Surfers had started experimenting with aerials in the late 70s, but it was Christian and his crew who took it to the next level, boosting higher than anyone previously and taking tricks straight from skateboarding – indy’s, mute grabs and the like. It’s strange to think now, in an era when aerials are an essential part of every competition surfer’s arsenal, but back in the late 80s getting airborne wasn’t just uncommon, it was frowned upon. It was messy and inelegant, more traditional surfers said. It somehow wasn’t ‘real’ surfing.

If Christian’s aerial tricks got people’s backs up, the in-your-face, punk rock attitude (which also came straight from skateboarding) didn’t help matters. Famous for trash-talking other surfers, he also showed scant regard for the etiquette of the line-up. “I was in a heat with Christian Fletcher,” Ozzie Wright told Surf Europe magazine recently, “and he dropped in on me and did an air. And then on the next wave, I was paddling out and he did an air straight over the top of me. They were such punks.”

Of course a young, brash surfer playing fast and loose with convention was like catnip to the media. Aerials made for great magazine photos, and by the early 90’s Christian had landed on the cover of both Surfer and Surfing. Appalled by the publicity this snotty young upstart was getting, a collection of the world’s best wave riders (including the top 16 on the ASP World Tour) wrote to the editors of Surfer demanding that they stop featuring him in their magazine.

Their sniffy letter makes for entertaining reading today. Even at the time, it only served to burnish Christian’s reputation as the ultimate rebel. As Matt Warshaw, managing editor of Surfer at the time, explained: “Easiest decision of the month was to put [that] letter at the front of the ‘Post’ column, at which point I sat back and waited for readers to slaughter them. Which they did.”

Off the water Fletcher was, if anything, even more uncompromising. He was photographed for Juice magazine wearing a gimp suit. He played in LA metal bands with names like Axefukk and Mutilage. At one stage he counted an Orange County porn store called Spankys among his sponsors. He fell in with the Hell’s Angels and found himself on the wrong side of the law on more than one occasion. In a hard partying industry, Christian gained a reputation for partying particularly hard.

As the 90s wore on all the excess began to catch up with him. He went through prolonged periods of heroin addiction and the punky-looking surfboard and apparel brand he’d founded in 1991 failed. Even as his influence on surfing became more and more obvious, with aerials becoming de rigueur in both contests and videos, Christian himself was fading. At one stage he gave up surfing altogether.

“When you’re cautious, you end up going over the falls in life in general. Cautious means you hesitate. The way I look at it is, you commit or you don’t – and I commit.”

In many ways it’s surprising that Christian has made it through to the age of 46. But with the help of his supportive family (including his son Greyson Fletcher, himself a talented skater) he’s pulled it around in recent years. As he tells the filmmakers behind the What Youth profile, he still loves to surf – preferably “really fast, shallow, hollow reefs”. And as their footage shows, he still loves “riding street bikes” and heavy metal. But his mantra these days is ‘live fast, die last.’ It’s a motto that suggests he’s learned from his long experience, and (dare I say it) become not just older, but wiser.