Michael Tarry – Issue 40 Interview

Support Michael’s climb of Mont Blanc for SkatePal here.

Introduction & Interview by Al Hodgson

Photography by Reece Leung, Gerard Riera & James Griffiths

Call me inattentive, but I didn’t realise that Moose’s real name was Michael for almost 2 years of knowing him. Obviously I knew he wouldn’t be ‘Moose’ on his birth certificate, but it just seemed weird to consider him going by any other moniker. I also didn’t know that he was a dual national until he picked up the phone one day and started having a fluent conversation in Czech. It’s always interesting to find out new layers of your friends’ lives, but both of these examples highlight to me how delayed my inquisition was into his… What I did pick up in him from very early on however, was his resilience. Dude can really take a slam, get up, walk it off, and try again. Sometimes it even seems like it’s a prerequisite for him to know he can actually roll away from something heavy.

This robust frame also persists through his landings as it does in his falls – a no-gimmicks approach with a confidence and firmness that (as a somewhat flaccid skateboarder myself) I have always found engaging.  And, as far as I can tell, that courageous constitution seems to bleed over beyond just physicality and into his personal and social life too. Moving away solo at 19 to another country, making new friends, immersing oneself in a different culture and not giving up on trying to make it work all demonstrate a certain strength of will whichever way you slice it. 

It’s great to see Moose utilise this facet and thrive down there in Catalonia. Likewise, it’s always a pleasure to catch up whenever he’s back in the UK. Looking forward to our next missions mate, I’ve got a list of hefty Sussex crust patiently waiting with your name on…

OK, first things first. ‘Moose’ or Michael? I feel like only old friends get ‘Moose’ privileges…

Haha whichever you prefer really. It’s a nickname I’ve had since I was 12 and though most people know me as Moose it feels pretty ridiculous to be 25 and introducing myself to people as that. No beef to the other Mooses, Furbys, Slashs or other nicknamed skaters out there though!

Not to make this interview at all about me, but it seems that as a filmer I’m probably associated with Harrison (Woolgar), Dougie (George) and Dan (Fisher) the most. Yet, from that crew, I filmed with you before any of them. We filmed a short section for my first proper Brighton edit (CIRCADIAN) just before you left the country. They’re some fond memories filming on those freezing nights with you…

Yeah it’s funny, I never really thought about that. I guess it was me, Ellis (Gardiner) and Zane (Crowther) before the other boys got on the next videos… I guess that was my first proper skate video project and it ended up being a really nice way to wrap up living in Brighton. Like most videos we pushed it down to the wire and I’m pretty sure three of my clips were filmed the day before I moved to Barcelona; definitely that fakie flip down the stairs outside the station with the gutter thing before it. All I remember about that video was it was so hard to balance getting as many day clips as night clips, especially through the winter. In all of those night clips it just looks so fucking cold. I love the vibe of that video because of that though, and you smashed it with the soundtrack to go with it, as always.

Cheers man, I was kind of still getting to grips with the VX at that point but I’m still pretty happy with how that project ended up. So, both your parents are from outside of the UK and both emigrated from their home countries around the same age that you yourself left yours. Can you speak a little about that, and whether it’s played into your national identity at all? 

So my dad is originally from a town near Durban in South Africa (although he’s half English), and my mum’s from Prague in the Czech Republic. Dad came to East London when he was 18 and then met my mum travelling in Prague and she came to London in her early 20s after marrying him there. 

It played into my national identity a lot growing up, I mean I’ve always considered myself both English and Czech. I would visit a few times every year as a kid and spoke Czech growing up, though sadly I’ve forgotten most of the language now, and my mum always drilled it in us that we weren’t just English and to be proud of it. I think leaving her family and coming from there while it was still under Soviet occupation and the perception of foreigners that a lot of Brits had in the 80s meant she must’ve had a tough time of it, and was keen for her kids to maintain her national pride growing up. My dad left SA because he and his brothers were conscripted to the army during the apartheid, and none of them really ever went back there, so I guess his concept of national identity is very different to my mum’s or mine. 

Mine is a funny one, I’ve now lived in Barcelona for longer than I technically lived in Brighton. I moved from London to a village called Lindfield when I was 3, and then to Brighton at 16, then Barcelona at 19. I feel like a foreigner in Barcelona because of course I am, but also a bit like one when I go back to Brighton as well as it’s been so long and so many people have left.  

