| YOU WANNA BE IN MY GANG? Last month I went to a 30th birthday party. It was in the usual anonymous, bouncer-girt subterranean bar in Birmingham's booze-strip, with the usual assemblage of hearty beer-drinkers cracking clichés and slapping the backs of other hearties they hadn't drunk with since the last time. In my case, I hadn't drunk with most of them in a decade or two, because this wasn't your usual family or social wing-ding, but a celebration of Bike magazine's 30 years on the news stands. And as far as I could tell, I was the only one there who actually turned up on a bike. Actually that's a lie: I turned up by train, but I had ridden my bike to Euston where I caught a cramped and snail-like Silverlink cattle-truck to New Street. Actually that's a lie too, it was a battered old Suzuki AN125 scooter, but at least I carried my helmet and grubby old Rukka with me to the party: credibility-junkie, that's me. Credibility is somewhat unfashionable these days, though. Get a result, make the right noises and bugger the consequences is the populist mantra, and who the hell am I to fly in the pert young face of expedience? Well who I am is the prat who originally launched Bike and didn't keep a piece of the action when I flogged it to Lord EMAP 28 years ago, and credibility on this occasion meant cutting the birthday cake for some inebriated chump with an Instamatic (they couldn't be arsed to hire a professional snapper), making a couple of cheap cracks and glad-handing a whole raft of aimables whose names I invariably couldn't remember and probably won't see again for, well, 30 years (assuming this diet of virgin monkey glands works, that is). And once aboard the last, dogged-eared Silverlink back to my lonely little Suzuki and in between swopping increasingly snitty text messages with an insomniac ex-girlfriend to pass the time, I disconsolately mused that motorcycling still is some kind of secret rite that bonds us into tribes. And even if we're old and decrepit (like me) and too concerned with keeping our limbs and marriages intact (unlike me, I'm almost ashamed to say) to venture out on two wheels anymore, we still think of ourselves as bikers above and beyond any other collective noun we may have shouldered later in life. Like carpet fitter, family man or sex pest (and sometimes all three). And of course it's this tribal phenomenon that most other big-ticket consumer groups - car and dishwasher buyers for example - conspicuously lack. Unless of course they're very sad people indeed. Rocket science isn't required to devine that tribal instincts can be commercially harnessed: that's why I started Bike magazine (and all the rest of 'em, if I'm going to be arrogant about it... and I damn well am). And that's why what we laughingly call the m/cycle industry laughingly call their marketing strategies are somewhat geared to the collective instincts of the Go Faster = Bigger Penis mob. |
But I have to say that since my enforced hiatus from motorbikery ended earlier this year, it seems that there's been some slippage in this respect. I guess the rot set in back in the mid-90s when the Ducati importers, whoever they were that month, ran a series of ads featuring their company workers and, if memory serves (which it often doesn't), Mrs Carl Fogerty, who were about as far removed from the laddish tearaways that we bikists secretly know we are as could possibly be. Then there was the realisation that cheap, motorised transport for the weary commuter was actually rather a spiffy concept, and suddenly everyone and his dog was building or importing scooters. Scooters, lest we forget, are not ridden in packs by angry or socially challenged young men, well not since the mid-sixties when me and my parka-clad ilk buggered off to the seaside to taunt greasy types who rode loud, oily Nortons and Tribsas. (And largely 'cause greasers tended to beat the crap out of us and had better-looking girlfriends anyway, I smartly defected to the bike brigade). No, scooters are a practical if colourful diversion from the serious and utterly seductive business of outlaw behaviour that the m/cycle trade had hitherto, if somewhat obliquely pandered to since, well, since Bike magazine opened that little Pandora's box 30 years ago with its 'Dare To Be Different' slogan. And with scooters largely responsible for the recent sales boom, what little product marketing the importers can manage these days for proper bikes seems geared to celebrating the motorcycle as art, rather than a tribal weapon. This objectification was carried through to the birthday bash in Birmingham last month when, to make all us old, and not so old, professional biking types feel comfy about the fact that none of us (apart from smug old me of course) had ridden to the event, they had several race bikes stuck behind plexiglass panels like summat Damien Hirst might've dreamt up... albeit without the formaldehyde. Oh, and non-stop videos of racetrack heroics and epic crashes played throughout the evening on a phalanx of TV screens. And maybe that's where the future lies, what with road congestion, mercilessly policed speed limits, prohibitive insurance costs and all the other obstacles to getting 'Fast and Furious on Two Wheels' (another hackneyed Bike slogan I dreamt up 30 years back), those of us with motorcycle licenses will be obliged to bolt our rorty, hair-trigger repli-racers to our living rooms walls and limit our two-wheeled antics to popping down to the shops for a pint of semi-skimmed on our Gilera Runners. But me, well I'd rather be in a bike gang again, or at least feel that the manufacturers thought I was. Now if only I could buy a real motorcycle for the price of an aged, dog-rough AN125... |