Consultation: Alex Moul

Portrait: Ryan Hall

As street skating surged in popularity over the final years of the 1980s, Alex Moul - an unassuming teenager from Abingdon, Oxfordshire - was undoubtedly at the cutting edge of progression. Under the watchful eye of Jeremy Fox at Deathbox, Alex not only dominated the increasingly street-focussed pages of R.A.D, but went on the win international contests and earn himself his debut pro board, all before finishing secondary school.

As the early 90s unfolded, Alex gradually shifted his focus to DJing and music production, though he thankfully returned to the fold with a late 90s vengeance, claiming his rightful place as part of Flip’s Huntington Beach based Easyriders am crew.

Now residing in California full-time, during the 2000s, Alex swapped Flip for Santa Cruz and embarked on a second fully fledged pro career. Despite facing the injuries and general wear-and-tear familiar to most seasoned skateboarders, Alex’s presence has been constant, positive and humble ever since. Always one to keep his personal trials and tribulations private, Alex shocked pretty much everyone in April 2023 when - spurred on by family and friends - he made an urgent public appeal to raise funds for lifesaving dental work.

After a turbulent 18 months, last October a strikingly fresh-faced Alex re-emerged out of the social media wilderness to announce that he was not only still alive, but - thanks in no small part to the generosity of the skateboard community - he was also proudly sporting an all-new set of pearly white gnashers. Just before the 2024 festive season brought everything to a temporary standstill, we caught up with Alex to talk mostly about his teeth: from healthcare and brushes with death, to vanishing TV executives and dental kinship with Andy Roy.

Read on to find out more, and maybe book yourself a check up at the dentists whilst you’re at it.


When did you first notice the deterioration of your teeth? Was this something that developed over recent years, or has it been an ongoing issue since childhood?

Oh, it’s been years. My mum always said I got soft teeth like her, for starters. About 20 years ago I borrowed $10,000 and I spent it all on my teeth, to get everything fixed at that point, and then two years later everything broke. I didn’t have any more money, then I got laid off from Santa Cruz and what-have-you, so I couldn’t go on and get more work done on my teeth; I was just trying to survive at that point. Over time, stuff just got worse and worse.


I’m guessing there’s a healthcare aspect to this, given that you live in the States where you’re entitled to literally nothing?

I had no money for insurance or anything like that. Plus, with dental insurance in America, they only cover about $1000, and then you’re fucked anyway. It just went on and on, then I got a really bad bacterial infection where a doctor said it had spread from my mouth and I nearly lost my eye. My eye fully closed up; they said if I’d have left it another two days, I would have lost my eye, then that could have spread to my brain, and if that happened, I could’ve got a blood infection in my brain, then I would have died. That was serious, and that was years ago (laughs). I kept battling through, then it just got to the point where I was getting really ill because of it. You know, everyone thinks you’re a pro skater and you’re making all of this wicked money, but really you’re just living paycheque to paycheque. So my wife Erin and my friend Ryan (Hall) were like, “we’ve got to get you some help somehow”. 

And this would have been back in 2023, when they started the GoFundMe?

Yeah, they put together the GoFundMe, and miraculously, they raised the $16,000. That was for the bare minimum, basically; that was to pull everything out, just to have some dentures that you’d glue in every day. That was our goal. That was brutal too, putting my face out there like that. And then some people were cunts online.


Really? How so?

Yeah, that’s why I went offline for a year and a half, until it was all done, because some people were direct messaging me dark shit. Lots of people were showing support and being real nice as well, which totally outweighed the bad, but for me, reading that stuff fucked me up, and it even got to a point where my relationship with my wife was getting bad because I was so worried about what people were saying and thinking about me. I told Erin, “I need to turn it off”, so I got off social media completely.

Oxford car park backside noseblunt, last seen gracing the pages of System Magazine. Photo: Wig Worland.

Andy Roy was pretty instrumental in getting this situation straightened out. Where does he enter the picture?

