Born to Ride
I was five when I first felt the magic...
Grebo Gurus
Fast forward about ten years. Like most places in the mid-70s, my hometown was very tribal. The working-class kids were predominantly rockabillies and skins, the National Front having a strong presence. This pretty much covered the council estate I grew up on...
My First Bike
So, bikes meant a couple of things to me. They got you a foot in the door, at least, with the tribe, and they got you out of trouble. Much safer to ride around the streets than walk or peddle. I’d already been kicked off a bicycle by a gang and beaten up on the way home from a gig. Two held my arms while two others hit me. It felt like being raped.
No Limit (1935)
No Limit is the first of eleven films Formby made for ATP, and it’s probably the best. This is Formby unfiltered, fresh off the stage: anarchic, cheeky, a bit blue, a working-class hero and very northern. No Limit is his Jailhouse Rock.
Fiery the Angels Rose
This potentially suicidal aspect of motorcycling is ever present; it’s in the appalling accident statistics, the blind spot of every car driver, and the temptation to still overtake everything on the road as if you’re playing a computer game. It is also the foundation of a much broader cultural code, an Oroboros of influences from fact and fiction...
The Geometry of Fear: Joseph Losey's The Damned
‘I never expected a thing like this to happen to me in England.’
‘You thought England was a land of old ladies knitting socks. The age of senseless violence has caught up with us too.’
Once a Jolly Swagman
Following on from my previous point about the lack of serious films covering any aspect of motorcycle racing, here is one of the good ones, if not the best...
Bikerbilly
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 good. Clearly communicating the riding experience through music and lyrics is difficult, which is strange given the thousands of songs written about love, sex and heartbreak. Surely that covers the same sort of ground.
The Early History of Flight
I was still a bit wary of my position relative to the curb (a problem I’ve always had driving cars as well), and I vaguely remember looking at the sidecar wheel to check… Suddenly, I’d drifted left. I saw my wheel mount the curb then I was sucked onto the grass verge. There was a hell of a bang and then I was flying through the air.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood
'In an era when Mrs Thatcher was teaching us all to think of me, me, me and riots were a common occurrence in the major cities, there was something quite special in being part of several thousand people gathering together in our little corner of rural England to live for a weekend in peace, love and harmony...'
The Lost Traveller
A retrospective review of the best 1970s British post-apocalyptic science fiction novel you've probably never heard of...
Some People
On social class, and rebellion vs. respectability in this neglected British biker movie...
Best Rat
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’.
Harley David – Son of a Bitch
On what happens if you use a Harley for everyday transport in all weathers for 20 years.
Race with the Devil
Race with the Devil (1975) is one of the few occult biker movies. It therefore occupies a tight huddle with Werewolves on Wheels (1971), Psychomania (1973), and I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle (1990). It also reflects the early 1970s craze with the occult that followed movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, spawning a generation of middle-class suburban devil worshippers because that crowd will take any excuse to have an orgy.
Genevieve
As the long-time owner of a functional but unrestored 1959 BSA A10, I am frequently reminded of the 1953 British comedy Genevieve. Specifically, I think of all those scenes in which the hero, played by John Gregson, repairs something on his 1904 Darracq only to have a different part fail a couple of miles further down the road. Oh, and never to say, ‘She’s running well today’ – in fact, never to even think it.
Furiosa
In a genre that is overwhelmingly macho, Miller used Fury Road to offer audiences both a male and female action hero, giving Furiosa more emotional depth as an exile yearning for home and the saviour of a group of enslaved women. In Furiosa, Miller finally gives us a female protagonist, with Tom Burke’s ‘Max’ surrogate only appearing in a couple of chapters, gender roles reversed so he becomes the doomed love interest.
The Black Rider
Made a year after The Wild One, The Black Rider seems to have already belonged to a vanished world even when it was new. In common with George Formby’s No Limit (1935) and the 1949 speedway drama Once a Jolly Swagman, The Black Rider is one of those rare British films that focuses on motorcycling before the era of mods and rockers and Hells Angels. Both protagonist and antagonist are bike riders, and I’m not spoiling anything here as we see the ‘Black Rider’ in the opening scene of the movie, coming ashore by small boat and shooting off over the dunes on what looks like a BSA Bantam.
