Surf Films To Watch Online Free | Billabong’s Pump

[Spending more time in front of the screen than usual? More YouTubes than tubes? We’ve compiled a half dozen surf flicks you can watch online free while the world has a little collective think about its behaviour, you can find em all here.

Eyeballs hurt? No worries, check out the Lockdown Special episode of our podcast.]

Pump (1990)

Jack McCoy

 

Pump was the video playing on rotation in the surf shops in a formative period for me, and thus looms large in my surf cinema heritage mind palace. Like much of the Bong / McCoy oeuvre, it probably gets a bit too much misty eyed nostalgic lauding from old farts who like to remind you they’ve been into surfing longer than you.

But what you can’t overstate is the cultural significance, rather than how good a lot of the surfing or filmmaking is. As well as of course, Occy, who almost gets better with the passage of time.

Pump opens with a mad Pipe wave of Curren (from the Billabong Pro, hence its inclusion) with a band called Slaves covering Joy Division’s Transmission, which isn’t notably different enough to really merit a cover, but kind of stands up.

Meanwhile, Uncle Derek’s wave at 9.20 is an absolute mind-melter. That was thirty something years ago, and he’s still out there today.

Occy at St Leu in Reunion Island is the real highlight from Pump, of which there’s a full 11mins of him and the late great Ronnie Burns, in a section that lasts a few songs.

Burns sadly passed away not long after filming this in a motorcross incident in Hawaii, and in the tricky head high St Leu lefts at times looks like that bloke from your local who used to compete regionally a long time ago and now surfs his own shapes. He was incredible at the Pipeline, though.

For real Occy pervs, after the St Leu clinic, some scintillating backside at JBay follows.

You can’t help but be alarmed by Richie Collins, an aggro evangelical Christian with Vinne Jones’ haircut and webbed gloves. He did kinda rip though, he was a force. He did a backside air in Hossegor in 1993 that was probably about twenty years ahead of its time.

I asked Richie Collins to sign a Billabong ad of him in a magazine at the Alder Surf Pro at Fistral in 1991, which happened to be Wavelength, as it goes. Anyway, he signed it, then wrote ‘God Rules’.

I was devastated.