I got so excited about getting the reconditioned magneto into my A10 a couple of weeks back (long story) that I recklessly entered it in a local classic show. Major error of judgement, there being no prize for ‘Best Rat’. Now, there are several advantages to putting your bike in a show as opposed to… Continue reading Best Rat
A Ghost Story for Christmas It was Angie – or ‘Angelique’ as she now styled herself – who first figured out that the old watch house on the Spit would make a great venue for a Christmas party. An early adapter to acid house, she loved beach parties in the summer and warehouse parties in… Continue reading The Watch House
A Ghost Story for Christmas When I was a kid, I made a list of things that scared me. Like a Desert Island Disks list, I got it down to seven: Spiders, especially the really big sod in the attic that my dad insisted on referring to as ‘Sam’.Velociraptor hide and seek.GhostsNuclear war.Being coated in… Continue reading The Museum of Everything
A Winter Solstice Story Despite several theories to the contrary, the priapic spirit that has in the last few years been seen at Stone Henge during the winter solstice was not, in fact, a druid. Accounts of the apparition vary, but common features suggest a tall, emaciated male figure, naked from the waist down and… Continue reading Blue Christmas
While hardly Quadrophenia, the neglected British film Some People (1962) remains a vivid depiction of working-class life, the lure of rebellion and the validation of belonging to some sort of youth culture – not that this was the original intention. Pre-dating both The Damned and The Leather Boys, Some People is the first of this… Continue reading Some People, 1962
Although I’m not shy about broadcasting my affection for New English Library Hell’s Angel paperbacks, I’m going to kick off the ‘Bikers in Fiction’ aspect of this blog with another personal favourite from that era with which you may not be so familiar: The Lost Traveller by Steve Wilson (UK, St Martin’s Press, 1976). Wilson… Continue reading The Lost Traveller (Review)
Coming of age in the early-80s could be a pretty miserable experience. I was eighteen when I left school in 1982, clutching three useless ‘A’ levels, having been rejected – mostly without interview – by every university to which I’d applied. (Unless you were grammar school, which I wasn’t, you weren’t getting in from a… Continue reading It’s never too late to have a happy childhood
As I sit here contemplating the intermittently sticking throttle on my BSA, I find myself wondering why I still do this to myself? I can fix it of course. It ain’t the cable or the spring, so I probably just need to clean up the carb. If that doesn’t work, I might have to dress… Continue reading The Early History of Flight (My First British Bike)
You’d think that rock ’n’ roll and motorcycles were made for each other, but truth be told for every 1950s banger about bikes there are a couple of dozen about cars if not more. Bike songs were more of a sub-genre of hot rod rockabilly, and, like biker movies, most of them aren’t all that… Continue reading Cycle Sounds Part One: Bikerbilly
By the end of the 1950s, the public perception of motorcycling culture had radically altered in the wake of Brando, Dean and Elvis. Motorcycling was now no longer viewed as the gentleman’s sporting hobby it had been in the early part of the century, when machines were high performance and expensive; neither was it simply… Continue reading The Damned (Review)
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