ORIGINAL THRILL SEEKERS.

ON THE SCENE SINCE 1998, THE OTS, ORIGINAL THRILL SEEKERS.

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Ots began in the late months of 1997 and was started by Rustie 8 and Base / zeste I had seen them up in my area and new people that new them one crazy night out in my car I got a call from them and went and picked them up with my mate who wrote noiser and now blah, we smoked some chongs and after blah whitie'd out. I dropped him home and me rustie and base went on a mission, after that it was racking and painting or hooking up every night. ots became a lifestyle crew. At one point there was 30 odd members street rats, dealers, dj's skaters, riders and graffiti artists everyone contributed some thing to the cause and we all used to meet up for field parties on a regular and always 20 strong any time we linked crashed parties, went raving, or chilled with some king l's and two skins. After while the crew fragmented as people started to get on with life and with a select few ots became a hardcore graffiti crew still with dj's, tattoo artists, hip hop heads and beat junkies repping on through. We still have ties to most of the original members who all live an original thrill seeking lifestyle, dj tricks, slide, rogue, blah, marys crew, big kev and the mad biker posse, all the drum and bass heads at the studio and heads just down for a beer and a the like. The ots crew is Faver, Rustie 8, Sleaf, Base 98, strode and kats a crew of the original, a crew of friends, a crew of parties and painting, the way a crew should be. My first experiences of graffiti were of Westbourne park and Ladbroke grove travelling the Hammersmith and city line back in 1997 / 8 on the way to playstaion skatepark for a session seeing writers like rate / teach, bozo, zonk, cosa and zombie, all the dds heads smashing it 20 foot fume and bosh walls and sweet street shutter full colour burners on Portobello road, along with a million other forgotten writers in the pits the tubes run through around Farringdon and Moorgate and tunnel dubs all the way down through Paddington past numerous elk and eine trackside silvers all the way to the car yards near royal oak. Once inside playstation you had the il crew pulse and dash and alert rocking phat pieces and then jaya on the roof over Tottenham court road and the many atg roof tops in Camden. What got me interested was the "how" how did these people get there? What drove them to go out in the night and put up their names up, that's what really drove me to start writing, the thrill of doing something illegal, and being somewhere you're not meant to be walking down tracks endlessly into the night smoking zoots and blaming walls. My first contact with seeing anyone actually painting was at playstation, ‘ swag' (who still writes) a top notch blader (you know who you are) was throwing up a black and chrome dub and the smell of the paint and the way he cautiously watched me as I watched him made me want to get involved after that we started racking from local shops car plan and then hycote painting underneath railway bridges doing poor carplan dubs that got smaller at one end, ha ha , experimenting with colours and styles sketching every day at school and benching on stations to catch a fresh RCS runner and tagging centrals on the way home. Using deks N-igma and later location 12 we started to develop more wild styles and stray away from a straight letter format and the very useful guide to London's legal walls provided an infinite resource to see graff up close and paint new spots. As an individual its all about the name, graffiti writers are always battling, battling your crew, battling all other writers for spots and fame but its always about the crew too you put up your boys you represent your crew and as a team everyone's fame grows. When it comes to productions or piecing its all about the end game, me and rustie always free style, both our styles are very versatile and can be contorted to fit any space and size but we always like to have a theme if possible, I love sleaf joining our crew in the recent years because the things he puts down on paper are sick, and it breaks up the abstractness of our 3d pieces with his 2d styles. Productions should have themes but I have to be pushed I try to choose things to paint that push my ability and mix up my style a little bit. Anything goes cartoon and movie characters, babes, guns, wildlife, seasonal influences, abstract paintings of different worlds are my personal favourites anything I see and can work with or use to my advantage, were all children of our environment. I guess my influence on the crew is that I constantly push them to be a part of a wall that's bigger, greater than the sum of its parts and I think that it gives our walls, love ‘em or hate ‘em a very different look and makes them stand out from the crowd. These days its all about paying bills and holding down jobs and being able to fund painting and beer money its hard to be finding time to be out all night smashing yards and walking endless miles of tracks when you got shift work at night or in the morning though ive always been a fan of motorway painting and sitting watching the cars go by and random trackside's in the middle of nowhere. Mainly we paint our own spots, secrets where 6 months down the line you can paint another wall next to your last piece and compare. safe to all the heads weve painted with over the years and anyone wanting to link for productions drop us some mail otscrew@hotmail.co.uk