Lucien Clarke interview
HUCK meets the newly-made pro skater from London who is currently making a big name for himself.
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Lucien is someone who has very much got a look about him. With his long-limbed frame, chaotic hair, trademark cap and the sort of grin that seeps into every feature on his face, he’s someone you just can’t help noticing. But there’s also another reason this 22-year-old Londoner will catch your attention: to borrow a local colloquialism, man can skate!
As proof of this, the day we meet is the day that Lucien Clarke is being made. One of his sponsors Palace Skateboards is holding a party in his honour to launch his first pro board – a deck complete with Jamaican colours in a nod to his place of birth. It’s yet another event to mark the great year Clarke is having. With his appearance in Chris Mulhern’s skate film This Time Tomorrow (claiming the coveted prestigious end section no less), getting his own colourway with shoe sponsor DVS and a clothing hook up with Altamont Apparel, he's climbing up the ranks thanks to his unique style and a penchant for a big set of stairs.
“Tshhh,” he exhales an happy sigh when asked about it all. “I don’t know, man, I’m stoked I guess. It’s probably gonna push me to skate harder really.” He lets out a short and slightly uncomfortable chuckle at the end: “Day-to-day, nothing really changes though, I guess.”
Being a pro nowadays goes beyond just being shit hot on a skateboard: it’s representing a brand, being a ‘face’ and getting that all-important coverage. Does he feel up to the challenge? “I don’t really feel that anything is different,” he says with a disarming honesty. “There’s probably more expectation from people who don’t know me. The people who know me know how I get on - I just skate and do what I do.”
And this skating is firmly out on the streets with him citing Andrew Reynolds and “gnarly shit” like Baker 2G and Zero’s Misled Youth video as a big influence. “I don’t really like contests. The way people get when they enter them. All the pressure, they become like animals, man, really hungry,” he says, pulling a war-like face to prove his point.
But a warface can come in handy for skating the coarse London concrete when winter comes around. “You’ve got to soldier through it, I’m a soldier,” says Clarke with another wide smile. “It gets really cold and it goes through to your bones. But when you get through it, you feel much better about yourself.”
While there may be an abundance of spots through the capital – protected by security guards with varying degrees of aggression – South Bank still remains popular as ever. Lucien is not immune to its charm either (you can find some raw, grainy footage of him skating it on YouTube). But with redevelopment underway, many believe that the iconic spot’s days are numbered.
Says Clarke on the topic: “They are just ruining it. They are trying to turn it into all shops and Starbucks. They should just leave it. Now you go there, there is a white line around it that says ‘skatepark’. A security guard came up to me and was like ‘can you go behind that line?’ I can’t believe it.”
Now filming for Palace’s debut team video, you can keep an eye out for more Lucien in the not-too-distant future. Not that you’d be able to miss him.
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Lucien Clarke interview (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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