Alpine Chicken Lager: Team Building at Team Trouble

Photography by James Collins

Text by Denis Bagley

Something had to be done – things were looking at best shaky, at worst nigh on mutinous in the lower ranks of Dungeon Inc. Even middle management was looking shaky; Joxa holed away in Norfolk, in the throes of tannin psychosis, refusing to come into the office unless it was moved to Swindon Job Centre; Rikk Fields too busy parenting or attending Inner Terrestrials gigs to fit a week in Europe into his schedule; Moss wandering the hills of Newquay, speaking little to others but muttering to himself non-stop about Shackleton, igloos and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Even Rybo, the team’s head of HR, was showing signs of strain, his first reaction upon being invited to Team Trouble in Laax being to question the financial viability of such a trip. Thankfully, his resourceful nature saw him creating a vehicular sleeping arrangement satisfactory to his needs, and he was back in. And, when French rang me in a panic a few weeks before the crew undertook a trip through Italy, wondering what could be done, it was in Team Trouble – where he would be working before the trip – that I saw an opportunity. For I, in one of the various hats I wear as a high-ranking corporate consultant at large, am adept in the organisation of individually tailored team building exercises which embody the qualities and values of your business, organising exercises which will help your employees embrace the ideals of synergy and interdepartmental collaboration which help bring around positive financial returns. It even says so on my business cards, which are correspondingly quite big, but still stylish enough in their off-white colouring and tasteful thickness. 

This Dungeon situation was one of the worst cases of workplace malaise I had ever seen, but in the ethos of Team Trouble there could perhaps be laid the seeds of a solution; seeds which would be tenderly cultivated, heaped high with the manure of friendship and their shoots sprayed repeatedly with the DDT of camaraderie, to ensure a bountiful crop of teamwork. Because, while there might be no ‘I’ in team, there definitely is one in ‘invert on your friend’s head’. There might even be more. And it was this level of trust and synchronicity which can be seen during the annual group-focused event that I wanted to study, in order to nurture the aforementioned seedlings, building up the basis for untold analogy, perhaps even ending in a state-enforced agricultural reform plan of ‘can do’ attitude. I’d also heard rumours of free booze, but that didn’t influence my decision one bit. Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, bullet points and tenuous analogies representing growth were my modus operandi for the weekend, and let no one tell you otherwise.

I disembark from my flight into Zurich Airport expecting the kind of cold that simultaneously stifles blood flow to the extremities and turns your nipples harder than the task of attempting to fix an Excel document populated by the work experience kid who’s been foisted upon the team by the boss, his uncle; the kind that taints the mind, has you huddling next to your fellow man not in warmth or kinship but more like Childs and MacReady at the end of John Carpenter’s The Thing, passing a bottle of scotch between yourselves as you realise the futility of a future for humanity, wondering if the other is even human. But my fears were unfounded. The early grab catches the worm, as my grandmother used to say after a few bottles of Buckfast, and so I and the majority of the UK contingent have headed out bright and early from a sunny Heathrow. And, against all odds, as well as the forecast, we board the shuttle bus from Zurich to Laax in a similarly warm climate.

Thursday, despite the snow weighing down festively on the branches of the pine outside my hotel window, sees the sun shine on our first full day in the alpine resort. Almost immediately, my position as impartial observer is compromised – Charlie and Diz need two more people to make Team Pisstap a viable force, and so I am forced into a position I don’t necessarily want to be in. Advising others is one thing, but actually taking part? Embodying the role of integral cog in the monstrous machine of team harmony? I try to justify it as essential first-hand training, like those training videos that tell you not to lift with your back, or the modules on how to say hello to another human being over the course of a two hour interactive session featuring a test at the end. But our warm-up heat is not entirely a success. Having successfully bullied Jimmy Wilkins into being on Team Pisstap, despite his obvious shortcomings in terms of skateboarding ability, we are told by the powers that be that, as he is already on a team, he couldn’t possibly be on ours as well. Despite my pleas, though I wax lyrical on how essential interdepartmental communication and synergy are to the growth of a successful business model, Alan is adamant; no doubling up. We begrudgingly acquiesce, instead bullying Jake Yanko into joining our team, despite the clear dip in median skateboard standards that this would bring to our crew. But the poor bugger, clearly embarrassed by having to skate alongside those better versed in early grabbing than himself, doesn’t even show up. We don’t hold it against him – I’d be intimidated in his shoes, too – and do the best we can as a trio, but I realise mid-kickturn (cue delighted gasps from the crowd) that I am jealous of Jake, away from the adoring crowd, hidden from the limelight in which I currently adulate. Our warm up time ends, I head outside, I turn my gaze upon snow-capped slopes and consider the words of John Muir; “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away into the mountains to learn the news.”

