Jani Peltonen
June 01, 2007 @ 1:40 PM
THERE’S NOT MUCH common knowledge floating about when it comes to Jani Peltonen. In fact forget common, there isn’t much info at all. And what little there is can be hard to come by. Peke doesn’t sit around at local Le Dome’ s or Southbanks, he doesn’t drink at Manolos or sleep with the Maxfishes, he doesn’t hang out at MySpace or leaf through magazines behind the counters of Streetmachines and Slamcities. He’s the man from the Tom Waits song, who never waves when he goes by, who’s all to himself—I think I know why. He’s hiding something from the rest of us. So who is Peltonen and what the hell is he building in there? You have the right to know.
Peke emerged on the Finnish skate map as a slightly introverted 13 year-old in the winter of 1993. In the early 90’s there was a small indoor skatepark called Sokeva in a northern suburb of Helsinki, notorious for its aggressive graffiti writers and street thugs. A group of skaters had taken over a disused building, then struck a deal with the owner after the fact and were allowed to stay. At the time, that was like getting shot up the main artery of the Finnish skate scene. When the rest of the city was shivering in the blizzard and skating dusty car parks, the Sokeva crew were the shape of things to come. The locals there—a certain Samuli “Hessu” Heino and one Santtu Söderlund in particular—had a rep for vibing the odd visitor to the extent that there were hardly any visitors. Intimidated by the rumours, Peke was doubtful about Sokeva at first, but got invited in that winter through friends of friends and eventually became an inseparable part of the set up.
The following few years saw the rise and fall of what to this day many Helsinki skaters consider the best spot they ever had, the red marble ledges in Pasila. In hindsight, these two spots were perhaps pivotal in turning a group of friends into the longest running and best-known board brand ever to come out of Finland. Control put out its first two boards in 1996, couple of years before the ledges in Pasila were skate stopped, effectively closing a chapter in the book of Finnish skateboarding. Peke’s name was on one of those boards, crude black block letters on red background. “That was su-uuch a fucking rough graphic.” Peke laughs. “I still have one of those decks.” Pasila was probably also the last popular hangout spot in Helsinki that Peke made his own. “It was that whole gang of people that skated there, many of them Sokeva locals. I mostly skated with Hakki [Harmaala] and Toma [Stankevitsch]. The three of us used to skate together so much, and in a way that spot was the centre of it for a while.”
By the time Control’s first video Sisu came out in late ‘96, Peke had pretty much disappeared off the mainstream radar only to be seen through his few and far between video parts and a rare photo here and there for a good ten years to come. “I don’t really have anything to say to that. I guess I’ve always been a bit like that, skating with the few people I skate with and doing my own thing. That’s the honest truth of it. It’s not like a calculated decision or anything, despite of what people might think. I like to skate with fewer people. I hate having to wait for my turn to skate, like you do on a miniramp for example, if there are more people.” There was a time, when Peke did a lot of the local comps. He even won the Finnish champs once. “I think there just was a point when I felt like that was it, I’m done with that.”
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