I got blood all over my shirt, sweat everywhere and we were off to this nice swing bar thing (laughs). I literally looked like a tramp; it was like the good old days.

Okay, like who?

A guy called Jamie (Staples), and the whole Horns Crew, everyone’s just killing it these days, it’s ridiculous. Josh Snooks, Josh Gregory, he’s ridiculous.

What about Jack Edwards? What do you remember about the Motive days, skating with him?

He was a close friend of mine for a little while. He loved Lord of the Rings and used to call my house The Shire – “am I staying over The Shire for a week?”

It was during the summer holidays when I was in school, he’d come stay at mine for a week, I’d go stop with him for a week…it was sick. That dude was one of the best I’ve ever seen in my life, hands down. The technical ability on that guy was so unbelievable, so incredibly talented. It was a pity that he faded out, just one day he stopped talking to me. I was texting him asking if he was good then one day I got a message from his old friend Greg and he was like “have you spoke to Jack lately?” I told him I’d tried to get hold of him but couldn’t. He popped back up out of the blue on a Radlands edit – he did flip back nosegrind nollie flip on the three set ledge, in eight goes or something. He could still do it as well as he could always do it. The guy is amazing.

Here’s the obligatory Cal question – how many times has Cal broken you?

Oh my God, man (laughs). On the last day of filming for this video I sacked myself and smacked my head on the same day. He’s put me in hospital five times, maybe six, with broken bones, ankles, this, that and the other. For this video I’ve not been put in hospital by Cal, but I did put myself in hospital a little while ago skating flat. I shattered my fourth and fifth metatarsals doing a frontside nollie flip. My foot slipped off the front of the board and folded in the middle, and shattered my fourth and fifth; I was out for six months or something (laughs).

You seem to bounce back from it all pretty well – like, when you wrenched your ankle at Watersports in Nottingham, people take slams that aren’t as bad as that one and you never see them again. They get into other stuff and just vanish, whereas you always seem to come back from it.

Oh I got into a lot of beer, I put a lot of weight on after that. I got a fat neck (laughs). We shot some photos of the new Get Lesta t’s to put on the Internet, and we couldn’t use mine because I had a massive double chin from being injured and sitting on the couch for however long just drinking beers. I live so far from anything that I can’t walk anywhere, I couldn’t afford cabs because I wasn’t working, so I’d just sit on my couch and drink beer, all day.

As soon as I got back I bought a shit ton of physio stuff. I was doing yoga – don’t tell anyone – and I did loads of physio on my ankle. I bought bands, boards, everything you need to recover, and I went in, put the effort in, and it worked. It’s not really played up in like a year, either.

Who decides what you do for an ender? Do you decide that that particular trick is going to be the ender? What if you did something better a little later – would everyone get sworn to secrecy again?

For me, the switch heel, it was the work I put in. And I’d already broken my ankle at Watersports too so that trick was like a ‘fuck you’ to the spot. There was the pressure on me, how uncomfortable I felt trying to skate it, and the amount of times we’d gone back for it, and because it’s a bigger stair set as well…there are a lot of factors that have gone towards that being my ender.

We were doing really well with keeping it a secret as well because I did it probably five months ago, and I even had Mike (Simons) comment on one of my statuses. I posted something, on Facebook I can’t remember what it was, and Mike commented “yeah, but you still can’t switch heel Watersports” and I was so hyped because then I knew that keeping it a secret had worked. I don’t even know if he knows now; he will do after this comes out.

Have you got any Buszy footage in your part?

No…oh yeah, I do! What am I on about? (Laughs) I’ve got two tricks on T-Block in there.

It’s funny that you can do tricks like you were doing the other week – the alley-oop fakie shove-it nosegrind reverts – and they just go on Instagram. I mean, I don’t think I’ve seen those tricks before, ever.

The reason that I put those two tricks up was because I never thought I’d do them at a street spot in my life. I can do them on a two and a half inch high manny pad but that’s about it. But I did manage to do one in a line on the DC trip on a street block so I was pissed off at myself for uploading them before, but fuck it, who cares? That’s just the way it goes.

So who chose your name then? Because you’ve got a few middle names haven’t you?

James David Rockingham Bush – I’ve got four names. Bush is my parent’s surname, but I was given the other three names before I was adopted. The two ambulance drivers who took me from the park bench to the hospital were called James and David, so obviously I want to keep those names, and Rockingham is where I was found, but fuck that (laughs).

So you’re going to get Rockingham removed by deed poll then?

Yeah.

What are you going to get put in there in its place? Buszy?

(Laughing) Yep – James David Buszy Bush. There’s good meaning behind all three of the names, I just don’t really want to be associated with Rockingham.

So Stern just sent through screengrabs of the questions for you from the Whatsapp group…

These are going to be good (laughs).

What made you go from baggy to drainpipe? That’s from Goose…

We went to the DC HQ in London and me and John Bell got insanely drunk. The next day Ed took us to get some sample stuff, and I was still drunk as shit, I wasn’t thinking about sizes or anything, and I took this really nice pair of grey trousers. When I put them on they were hugging my legs (laughs). I wore them one day and I got no end of abuse from Cal. “Jeggings” was the quote. That was an accident.

What language do you speak? And what accent do you call that?

Drunk. And annoying.

Why do you like fat girls?

Fucking hell…(laughs).

When are you going to get into conspiracy theories like everyone else from MK?

I had a stint when I was younger, when I used to smoke a lot of weed I kind of went for it, but then when Jack went off the radar I took the hint and dropped it. When I stopped smoking weed I just didn’t care any more. Hornz all the way.