Nek Minnit ... Fame

A broken scooter and a throwaway line went viral and made Levi Hawken famous. The artist and skater talks with Russell Brown on the eve of a documentary debut about that minute — and that fame.

At its essence, street skating is a matter of deriving function from form — interrogating built space in search of planes and edges, inscribing shapes the original designer never saw, finding a physical solution. In a scratchy video shot in 1991, a skinny kid in baggy jeans and a blue beanie grins at the camera.

“I’m Levi Hawken,” he squeaks. “And this is my section.”

For the next few minutes, over a pop-punk soundtrack, the kid flies and grinds and falls over the city, over steps and seats and the fixtures of concrete carparks. When he nails it, he thrusts his hands in the air. When he doesn’t, he picks up his skateboard, rubs his tailbone and tries again.

In another video, shot 18 years later, the skinny, squeaky kid is a grown man pointing his skateboard — short board, hard wheels, the most difficult and dangerous way to do this — down central Auckland’s Liverpool St, a short road so steep you feel like you need a handrail just to walk down the footpath.

“Oh my GOD!” a spectator yells as he flashes past.

He nails it. Like the kid who’s pulled off a trick, he raises his arms in triumph, relief and recognition of the cheering onlookers, before skating back and flopping theatrically on the hill he’s just bombed, where he’s mobbed. Someone hands him a beer when he gets up and he faces the camera and, flushed with adrenalin, dedicates his feat to Bridey Gallagher Hawken, his recently departed grandmother.

The descent of Liverpool St took 12 seconds — the same length of time as the clip someone took from a DVD. The one in which Hawken, clowning around in a city skate park, looks down at a broken scooter and jokes: “Left my scooter outside the dairy. Nek minnit ...”

Hawken is used to being on camera. He’s been captured in action hundreds, maybe thousands, of times and his life spans pages of Youtube search results. But fate decreed that it would not be any of those videos that defined him in the public consciousness but the 12-second joke that got way, way out of hand.

When “nek minnit” exploded in 2011, Hawken was, he says, “down in Dunedin just kind of minding my own business and doing art and skating — and that happened”.

There was little to indicate his life was about to change. Colin Evans’ independent skate video South in Your Mouth, had premiered the year before. A clip from the DVD was uploaded to Youtube under the title Negg Minute in May and attracted little attention outside the skate scene. But in August, another Youtube user posted it as Nek Minnit and the world went mad.

By the end of the year, the clip had been viewed 1.6 million times and “nek minnit” was New Zealand’s sixth-most-searched term on Google. And it didn’t stop.

“I’ve met so many people and it’s made a lot of people happy,” reflects Hawken, “but you know what it’s like, you see famous people and you think they’re happy and they’re not.”

On the internet, people speculated about his appearance: he had leukaemia, he was “retarded”, he had a meth problem. He actually has a genetic disorder called ectodermal dysplasia, which affects his skin (he has hardly any sweat glands), hair (white and wispy as a child, long gone now) and snaggled teeth.

He was bullied about it at school and having that come back hurt a bit. But becoming a meme created another problem: he lost control of a reputation built up over two decades of absolute dedication to his craft. Was that more upsetting? Hawken pauses a long time before answering.

“It was upsetting. Well, not really upsetting, but … you have all these things you want to do and you think of how they would play out and then something happens and catches you offguard. It wasn’t so much that it was out of my