I slap myself in the face; hard, perhaps even harder than creating an office rota for buying milk and coffee. These intrusive thoughts must be kept at bay. I breathe deeply, internally conjuring the LinkedIn colour palette until I calm down, just like the doctor advised. And, once back inside, I think I understand. Groups of skateboarders, some in costume, are bouncing around the bowl at the same time – often within a gnat’s arse of colliding but for the most part emerging unscathed. The range of outfits should be noted here; there are cops, robbers, chefs, Dexys Midnight Runners, even a few oddballs dressed as skateboarders (“Just speak to the guy in the checked shirt and chinos.” Yeah cheers pal.) Team Pocket Fluff, resplendent in pimping regalia, are clear front runners for the best costume award.

The spirit of the event even affects Jake, who returns to make up for his earlier no-show and, despite grabbing his board questionably late, manages to keep up with the rest of us. The judges aren’t put off by the other three team member’s strange obsession with grabbing behind the knee and, awed by my ability to put hand to skateboard way before the lip of the ramp is even in my line of sight, put us straight through to the quarter finals. While my lower back weeps tears of compressed spinal fluid, my brain and liver sync up to enjoy some well-earned lager-based beverages, augmented by the ‘schnapps in a plastic snake head’ which occasionally materialises from the sweaty throng. 

I gingerly make my way down the next day to breakfast, a surprisingly sparsely populated event when compared to the queues at the skatepark bar the night before. If an army marches on its stomach, I think, it may stand to reason that a skateboarding team staggers on its liver. My lumbar region, however, is beyond movement altogether; if I were to extend this already stretched analogy, it would be the deserter who was shot and whose corpse was left in the snow for the wolves and bears to feed on, but not before each member of the team had taken a long, derogatory and perhaps mildly dehydrated piss on it. But that was fine; today was the day in which numerous best trick events would occur, ones which allowed the riders’ inner misanthrope to shine. It was no event for the team builder but for the individualist; the bearded doomsday prepper hiding out in the hills, the skater quietly having their own session behind their local retail park on a Sunday night, the Steppenwolf unable to control their “mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols…” In this spirit, Charlie Gush decides to wallride a large TV screen propped against a wall for safekeeping.

The vert best trick jam begins with the installation of a metal extension on one side, immediately drawing the attention of the members of our cohort noticeable by the nauseating trail of pad stink which followed in their wake. Whilst these solo flights of self-indulgence are of no help to my purpose here, the trapezoidal shape of the extension does bring to mind fondly the pyramid approach to team building, and I remember with a nostalgic glint in my eye many a presentation in which I have let the words ‘strong foundation’ and ‘systematic approach to person development’ waft over my glassy-eyed, underpaid listeners. The bowl is similarly being  garlanded with sponsor-themed accoutrements, from a Marshall amplifier sub box to a Yeti cooler placed precariously across a hip. There is even a rectangle of mesh wire fencing, set a little back from the coping on one of the smaller transitions in the bowl, a homage to Natas Kaupas’ slow-mo fence booting in Streets on Fire. This immediately draws my attention but sadly, with too much doubt in my ability, I am forced back to the position of spectator, adviser, supper of beverages. And my careful observance is soon to be rewarded. As the bowl session draws to a close, two teams of two skaters begin to build towards something electrifying. From Team 110’s corner, channeling the power they harnessed whilst filming the brilliant Tea & Biscuits miniramp edit, Jordan Thackeray is attempting to 50-50 grind across the loveseat whilst Alex Hallford balances a precision crook stall on Jordan’s outside rail. Meanwhile, in the same spot, Pieter de Clus’ own back 50-50 is graced by Matteo Vandeputte’s backside tail. After lengthy battles, both duos land their tricks in quick succession to rapturous applause and throwing of cans.

Taste for excitement sated, we head for a bar up the road, where the latest Heroin video is showing, preceded by Rybo’s video from last year’s post-Laax Pisstap adventures, and I muse that the process of getting me a drink is also a team activity – from the drayman who delivered the keg, to the bartender who connected it up and poured my drink, to those who had organised the event which had brought me to my plastic cup of Alpine beer in the first place – and I am profoundly grateful to every single one of them. As we queue for a drink, a disco track begins to play with a chorus that sounds seductively like a nonsensical chant of ‘chicken lager’. It is unlikely that this is the actual lyric, but it should be; it works its way deep into my head, nestling up in the ‘chicken slogan’ portion of my brain next to Beirut institution Deek Duke’s ‘All Chicken No Rules’ and the accidental Stokes Croft frontage offering ‘Fried Chicken Drinks’, all shimmying and swaying atop my cerebral cortex like nematodes of the mind. To those who make Team Trouble happen, I can only wish a multitude of chicken lagers upon you all.

