The Chrome Ball Incident returns with an interview with East Coast OG, miniramp master and lip trick connoisseur Barker Barrett. Barker came up in late 80s Pennsylvania and quickly ended up through travelling as part of New York’s Shut Skates crew (which would later morph into the classic Zoo York team), so there are plenty of engaging stories to be read here about Jeremy Henderson’s team managing style, going to demos with Sean Sheffey, the warehouse being in the same building as Sonic Youth’s practice space and more.

From then on he was involved with Chris Miller’s Planet Earth, the original Creature Skateboards team with Jason Adams and various other both long and short term companies, ending up managing the IPath team during the all-too-brief ‘IPath Promo’ era and putting down one of the best parts of that particular video. In case you don’t know what that means, it means Fred Gall stories – and if that isn’t reason enough to click the image below and start reading then we don’t know what is!

This interview had the added bonus of introducing me to Barker’s recent slappy grind video, which dropped when I was on holiday – doing slappies on American curbs, in fact – and avoiding the internet at all costs, so I’m stoked enough now to share it here too…

“It’s just one of those things, man. I think it had so much to do with the downtime in skateboarding. But if a switch kickflip backside tailslide is what everyone is doing, why the fuck are you doing it? We don’t need another one. Those guys are doing it just fine. There were entire skateboard companies at the time who were putting out videos that you could easily double-expose over a Girl video…. same spots, the same tricks.”