Kai Your style is highly innovative how do you come up with new slides?

Alex It ¡s very much a team effort, we all bring a different skill to the table. Some of us are really good at analysing moves and other riders, working out how to do different tricks. Sometimes it's just by chance and other times you go into a trick too fast over cook it and some how manage to pull it off but with a new twist or tweak. There are six of us, which allows us to watch and learn from one another. The creativity within the group comes from the individual elements of each rider. Nothing is sacred everything is shared.

Kai What got most of you into sliding?

Alex I got into sliding after seeing my workshop technicians making gloves and sliding down the hills at collage!! That was it for me-the missing piece of the puzzle! I snow board and surf a lot so sliding was the perfect thing to compliment my other sports.

Chris I had a go on Alex's flexi-deck down one of our local hills, had fun, got some speed wobble, but got down the hill ok. We rented Dogtown & Zeeboys and soon after I had cut out 36 deck from a piece birch, 12ply and away I went. Saw some clips of Sergio Yuppie and Cliff Coleman and got some hard wheels¡K

Kai What brought you guys together?

AlexSliding brought us together! We all used to long board but on our own or in small groups. Most of the time bombing and carving about down the hills of Falmouth. Chris and I skated together and Chris new Dom (Random Rides skate shop owner) from playing basketball together. I new Tom from just skating about and he was good friends with Mark, Andy and Dom too. One day I went bombing with Mark and Dom, I was on the first every Faltown board doing some basic 360's and Coleman slides-well it turned out that Mark was a bit of a secret slider too and a few smokes and a skate later we were all good friends looking for the future of sliding.

Kai Any competition experience, If not do you see any competing in the future?

Alex As far as we know there have not been any official slide competitions in the UK. The first time we met Cliff was at the Lush Long boards Spring Session. They put on an awesome weekend and took us to over 50 different hills to bomb, slide and carve. Cliff held a small slope style competition their on a road called switch backs-we took the top six places.

We heard that there was a slide competition in Paris last year during the Slalom World cup, if it's on this year count us in!! We are also looking to set up the UK DH Slide Association and hold a UK Slide championship this September! It¡¦s a tricky thing to do and we will be talking to as many people as possible within the industry to come up with a format we are all happy with. We've got some wicked ideas and we have some TV interest in it too. But we cant say too much as nothing is finalised as yet.

Cliff and our selves have been talking a lot about the future of sliding and we both see big things! What we do is highly visual and very exciting. This makes it a great for TV, which is highly important for the expansion and growth of the sport.

Kai Who do you see as a leader in innovation besides yourselves?

Alex It's all about Sergio Yuppie. That man is a genius and we all admire what he does and want to mimic his moves. He's so smooth and fast. J.M Durann and Patrick Risso are two other awesome skaters who have great style and technique. We skated with them in Berkley. These guys have it down. They no really technical no hand slides and nose blunt slides etc. And *censored* me! Have you seen these guys Bomb a hill! We followed JM down Centennial in Berkley in a car then lost him at 40mph round a 90-degree bend!! And never caught him!! We followed him a second time through a strait and he was hitting 60-65mph, no worries!

Kai You are now into the retail market with the board release was that much of a switch? What made you decide to do that? How do I as an American get one of your boards?

Alex Faltown Skateboards has been around for as long as we have been sliding. The first Faltown board was made the day I got my first set of hard wheels. I had been sliding 88a wheels before that on a narrow board-just getting the basics down. I got my wheels and shaped my self a nice wide neck deck, set it up and off I went. It was revolutionary for me and it transformed my skating.

Chris Faltown as it stands now, first sparked for me as I made a funky little logo for the name Faltown Skateboards, stuck it under some grip tape and went from there.

It has all progressed pretty naturally with various opportunities and like minds wanting to see if we could do it for real. We had to produce a better product for our customers, so we re¡Vmodelled the shapes and took a long time getting them right.

Alex Faltown was set up because we had no money to buy equipment when we were at College. So we made our own. Then Dom Lilly kindly offered to sell our boards in his shop and we were off. We original set up to make custom skateboards. We had a range of shapes where the customer could specify the size, shape and angle of concave and kicks and get custom one off graphics. We found we didn't have the time to make enough boards as we were finishing our University degrees at the same time!

As we ran out of stock we decided to dive into the world of OEM skateboards. We now get all our boards made at the Madrid factory in California to our own specification. We can't offer as much custom work, but we can offer a far superior product. This allows us to concentrate on the movie, website and product development.

If you live in Europe you will be able to buy direct off of our new website which will be going live this spring, but as an American you will have to wait a few months until we have set up our USA distribution. Sorry about that guys.