Andy Roy did a thing with Bam (Margera) at a dentists, and they basically sorted him out for whatever money he raised on his GoFundMe and some promotion online. So this guy who helped Andy was telling me from April the year before last, “we’re going to make a pilot for a TV series, it’ll show the before and after. You’ll be a changed man, just trust me, but it all takes time”. It went on for months. This guy would disappear for a month, then come back and say the same thing again. Finally, at the end, he was like, “it’s definitely happening, 1000%”.


That’s a big claim.

I did an interview with a production crew also, talking about how we were going to do it all, asking would my wife be interested in being involved with the big reveal… I was like, “I don’t give a shit, even if you gave me teeth that were made out of wood, we wouldn’t care.” At this point, I could’ve died; I was throwing up every day, I could smell poison just blowing my nose, so it was bad. Then this fella just dropped off the face of the Earth; I never heard from him again. I’d told everyone that it was definitely happening, everyone was celebrating, and then he disappeared completely. Wanker.


And he knew that, for you, this was life or death? It’s not like you were just trying to get on TV.

It was life or death, and I was explaining that to him, the times that I did get hold of him. He kept saying, “just wait a little bit longer”, but I didn’t know how much longer I had. So he vanished, and I was like, “great. I’ve been promised the planet, and now I’ve got a Malteser” (laughs). So Andy goes, “right, I’ll speak to my dentists in Tustin”, which was Global Implant Dentistry. I went in for a consultation, and they said they could pull everything out, give me implants, then the teeth, which are like dentures but they click on, so they don’t move about in my mouth. They’ve basically given me about $40,000 worth of dental treatment for the $16,000 we raised, which they didn’t have to do at all, but we said we’d do a little video of it all, and put it out there.

So we go in there on the morning the work was meant to start, and they tell my wife they’ve found a cyst the size of a thumb between my gums and my nose; that was the biggest one, but there were multiple others. So we had to get all of that out, do a biopsy, and give me a bone graft because the cyst had eaten all of my jaw bone away. They were like, “this is just in the nick of time, because if that spread to your brain or your heart, you would have died.” They also said, “we’ve discovered you have a little heart murmur or something, so we can’t give you too much fentanyl, in case it kills you” (laughs).


This sounds like an absolutely traumatic can of worms (laughs).

I was like, “fuck me, let’s just get it over and done with then” (laughs). It was a crazy four hours for that first work; I was in and out of consciousness as they pulled teeth out and screwed bits of metal into my face. After that, they give you a temporary denture set, but they sew up the implants underneath your gum line, and that takes about six months to heal and see if your body accepts the implants. Then they cut you open and they reveal where the metal is set, then they wait for those cuts to heal, which takes another month or so, then you go back and then they screw in the last of the metal, to hold your teeth in place. There was a chance that my body could reject the implants, so that was scary. And that’s why it took so long; they couldn’t do the last implant because my bone graft was there, so I had three implants in the top and four in the bottom, then they had to wait for the bone graft to heal, and that took eight months. I went in again, they cut the gum open and screwed in the final one, then I had to wait six months again for that to heal, and then my body rejected that one. What should have been a 30-minute process turned into three hours of them scraping everything out, then re-doing the bone graft, and that was pretty gnarly because I’d grown back some nerve endings, which is really rare, so I could feel everything. Now I have to wait until February, then I can go in for another attempt at my last implant - they’re going to put it in a slightly different place - then I have to wait six months for that to heal and hopefully my body accepts it. My teeth all work fine as they are, but you need to have the same anchors on each side of your mouth to stop them from wearing down in odd places.


Alex and Andy - new teeth men.

So it was after getting the seven implants in, and having teeth that work, that you decided to share the reveal video on your Instagram?

I wanted to say thanks to everyone who helped give me a second chance at life. Andy Roy came over and shaved my head and cut my beard off. Also, my beard and my ‘tache were like a curtain, so that nobody could tell what the hell was going on inside my mouth. I shaved it all off, and my wife was like, “oh my God! You look 20 years younger” (laughs).


Was it never an option for you to return to Oxford and try get your teeth fixed on the NHS?

