Back Street Heroes June 2024

Yay, it’s May, and that should mean we’re at the beginning of summer 2024! (Note the ‘should’, he says pessimistically – many’s the time I’ve been to rallies in May and lain shivering in me tent wishing I’d not put the winter sleeping bag away quite so readily…) It’s definitely the month in which the event season kicks off with a vengeance, isn’t it? In our listings for this issue there’re some… er… hang on, talk amongst yourselves for a moment… 58 weekend events, plus any number of weekday bike nights, and should your bank balance/liver/long-suffering other ‘arf stand it, you could probably go to a bike-related event every single day this month. And they say biking’s a dying thing, do they? Unusually for me, I (allegedly) have the weekend…

Unlike last year, the weather gods (y’know, those nice people who stand in front of big maps on the telly and smile sweetly as they tell you you’re going to get p*ss-wet through) were kind enough to keep the snow away, and Pam and I drove up, in a hire van with a couple of bikes in the back, in, mostly, sunshine – I say ‘mostly’ ‘cos this year was the first time ever I didn’t stop at the Border Stone on the A68 because it was blowing a hoolie, and the piper who’s usually there was conspicuously absent (probably ‘cos the tartan octopus he usually has trapped under his arm’d taken advantage of the suitably aquatic weather to make a break for a nearby loch). The Edinburgh bypass was…

And while, as I say, we probably won’t ever see one of these in these hallowed pages, there’re others out there that, while not quite as rare, are almost equally unlikely to feel the hot kiss of the custom builder’s gas-axe. The motorcycle you see here before you for example, while not quite in the above class, is another that, again, is something you’d see too often in fully customised form; it’s a genuine Laverda Jota from the late 1970s/early 1980s, and it belongs to a guy called Stephen Anstis. I don’t know if you know much about what is one of the classic Italian superbikes, but the Jota, in its truest form, was a bike that, if it hadn’t been for the British Laverda importers, the now long defunct…

Some of us may remember, back in the 1980s, a Finnish stunt rider, Arto Nyqvist, who came to Santa Pod and did insanely wonderful stunts (absolutely vertical wheelies the likes of which we’d never seen, skiing off the back wearing clogs) on a Z1300, and those of you of a street-fighting bent may’ve read about the now sadly defunct weekends of two-wheeled mayhem that were the legendary Bomber Weekends, organised (chaos) by the Finnish version of Streetfighters magazine, Bomber. Apart from that, well, it’s near Sweden, isn’t it? And it’s very cold in winter, there’re a lot of trees, and it’s expensive there (but not as expensive as Norway… nowhere’s as expensive as Norway). That’s about all we know… What we definitely don’t know is that it has an absolutely…

Paul Duffy was at the Druids MCC Show in Kildare, Ireland, back in 2017 and, wandering the field, he bumped into a guy named Kevin who had a rather nice trike. Paul’d always been a fan of trikes, and this one completely lit the blue touch-paper – he decided then and there he had to have one. He chatted with Kevin for a bit, and then, he thought, it was going to just be a simple case of finding and buying one. The hunt was on, but nothing really piqued his interest – so many that were offered were nothing more than bikes with a car axle added, not really customs, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, for him they just didn’t hit the right buttons. He thought about…

This was the first Thug Bike Ride-In Show, and was being held at Thug Bike England’s motorcycle repair centre in the village of Astley, about five miles north-west of Shrewsbury. Calling it a ‘motorcycle repair centre’ is a bit like calling Harrods a ‘corner shop’ – it describes what it is, but doesn’t really give an idea of the scale and variety of work done there. With decades of experience in building custom rides, the owner, Red, produces anything from streetfighters to chops, and with any paint job or amount of chrome your heart might desire. So, we were interested in what’d be turning up on the day, and how far word’d travelled about the show, and we weren’t disappointed. Red’d commandeered the parking area for all the local businesses,…