The next day is the event’s denouement and, despite my body feeling like it has been dipped in a vat of poultry booze, I enter the spirit of things by trying to push the early grab to brave new stinkbug worlds. Charlie spray paints ‘Pisstap’ on a sheet of wood, Diz does a streetplant on the platform, Jake floats above us despite the cast on his wrist and we finish up by fingerboarding our way towards the finals… but, with the judges clearly distracted at essentials moments of our run, we do not make it through to the semis. “More fool them,” I think, immediately scanning the room for loose beer tokens. 

Eventually, deciding that I’ve been basically huffing other people’s pad soup for too long, I take my can outside to watch Diz and Sox skating the building’s skylight with the express purpose of James Collins getting a photo from within. Across the weekend, amongst the many other sub-events, there has been in honour of Dead Dave a ‘best streetplant’ contest running. Hence I find myself filming Diz’s efforts, planted firmly upside down with a hopefully enforced sheet of glass the only thing between him and a 40ft drop to the flat bottom. The streetplant is a notoriously solitary pursuit, but there are plenty of athletic fellas and ladies gathered here for the weekend. As I watch one half of Team Full English jump on the other half’s shoulders and carve around the bowl as two terrifying dual-humans, I realise that it would be theoretically possible for one human to streetplant upon another – to return to my earlier cinematic reference point, a ‘John Carpenter’s The Streetplant’ sort of scenario – but it is often the case that a prophet is ignored in his lifetime, and my mumbled theories, put forward a few hours later in a cramped corner of the Indy Bar, are dismissed as the gibberings of an idiot. 

This, however, comes later. Diz’s mission achieved, alongside a few choice manual variations from Sox, I head back inside to watch events unfold. There are pizza boxes, footballs, bald men with heads painted like bowling balls, squirrel men doing backflips to flat, myriad overs and unders and tricks on tricks. This is not always an unmitigated success; elsewhere in the country, at the Cern nuclear physics facility, scientists are attempting to discover more about the forces which bind together the protons and neutrons which form the very fabric of our universe. I can’t help but feel, however, that they’d do well to have boyed off their Large Hadron Collider for the night and got themselves down to Laax Freestyle Academy to witness a Large Mechelen Collider between teammates Jeroen Bruggeman and Wannes Derycke. I’m pretty sure I witnessed the birth of a small universe as their bodies collided, but it might just have been a little bit of Moretti-scented bile flung from Jeroen’s lips.

Apart from this, and a few other macabre blips in the schedule (big up Physio by Bix, whose tape was basically holding half of the visitors upright by Saturday evening), the event is a sweaty, booze-drenched success. As I stand in one of the rider’s rooms later that evening, swaying slightly and chanting, “Too many men, too many many men,” I reflect that perhaps this is the answer to a satisfied team – not in going to games bars, or axe throwing centres run by bearded gym-goers who look like they wish they had been involved in storming the Capitol Building, or in being forced to attempt group vocals of 2010s pop songs in expensive events centres, but in visiting somewhere new, not showering for multiple days and skating through as many minor injuries as your body will allow. And, of course, I am now with the Dungeon team for another six days; my lower back better toughen up, or else. There is a gleam in my eye as I think of the possibilities; no more clocking in, no more starchy suits, no more Teams meetings which are spent planning future Teams meetings, just the open road, a few like-minded nomads and a car boot full of skateboards and beer.

The next morning I awake to the phone ringing; it is French, asking if I’m ready to get going. Rybo is packed up outside, the engine is running, there is no time to lose. I pause. A drip of sweat rolls from my armpit down towards my elbow, a nerve in my right eyelid starts pulsing as I put down the phone, gently, as if placing a child in a cot, beside the closest bin. I place my battered copy of ‘My First Summer in the Sierra’ in my pocket, quietly gather the rest of my things, and begin my blissful trudge towards the hills.

Apart from a short missive containing the above, nothing has been heard from our reporter. There have, however, been found empty beer cans decorated with crudely scrawled drawings of chickens, and reports have been made by hikers of recently abandoned lean-tos and the ashes of fires hastily extinguished. Investigations are continuing, with all efforts being made to contact the missing person.