Not really, considering that the government has had my green card on hold for four years. We couldn’t believe it because we actually got it sent within a month of our interview, then my lawyer called and said, “don’t leave the country, there’s a typo on your dates on your green card. You have to send it back”. We sent it back, COVID hit and the government shut down, and we’ve been in the backlog for four years now. I just missed my dad’s 90th birthday, but he’s still cracking on, still gets down the ice rink twice a week, so… Well done, Dad (laughs).


When you finally get the green card, a visit to the UK is going to be high on the list of priorities, right?

We’re coming straight there once we get it. I haven’t been there since 2008, so me and Erin will be going to Abingdon to see my dad, then working our way up to Heckmondwike to see my mum, and hopefully see everyone else along the way.


I’ve got a couple of questions here from Ben Powell. The first is: you were out wild camping and cooking whilst your teeth were really fucked. Were you actually eating, and if so, how?

I was eating, just very slowly, and sometimes very painfully (laughs). Me and Erin travelled across America a couple of times in the van whilst a lot of this horrible darkness was going on inside my mouth, and we’ve also filmed a ton of recipes cooking on fires, so we’re going to try put them together and do this YouTube channel called Open Fire Food. It’s basically us trying to cook gourmet shit on bonfires at different campsites around America. The only thing is, now that I’ve got teeth, the videos would look so much better (laughs). Erin made a chocolate soufflé on a bonfire, and according to Gordon Ramsay, that’s difficult enough for a chef to do in an oven (laughs), so hopefully I can find that footage.


Ben also asks: were you surprised to see that you still looked 15 once you’d shaved your face off?

I don’t know about looking 15, but everyone has made some pretty nice comments, and clearly I do look a bit younger without the grey cloud attached to my face. I think it was a bit too much of a shock for Erin, because she kind of liked the mountain man look, so now she’s made me grow a bit of it back.


Tailblock on a 'rare as hens teeth' Popcorn plank. Photo: Ryan Hall.

We were chatting earlier about your back, because that’s what’s stopping you from skating much right now. Do you want to talk a little about that?

My back has been plaguing me since I was 25. The doctor did an x-ray and asked, “when was the car accident?” I said, “I’ve never been in one, but I jump down a bunch of stairs every day.” The doctors told me I had two reverse curves in my spine, and I was the youngest person they’d ever seen to have the beginnings of arthritis in their spine. I went to chiropractors, spent all of this money, and nothing helped at all. Pete Evans came to visit me, Dr Pete. He’s come to America, I figured he’s going to want to skate some painted kerbs at least, and he told me his back was fucked too. I’d been seven months locked sideways; I couldn’t stand up straight, pain would shoot down my left leg… Pete comes over and goes, “try these stretches with me. It’s kind of like yoga, looks a bit odd, but if we do them together, they might help a little bit”. Three days in to doing these stretches twice a day, I was standing straight-ish again. Five days in, we were skating flatland. The second to the last day he was here in California, we were skating stairs again, and six months later I was pro for Santa Cruz. So I went from, “I’m probably not going to skate again”, to a second pro career. Do your stretches, kids!

I should still be doing those stretches every day, but I haven’t been. Then last Christmas something slipped, and I tried to do the stretches and made it worse - tore something, probably - so you’ve got to leave it. This week I’ve been doing hot tub, heat and ice in 20-minute increments, and now I’m popping to the shop again and what-have-you, so that’s good news. Thanks Dr Pete! I’ll be back skating again, as soon as I can.


Thanks Alex! To wrap this up, have you got any final thoughts or parting words on the subject of your teeth?

Thanks to my lovely wife Erin and my friend Ryan for making me do the GoFundMe and making me put myself out there and be vulnerable. I absolutely hated that; that’s probably one of the bravest things I’ve ever done in my life, you know, admitting that I needed help. Thanks to everyone who reposted the link or donated money, and saved my life. A massive thanks to Global Implant Dentistry and Andy Roy. I gave my whole life to skateboarding, so thanks to all the skateboarding community who gave me a little something back; it really means the world, and I’m going to cry if you carry on like this. Thanks to you, everyone at Sidewalk for everything over the years, Mon (Barbour) at SS20… I could go on, but it’s not an awards acceptance speech (laughs). Cheers!

Follow Alex - @moulyalx