SoCal so cool

Not that it looked quite like this when I was last in southern California visiting (among other things) NAMM at Anaheim and the Fender museum in Corona (some bastard nicked the camera at LAX before I’d downloaded the pics), but the quality of light is instantly recognisable as overwhelming and unforgettable, the wide streets stretch arrow-straight for miles, the palm trees grow like weeds at the roadside and everywhere, in all things, California speaks with a unique voice.

…and whitey’s on the Strand

Last time I saw Gil Scott-Heron was in 1984, he didn’t know me but I knew him. Years spent soaking up the lyrics to Johannesburg and The Bottle gave me a kindred attachment that meant watching him do his stuff during an afternoon gig at the South Bank in London was like watching a favourite uncle say, (and not the type who likes to give ‘special’ cuddles to nephews) or at the very least, a mate.

It was a good gig in glorious sunshine with my actual mates and my best girl at my side and there are few finer ways to spend a weekend. We bootlegged Gil’s set holding up a huge ghetto-blaster containing probably 120 D-sized batteries and no-one told us off – cool. And afterwards we wandered along the river and watched The Kids doing their stuff aboard BMXs and playing rollerblade hockey in the underpass.

Not one had a beard.

Or a tattoo.

The only pic I can find from the day though I shot lots of GSH

It’s a different world now and a better one frankly, and it’s different and better because of voices like Gil’s, chipping away at injustice.

Gil Scott-Heron d. 27 May 2011

I want to say that later we went back to the bikes, my baby scooched up behind me and we headed south at never less than 80mph to watch the waves lap over the pebbles at Brighton. Hmm. Actually we walked up to Trafalgar Square, drank Sam Smith’s in The Chandos and Molson in The Maple Leaf, wandered along to The Coal Hole for a last wodka and boarded the Central Line at Charing Cross back to Leytonstone.

Not quite rock and roll but a good day.

Thanks Gil, mate.

NB Gil’s appearance was part of a day organised by the then soon-to-be-disbanded GLC led by Ken Livingstone and featured bands including Billy Bragg and The Smiths (fulfilling dates booked before they were famous). The event was also notorious for some pretty stiff fighting with neo-Nazis. Read more about it here

One million years BC

Mine, of course, looks just like this

At least, not quite a million years but a bit before public internet access…say, 1930s to the end of the 1950s, a time when biking lore passed on informally by word of mouth, father to son, club member to club member, neighbour to neighbour. Tinker with your bike and you could be sure of a dozen blokes just like you, young men with their first or second two-stroke or else family men with something smart but practical from BSA or a well-used chair-hauling possibly side-valve big thumper from Panther, Norton or war-surplus Triumph, being ever on hand to help.

And failing that, there was always the Blue ’un and Green ’un and their many spin-off tomes dedicated to every aspect of motorcycling and bursting their bindings with practical and useful advice.

Such tomes – but let’s call ’em books so that I don’t come over like someone writing for the truly awful rubbish that comes out of the Morton’s empire (‘tomes’, ‘custodian’ and all the other bollocks which is their stock in trade in the hope of a. sounding competent, b. authoritative and c. avoiding the wrath of the nut-counting readers) are presented here, Two Stroke Motorcycles and The Motorcyclist’s Workshop.

Each is a glorious paean to the possibilities presented by taking pains with your motorcycle, the kind of works nowadays described as a ‘bible’ – The Bike-builder’s Bible and the like. Then, (published in 1920 and 1931 respectively, my editions are reprints from 1946) they offered simple and widely-disseminated motorcycling standard practice, the kind of instruction every boy experienced from school onwards, working with hand tools, basic mechanical engineering practice and so on, reproduced in book form to provide a handy all-in-one reference with hints, tips and wrinkles sprinkled throughout, rather than as a bridge for the gaping chasm of knowledge plainly visible today.

(But that’s to sound like one of those elderly curmudgeons on YouTube, indulging a predilection for faint but detectable racism and damning everything made after 1970.)

In a nutshell then, all that you wanted, consolidated into a handy little package to be enjoyed at a moment’s notice – Konnie Huq in book form.

A wealth of good stuff and this is just the start

Couched in the stiff but friendly argot of the time, to read a copy is to revisit the rainy afternoons of your childhood spent in the company of the Fat Owl of the Remove, Wharton, Nugent, The Bounder, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh and the rest.

I adore it, you might find it ponderous and lacking a sufficient quantity of swear words. What is not lacking is the good stuff in the form of practical techniques to tackle everything from a plug swap to an engine rebuild, selecting and using hand tools to housing them in a suitable self-build workshop and finishing off with tuning for speed and efficiency.

From building and organising a workshop to polishing and balancing
flywheels and checking alignment. The above is still the accepted
method though I’d put a clock on the other side too, to check relative run-out

It’s my experience that when working with workshop and technical guides from the first half of the twentieth century, it’s tempting to go further than your ability might otherwise allow and this should be smartly reined in. These books – and the Iliffe guides are no exception – make pulling apart a motor and merrily attacking its innards sound like an everyday operation. It is, but only if you have the underlying ability gleaned from a young life spent in the company of men in stores coats clutching Moore & Wright mics with the smell of oil and metal never far away, otherwise it’s all too easy to bite off more than you can chew.

Worth reading then, and worth buying to read, but watch out for prices on eBay and pay no more than a fiver or so. Published by the million on cheap paper but with an underlying quality of presentation they survive well today.

NB You can read more about Iliffe and its history here and here