Swellian Lord Vaughan Dead on the wild success of Ain’t That Swell, why BeachGrit commentary is “the number place in the world for comedy” and reveals new project “that might be the most fucked-up thing ever in surfing!”

"I’m terrified to try and defend myself. When you love everything you open yourself to be torn down by some really smart people.”

The last time we saw Adam “Vaughan Dead” Blakey, director of zeitgeist smashing surf films, one half of the long-running Ain’t That Swell podcast and frontman of the Goons of Doom, he was at the Rip Curl Newcastle Cup squawking ecstatically, as if he wanted to seize local boy Ryan Callinan in his arms and pull him down between his thighs.

When his hind legs aren’t quivering and he isn’t easing his crimson dingus out, Vaughan is a man who straddles better than anybody the fine line between positive noise and toxic slime.

The surf films he makes with pal Nick Pollet are more fun than candy striped short shorts.

The band he fronts, The Goons of Doom, with all its happy beer-drinking anthems.

He loves the BeachGrit commentariat, says “It’s the funniest place ever, the amount of energy and fucking brains going into so much tear down… it might be the number place in the world for that style of comedy.”

Loves it but he don’t engage.

“I don’t feel smart enough to properly articulate myself in that way… I’m terrified to try and defend myself. When you love everything you open yourself to be torn down by some really smart people.”

His latest project, with Nick, is a stop-motion film voiced by the superstars of surfing, three years in the making. It reveals in six months.

Vaughan, it hardly needs to be said, is a startlingly original and hard-boiled lover of surfing.

Essential.