This was back in 2012. It had been a while since Harry had been on the cover, then this dropped, and it went down an absolute storm. Full Cover story below –

Words and Photos – Nathan Beddows.
Additional photo – Matty Lambert

We can’t express just how long we have waited to get Harry back on the cover since his first cover back in issue 124. We won’t go into the details too greatly, but if you’re a regular reader you may be aware that we tried last year to get Harry on the cover with an invert 360 over a wooden spine at an indoor gym in Dumbarton (big thanks still go out to the Unit 23 guys for building the spine). Okay, so that location wasn’t perhaps the original plan but we can thank the great British summer for pissing all over our plans on that one…

Fast forward to March 2012 and we’re riding the ditch in Madrid, Spain with Ruben and Sergio. Matty Lambert is filming and Achim Kujawski is taking care of the TM duties. The sun was beating down, Harry had put some music on his iPod speakers, Matty’s cameras were rolling – basically the session was in full swing.

Harry and I had chatted for ages about the possibility of shooting a backflip drop in somewhere. We’d talked about doing it into a metal slide in London, into a seawall bank in Southport, or even just down some stairs. Personally, I was just into the idea of doing it anywhere that wasn’t a ramp and that was gonna look cool.

We knew that time was running out and unfortunately because printing thousands of copies of a magazine (then posting them all out) takes about two weeks, the cover had to be shot by the end of March, roughly two weeks before the edit came out. But deadlines can be good because if you’ve got a deadline then you can put yourself under a little bit of pressure…

Luckily, upon arrival at the ditch, we knew that it was going to be possible and although we didn’t over-hype it or chat about it too much, I kept shooting test shots to see where the best angle was gonna be inbetween shooting other stuff with Harry. Harry was adamant that he was going to only do it once (unless he crashed, but we didn’t wanna think about that too much). I told Harry I’d found the perfect angle for the cover and asked him to drop off a few times to make sure it was all gonna work out sweet.

Crunch time then came round. Everyone fell silent and held their breath. He hopped, flipped and landed into the bank perfectly. It was all over in less than 2 seconds but like most epic things you get to witness, it seemed to take an eternity for Harry to come round and touch down.

The sequence had turned out sweet with no weird crossovers (even the shadow from the flip part had fell perfectly down the bank). Matty Lambert had clocked the footy and that was that. We rode the ditch for a few more hours until everyone was done in and then as soon as we got back to a computer, the sequence was roughly stitched up so that people could understand which frames we wanted to use. It had taken such a long time to get Harry on the cover doing something that truly does him justice but it was finally done and all ready to come out in time with the edit. Things really couldn’t have worked out better.