Kai What slide gloves you using?

Alex We make our own. You have to use UHMWPE on the palm it is the best stuff for the job, just ask any serious slider and they will tell you the same. Different people swear by different things and that¡¦s cool, but UHMWPE is the best thing we have come across.

We are product testing a number of different designs of slide glove at the moment and we are hoping to have the product ready for this summer so keep your eyes peeled!

Kai What are you riding as a slide deck?

Alex We all ride a Faltown 3.2 slide specific deck. This board has had the most rider input out of the whole range. We got our team involved and asked them what they thought would make the best slide board? After many long nights drinking coffee and discussing ideas the 3.2 was formed. It was the final shape in a long line of design considerations, hence the numerical the name for it.

The board is designed to give the rider a lot of space to move their feat around the board. The spoon rails give the effect of a tighter concave in the middle. This means that as a rider you always know were your feet are on the board with out needing to look-if the concave feels tight you are in the middle if it feels wider you are over the trucks. A lot of our moves rely on foot adjustments and if you look at our videos you will see that our feet are often in different places of the board during different parts of a trick. Sometimes only our toes will be on the board. This is the advantage of a wide deck, if your foot does come off there is plenty space to help you get it back on quickly.

Cliff asked us for a board and he pulled a couple of 360's first run out. He later told us that he hadn't pulled that many since the 80's!

Kai Any session that stands out in your mind?

Alex Ooooooh they are all are so event full! I think it is the bigger events that stick out in my mind, The first time we met Cliff in Sheffield at the Lush Longboards event was pretty crazy. Those guys now how to put on an event and to meet Cliff and get his nod of approval that was amazing. Sheffield was the first place we had all skated together with people from outside of Cornwall and I think we turned a few heads.

Chris This January when we went to San Francisco, we did a twenty nine block run from the top of the suburbs to the bottom with some locals guys who we just happened to meet in the park one day. That was an awesome session.

We are all really good friends with Cliff. We hung out with himself and his crew in Berkley this January. Cliff was amazing and he looked after us so well and introduced us to some of the best skaters in the country. The sessions we had there with the Berkley crew and the San Jose crew were awesome and so much fun, every thing we saw inspired us.

Kai Where do you see sliding going next both with your crew and with the world?

Alex As we said earlier, sliding has got the potential to be massive. It is already the second most favoured skateboard discipline in Brazil and Cliff tells me that there are at least ten people as good as Sergio out there! Could you imagine ten Sergio's spinning down a hill in Brazil, sounds like Heaven to us!!

As far as our crew goes I know there is going to be some stuff over the next year that will blow your mind! The advantage we have is that there are six highly creative people that slide and skate together every week-and we've been doing that for nearly two years now and you know what they say six heads are better than one!!

We all feed off each other and share everything we learn, nothing is held back from anyone and we are always trying each others moves. Everyone has their own unique style e.g. You could see two different riders pull the same trick but it will look aesthetically different. That's what's so interesting about sliding, you can really adapt it to you style of riding.

Kai Seems like sliding is starting to get more attention why is that

Alex You can take sliding as far as you want. You can just learn how to slide to stop to give you some real confidence at high speed or take it to a higher level and start doing all the technical slides and riding harder wheels. It also means that as long as the road is reasonably smooth you can skate down any sized hill you like without even breaking a sweat! We've managed to skate a rough 1:4 hill out the back of the hostel in San Francisco! As the discipline became much more technical and fast the more interest was created. We were one of the first teams to put out an all slide series of web movies. The response we had was enormous and helped many people get into it.

Once you get a pair of gloves and learn to slide your confidence doubles and it is a natural thing to try more tricks. The best thing about it is if you crash you just slide along on your hands. It gets really technical as well so I guess street skaters can relate to it. They¡¦re used to breaking down moves and working out tricks aswell.

Kai What is your favorite slide?

Alex Good question it changes every week, last week it was the surrender spin. You can go into it at full speed and just keep spinning. I can get about 5 or 6 rotations-but after skating in Berkley I want to get my Nose and Tail Blunts down.

Chris My favourite move is a one handed layback tailslide. Kick out with your back foot, put your back hand down and slam that tail on the ground and slide on your two back wheels.

Kai You mind if I ask what you are working on now?

Alex At the moment we are putting together the finishing touches to our new website which will be going live really soon, then we plan to finish our DVD. We have been filming the progression of our sliding since day one. We have over 2 years worth of sessions on tape, and four major events we visited which we filmed and documented. The video will be a mix off action, documentation and education. And will feature a slide school and plenty of tips and how toos and a lot of us clowning around on skateboards!