Do you think your parents’ backgrounds influenced your decision to move? 

Definitely. I don’t have a big family anchor in one place and I’m really lucky that both my parents have always been supportive of me and my brother going out and seeing as much of the world as we possibly can. I remember just before I left for Barcelona my dad telling me about how, at the same age, the decision to leave his village and go to London on a cargo ship was made between a Friday and a Sunday. Moving to Barcelona was a bit of a hair-brained scheme, and I remember naively thinking that my dad doing that before me was so fucking cool. 

You made that move to Barcelona in 2018 and, as far as I can tell, your experience of the city has maybe been a little different to a majority of British skate expats. Rather than getting caught up in the MACBA/party whirlpool you’ve actually trying to forge a career out there, learn the language and immerse yourself in Spanish/Catalonian culture. Can you tell me what you do for work and a little about how life outside of skating is over there? 

I work as an English teacher between Barcelona and the UK. At the moment I give private classes at people’s houses and businesses around the city, and then once a month or so I help run study programmes/summer schools in the UK and Italy for a company called Dusemond. I think I definitely had my fair share of fun in the Barcelona party whirlpool, but if I’m honest it seems the city has mellowed out a bit post-COVID. A few of the bars at the heart of it have now closed and maybe people have just got older. I think I got to a point where I realised why I was actually here and for what reasons. Barcelona and Catalonia in general is such a beautiful part of the world, and there is so much to get stuck into outside of the MACBA/skate tourist bubble. I guess having friends who don’t skate helps too. Not to say I don’t still love a tipple though, and I don’t have anything against the MACBA/Raval bubble. I just don’t think it’s very good for me.

For sure, I think that’s definitely important if you want somewhere to have any kind of longevity in your life too. It can’t just be no responsibility party vibes forever. Similarly to that, it also seems like your approach to skating out there is quite refreshing and explorative too. From the outside it looks like you and your current crew approach spot hunting in almost the same way we did in the UK, foregoing the oversaturated in favour of hunting down somewhat lesser seen bits and pieces. Do you think that’s an accurate comparison, and if so was it intentional?

Yeah, I guess it’s trying to squeeze the most you can out of a place. Brighton has limited spots, and London, Barcelona or, say, LA, have a lot of completely rinsed spots, but that doesn’t mean there’s not stuff that hasn’t been seen as much or skated in a different way. I also love the idea of finding things that haven’t been done yet at completely overly-skated spots or well-known areas because to me it’s what makes a skater stand out. Though unless you’re sending something over the Alex Olson road gap, MACBA is definitely off limits. 

Who are some of your inspirations in regard to that approach to skating Barcelona?

When I first moved, Bjorn at Sour hooked me up working in the warehouse/office and I spent a lot of time around those guys in my first couple of years, so I guess Gustav and those guys really opened my eyes to stuff at first. Now you have Joscha Aicher, Maxi Schlabe and the other German guys, the Petshop and Lockjaw guys, the Rassvet guys… Dougie and Quentin over in London. Loads of people get me hyped. I’m a big fan of the WKND guys and how they approach LA/California, Atlantic Drift, and any of the Aussie scene skaters (I dunno what goes into their breakfasts as kids but fuck me). 

With that in mind, can you tell us a little bit about ‘Better Off Shook’ and ‘Far Green Country’?

‘Better Off Shook’ or just ‘Shook’ came from our Aussie mates Shannon (Cheung) and Jayden (Rofe)’s slang for beer fear.  After the lockdown in Spain a lot of us were on unemployment benefit or furloughed, so we went on a few trips and our mate Benny (Ben Dixon) decided to start filming skating. That was where our first video came from. Now sadly all of us have had to get off the dole and get real jobs again, so the videos are coming a bit slower, but the drive is definitely still alive and well! 

‘Far Green Country’ in a way is linked to a longing for the green countryside of home, or maybe just the idea of it. It was started by Benny and Edd (Gregory, also great with film) who wanted to document the many cycling and camping trips that we do through mostly spring and summer. Catalonia as a province is great because it has a mix of mountains, really beautiful coastlines and fields and forests inland, so by bike it’s a lot of fun to explore. I suppose even this carries an element of the spot searching instinct of skating, except instead of a nice rail in some suburb we’re searching for the next best waterfall or beach cove. 

