By Phil Jarratt
Over the many years we’ve come to expect the unexpected from Tom Curren, everyone’s favourite loony world champion surfer, but his latest Rip Curl-funded video, Free Scrubber, adds a whole new dimension to weird.
Okay, we know that 2020 was a pretty whacko kind of year for most people, and we know that three-times world champ Curren, now 56, is a pretty whacko dude, but none of that quite prepares you for Free Scrubber, 15 minutes of totally unscripted raw brilliance, all shot with a handheld and a drone by Aussie Andy Potts over three months in Covid-locked-down, deserted Salina Cruz, Mexico, land of the long right barrels.
“Free Scrubber fell somewhere between Searching For Tom Curren and Eraserhead,” wrote Sean Doherty on Coastalwatch. Others compared it with David Lynch’s weirder moments, but in the surfing context, no one does weird better than Curren.
Although I didn’t know him when he was winning world titles, I caught up with him quite a few times later in life, including a memorable appearance at the Noosa Festival of Surfing in 2008. But long before that, around the turn of the century, we had a strange encounter at the Quiksilver World Masters in France.As the event director, I had commissioned surfboard shapers from around the world to recreate the most famous boards ridden by the champions who would be competing, including Curren’s mid-‘80s Al Merrick “Black Beauty”. This fascinating collection would be displayed at the event and would then travel the world exhibiting at Quiksilver’s flagship stores.
On opening night we held a big cocktail party to introduce the Masters Collection and seek a few words from each of the champion surfers, explaining what had made the board so special in their storied careers. All went well until I called Tom Curren to the stage, and when he finally appeared he seemed not to understand what had gone before nor what was now expected of him. Instead he gave me a bro shake, thanked me profusely, then took the board out of its display stand and walked off stage with it, and out the front door. He was seen tying it onto the roof of his car, and later rode the board in the contest.
The global CEO of Quiksilver, a Curren groupie from way back, wouldn’t hear of me demanding it back, so Curren kept it, and the global exhibition kind of fizzled.
Cut to just a couple of years ago, another Masters championship, this time in the Azores Islands. Curren shows up with just one board, a skim board around which he’s rather untidily stuck a few lumps of foam. It looked a mess and rode even worse. Only a surfer of Curren’s extraordinary ability could even catch a wave on it. When he was inevitably eliminated because of it, we had a chat and I asked him if I could take a picture of the offending object. Tom, as always, was obliging, but didn’t want to be in the photo with it.The skim board was the puzzle of the event – what the hell was he thinking – but I was amused to see that self-same dog of a board still in Tom’s bizarre quiver two years later in Free Scrubber.
Which brings me circuitously back to this intriguing short film that you can Google (while we still can) or find on the Rip Curl site. Andy Potts just happened to be working with Curren in California when the great man decided to decamp to Mexico while you still could, so he followed. They set up home at Bugs Arica’s surf camp, Andy filmed and Tom does what he does, goofing around, killing you with a sweet guitar lick or cruisy vocal, surfing like he always surfs, just about perfect, or just being Currenesque.
After a series of events too complex too explain here, the raw footage ended up with another inspired loony, surfer/musician/journo/film-maker Vaughan Blakey, who sat down with Nick Pollet in the edit suite and went WTF! Wisely, they went with the gut, which was that this is raw Curren, like only those who know him have ever seen.
There’s much to be said about explaining the inexplicable, but in Tom Curren’s case, like his dad Pat and Miki Dora before him, there’s a joy in just accepting it for what it is, a drum beat at variance, but not opposed to, the music surrounding it.
Despite the fact that he nearly cost me my job, I love Tom Curren and I love this flick. See it.
