ANDREW KIDMAN INTERVIEW: A Look Inside Ether

The cover. Never judge a book by its cover.

So you’re not trying to reach a higher goal, you’re just living your work?

No. I’m not trying to achieve any higher goal, I don’t think. I don’t hang around the commercial side of surfing so much, I just spend time with friends or shapers or people that are interesting. You gravitate towards these interesting people for whatever reason and you end up spending time with them and they end up becoming your friends. I just document stuff. If I think its interesting I’ll just take a picture of it. Or if its really interesting I’ll take a picture of it and follow it up by suggesting that maybe something should be written about it, so it becomes more public.

I’ve had a really rich life from surfing, and a lot of people have helped me have a really rich life from surfing and surfboard design, and I want to share that with other people. That’s kind of what the book is, and why I’ve put the interviews in the book with Skip (Fry) and Stanley Pleskunas and people like that because there is so much information in there that if you’re a surfboard shaper you could learn a lot from it. And your surfing would benefit from it. So I think that is the goal at the end. You just try and put information of there – good information, sort of non-commercial information.

Are there enough avenues to get that information out there.?

I think there is now. With the internet you can get that information out there. I use the internet heavily. I’ve basically survived off the internet for the last five years through my website litmus.com.au. That’s basically just a commercial site where we can sell the things that we make.

Does today’s high performance surfing mean anything to you?

Ah, I love it. But honestly, the competitive side of surfing, whatever, I couldn’t care less. But the performance side of it is incredible. I love watching it. I’ve always found the competitive element of surfing kinda strange, because I really don’t like it when its in the water, especially when the competition element comes out of surfing and goes into free surfing, I really struggle with that. Because I find it callous. Its almost like the competitors take that mentality that they use in their heats and bring it to the free surfing realm. We see that a lot at Kirra and Greenmount. But the performance side of it is unbelievable.

The designs that come out of it, like the shaping and that is really interesting as well. I’m not that close to it, I don’t go up and look at those guys’ boards but you can see that they’re high performance. They’re not something I would ride because I surf differently to them, but its definitely interesting to see how what’s going on it that realm comes back to influence other areas.

For you, is there a performance distinction between surfing refined boards and alternate boards?

I don’t think so, I ride a lot of different boards because I like the different feelings that they give you. I don’t ride the super-refined hyper-performance board because I can’t paddle it that well. I rode them for ten years when I was a kid, but as you get older and you don’t get to surf everyday, I mean I’m 38 now, maybe 37? (laughs) You have to adapt. I talked to Simon Anderson a lot about this and its in the interview in Ether. You have to adapt if you want to continue surfing the way you want to surf.

The subject matter in Ether has a lot of historical context, is surfing’s heritage important?

It's extremely important. And it's especially important that the history is documented correctly. That’s what I did, in the book, I didn’t try to write history with it, but I tried to pass the knowledge on. You show a photograph of a Simmons surfboard, and you show people what was there and the design elements of that board. That’s late 50’s that that board was made. If you look at a modern fish design, all those elements are still there. I think that’s interesting. Its not saying that this is how you have to do it, its just saying that this is a really interesting thing that happened in our history.

What’s next for Andrew Kidman?

I’m working on a new film and working on a lot of music lately. The music is always a huge part of the film and the production process, because what it does is set the mood for what you do in the film. Originally for Litmus we recorded the music first before we made litmus and then we were able to set a time to the film through the music. Glass love it was the same thing. I’m going through that same process again. Just chipping away.