Were your initial plans to stay in Barcelona as long as you have? And do you intend to stay for the foreseeable?

 If I’m honest I don’t really know, when I first came it was on a bit of a whim and I just said I was going to move and see if I could figure it out. Now 6 years have passed and I’ve sort of built my life/base here. The quality of life and cost of living is great here and it feels like moving back to England would be a bit of a step back. After spending the first few years establishing myself I’m now more hyped on coming back to the UK regularly and maintaining my connection between there and Spain, and my work seems to enable that pretty perfectly. I love my life here in Barcelona, but I definitely don’t want to just disappear from the scene in the UK. The ideal would be to keep Barcelona as a base for the foreseeable and just keep travelling around from there as I am at the moment. 

Talking of travel, to me it’s rad that your original Brighton crew, despite separating geographically (with your move to Spain, Zane to Manchester, Dougie, Dan and Ellis to London, and Harrison staying here in Brighton), there’s still a really strong tie between everyone, with you linking up all over the place around the UK and Europe. It must be pretty nice that all the guys you grew up skating with are all still well within skateboarding and you can all link up often because of it. 

Yeah man, if it weren’t for all those guys I probably wouldn’t be so keen to come back to the UK so often! I’m really grateful to have always had such a tight crew of friends who are now all doing their thing respectively, but still maintaining the same interest and drive in skating that we always had. Maybe a little cringe, but it is just so sick to see all of your friends killing it at life and in skating wherever they are.  It keeps me driven and motivated in whatever I’m doing too. I guess as we get older it’s harder to coordinate full crew meetups, but having you running all of those Villagers trips through the last few years was a great way to do that. 

Cheers man, yeah they were fun. Talking of which, we had you back in the UK as VIP guest on our last Villagers trip to Dorset. Can you tell us the story behind the back tail ender in Bournemouth?

Haha oh god, that was a hectic one. Two weeks before that trip I took a nasty slam and got my hand jammed in a metal fence. I had to have a load of stitches running between my two fingers, basically holding them together. The day before the trip I had the stitches taken out and was terrified of falling on that hand, so I kept falling in these dodgy ways. We tried that back tail I think on the third day and I got pretty bullied on it for an hour or two, and then on the last day just before coming home we decided to go back for it. I was so knackered and could barely ollie on flat, and I remember thinking, “what the fuck am I doing here” as we drove to the spot. Then by some miracle I came away with it in maybe like 15 minutes and the trip was signed off on that high note. I remember seeing a photo of Charlie Birch back smithing it before I skated it and thinking it looked so good, though I’m sure he banged that one out a lot easier than my back tail haha. 

I lived around the corner from that rail when I was at uni. I used to walk past it all the time and it seemed unfeasibly high to me back then. Without that land I’m not sure we’d have had enough photos for the article because of all the rain on that trip, so I was really stoked you came through that last day and got it. So what projects are you working on at the moment?

There’s two new Better Off Shook videos set to come out – one that’s ready and one that’s not quite done yet – and then I’m working to finish a video part by the end of this year. I’ll also be in Brighton for a couple weeks in the summer to work on some bits with yourself and Harrison for separate videos. After that we’ve got another O.W.L trip set for October which I’m really excited for too. The first half of this year I had pretty bad luck with injuries, I was out for all of February and then part of April and now May with separate issues, so I’m hoping the second half of this year is more productive. 

Are you getting bits from anyone at the moment? 

Yeah, I’ve been getting some bits from Shiner for a little while and New Balance shoes for the last year or so, various product and support from Skatedeluxe Skate Shop, clothes from a company called Service Works which my good friend James Willet works/designs for, and I just recently started skating for Garden Skateboards.

Finally, any dedications or words of thanks?

Yeah! I’d like to thank everyone out there who has supported/backed me wherever you are in the world. A massive thanks to Gerard Riera, James Griffiths and Reece Leung who put so much of their time into shooting my photos, Gerard especially. Ben Dixon and Jules Meier for putting all the effort and time into filming, through successful and unsuccessful missions alike. To yourself for doing this interview, and for backing me since the beginning. The companies that support me, my amazing friends in both Barcelona, England and anywhere else for that matter. My mum, dad, brother Chris and my girlfriend Mhairi for always being behind me. Love you all!