The Bikeriders
Though I mis-spent my youth in bike gangs in the 80s not the 60s, I cannot deny a certain dewy-eyed nostalgia came over me in the cinema when I watched The Bikeriders, remembering what it felt like to belong to something like that, to be part of a community, to be so sure of your own identity. And I’m still doing it today, although more sedately, and in a more legal state of mind. For all the daft, unrealistic and derivative biker movies I’ve watched over the years, The Bikeriders is the first to actually catch that feeling.
The Wild One & The Birth of the Biker Movie
Let’s be honest, for the attitude, the swagger, and the look, Marlon Brando is the Elvis of biker movies. He may not have been the first, but he defined the genre. After The Wild One hit the screens of unsuspecting American filmgoers at the end of 1953, nothing was ever going to be the same again. Hail to the King, baby.
‘Wild & Wicked!’ Motorcycle Gang (1957)
Dragstrip Girl was released at drive-ins in April 1957, then director Edward L. Cahn made it again in October, this time switching hod rods for motorcycles, with stars Steve Terrell and John Ashley essentially reprising their roles. Billed as ‘Wild and wicked,’ Motorcycle Gang (1957) was the first of the Wild One copies. The biker movie was now officially a genre.
Little Fauss and Big Halsey (1970)
In memory of Robert Redford, let’s celebrate his early career motorcycle racing movie ‘Little Fauss and Big Halsey’ (1970), also starring Michael J. Pollard and Lauren Hutton, in which a mismatched pair of privateers trying to get noticed both fall for the same girl - a nice preface to Bruce Brown’s seminal racing documentary ‘On Any Sunday’ released the following year.
Dragstrip Riot (1958)
Billed as ‘A fight fought with all the fury of youth,’ Dragstrip Riot is another link in the uneven chain that leads from The Wild One in 1953 to Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels in 1966, representing the evolution of the outlaw biker picture. Part of the teen exploitation trend in drive-in cinema, Dragstrip Riot pits a group of road racers against a biker gang and its increasingly deranged leader, proving that, as one character notes, ‘Cyclists and sportscar boys just don’t mix.’
The Hot Angel (1958)
The first wave of Brando-inspired low-budget biker movies came to an end in 1958. Released in December, The Hot Angel was the last of them. Generally overlooked by bike film historians, The Hot Angel is a Paramount B-picture about uranium mining and claim-jumping in the Grand Canyon that mixes light aircrafts with motorcycles in an awkward blend of juvenile delinquent teensploitation and airplane thriller as ‘Teenage gangs rip highways and skies with thrills and terror!’
Remembering Eric Von Zipper
Comic actor Harvey Lembeck (1923–1982) had been Corporal Rocco Barbella in Sgt. Bilko. Dressed in a Schott Perfecto and peaked cap and 40-years-old, he sends up Brando something rotten as Von Zipper, the ‘carbon monoxide commando’, with imperious, Napoleonic gestures, scratching, and finger clicking punctuating statements of threat and rebellion delivered in his natural Brooklyn accent: ‘Nobody tells Eric Von Zipper nuthin’!’
Psycle Sluts by John Cooper Clarke
The poem’s frame is late Seventies British biker culture, which is where I come from, and the fringes of the outlaw scene. The girls that hung around this world are the subject, not the women that rode bikes themselves, but the heavy metal hangers-on that would tag along for a bike ride, often just schoolgirls in heavy makeup haunting the local biker pub. These Clarke develops into lurid S&M fantasy objects that become increasingly atavistic and apocalyptic, ‘cycle’ replaced by ‘psycle’, playing, of course, on ‘psycho’, merging the working-class world of laundromats with surreal fascist and dominatrix iconography.
Scorpio Rising
While Eric Von Zipper was first doing his thing, a much more reverential project was coming together in LA on the underground film circuit. In a mere 28 minutes, Scorpio Rising (1963) by the gay avant-garde filmmaker and occultist Kenneth Anger took biker movies to a place even the Angels feared to tread.
The Leather Boys
Like Scorpio Rising, The Leather Boys (1964) functions on two levels as an almost cinéma-vérité depiction of the culture and family lives of the ton-up boys, and as a pioneering landmark in queer cinema. Subtle though Pete’s unrequited love for Reggie is, this was edgy stuff for 1964. Made only seven years after the Wolfenden report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, homosexuality between consenting adults over the age of 21 was not decriminalized in England until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.
