The Scooter Years

I started off on two wheels as a rocker. Me and my best mate, Les, went to see the ultra-cheesy Cliff Richard film, `The Young Ones.` A young dork was riding a stunning motorbike: a Triumph 200 trials-style bike, with shiny high exhaust and cowhorn bars. I wanted it. Love at first sight. Ignored the rest of the bland film; just sat there wondering how I could get that bike.

I was fifteen....just months away from being able to ride legally. I pestered my dad for weeks. He eventually caved in. This was all new at the time: young people just out of school soaking wet behind the ears totally green and naïve were now called teenagers. And we were determined to flex our youthful muscles to get what we wanted in a fast changing world. The monochrome Fifties were giving ground at a snail`s pace....but change was coming. You could feel it in the air. Stuffy rod up your back get yer hair cut Britain was embracing with great reluctance the emergence of a fledgling youth culture. The beatniks had pushed at society`s boundaries by lounging around in coffee bars nodding off to jazz, but they were still wearing their dads` tweeds and smoking bloody pipes. And apart from Che how can you take any revolutionary seriously when they`re wearing a beret...?

So dad coughed up the deposit for the bike. I was Marlon Brando on this fabulous bike: the wild one. Used to look at myself in Woolies` big window as I rode by. It was 1962 and the law regarding wearing a crash helmet was some years away. But my mum put her foot down and insisted I buy one...and wear it. So I would ride away from the house in Farm Avenue, Rayners Lane wearing it, get to the end of the road, remove it...and speed off. A nosey neighbour ratted on me. So I got the maternal tongue lashing...and had to wait until I was further away to take the ugly thing off.

But I was a phoney rocker. Les was the real deal: greased back licorice locks, leather jacket, roll yer own fag dangling from his mouth. I was only in it for the look. Poser. We used to lounge around on the seats outside Sopers in Harrow on a Saturday eyeing up the talent. Then the inevitable happened: two real rockers towered over us and uttered the classic question...”Oi...what you lookin` at?” We scarpered.

Then I began to notice the new kids on the block. They were strutting around in neat Italian cut suits. Sporting short tidy hair cuts. Stylish skinny girls on their arms. Then they were buzzing about on these weird two wheeled scooters. I was hooked. It was the look again. Let me at it.

I flogged the motorbike and used the dosh to buy a Lambretta TV175. Dumped the leather jacket. Cut my hair. Got some threads. But didn`t even say goodbye to Les or explain that I was through with all that greasy stuff. Forty years later we met up through the usual Facebook searching and got together for a pint. I was still guilty and embarrassed at my callous betrayal, but Les sort of forgave me. He was still a rocker, with a bike and slicked back hair. Mates again.

It`s a really odd thing with scooters. You`re a Vespa man or a Lambretta man. I was firmly in the latter camp. And still am. The sleek lines of a Lambretta always look more attractive to me than the pregnant Vespa. But different strokes etc. Got to respect the vagaries of taste.

I didn`t realise it immediately, but I had entered a tyrannical world of mod culture. Style was everything. If you were not on-point with your clothes, your hair and your scooter you were nowhere. And styles changed at an alarming rate. It was almost impossible to keep up and be entirely on trend.

I think one of the first changes I made to the Scooter was removing the front mudguard. Seems very odd to me now. And probably did then. But the style was soon pushed aside, so out came the screwdriver to put it back.

Then I noticed guys were zooming around with huge mudflaps. They would shoot by with these things flapping about, slapping on the road, kicking up the dust. I was not well upholstered in the cash department so decided to make my own. Bought some roofing tarred paper. Cut it into huge pieces and bolted these under my scooter. Didn`t last long at 60 mph. Torn to shreds and chucked. Fortunately the style soon vanished as well.

Then it was aerials. Oh, god....they had to be about eight feet long with a fox`s tail dangling off the end. I couldn`t make one of those so a tail fixed to the back of the seat had to suffice. For awhile....

Then...the chrome carriers. Here we go again... Just one on the front this week. Add one on the back this week. Now it`s time for side bars. Then some bright spark fitted a spotlight to the carrier on the front. Someone decided they`d have two. Then four. Ten. Twenty....what!? It got totally out of hand. Hardly any of the lights were actually connected. Too much for those weedy batteries to cope with.

I had a decent lot of carriers, but didn`t go for the Wembley floodlights on the front. Couldn`t afford it, to be honest. I reckon if I`d had the readies I`d have been up there with the twenty or thirty light brigade. As it was I watched the pennies, bought a modest little number, drilled a hole in the front mudguard and bolted it on. I kind of liked the more minimalist look anyway. A scooter wasn`t supposed to look like a bleedin` Christmas tree as far as I was concerned.

Spare wheels came and went. On the front. On the back. Behind the front panels. Tarten covers on. Tarten covers off. Then tyres where whitewall. Didn`t look right to me. Perhaps I just couldn`t afford them.

But I was spending all available shrapnel on clothes. I loved the look. God knows where all that gear went. Wish I still had it. The candy striped seersucker cotton jacket. The collarless hairy green jacket that was unique. I`d tried to start a trend. Didn`t work. The wide lapelled navy double-breasted jacket with the subtle chalk stripes. The girlfriends were also subject to inspection by the style police. They had to have the right shoes and skirts, jackets and hair styles. At one time they were all in long leather coats, then they all had these decidedly dodgy looking navy plastic macs.

And of course.....the USAF parka. Off to the army surplus store, slap down the cash. Walk out in the de rigueur item that all well-respected scooterist mods had to wear. Fortunately it was a damn good move for whoever started this essential fashion. With its removable fleecy lining it was warm in winter....and with the lining removed cool in summer. It was enormous. Used to flap about and at real speed was not the best aero dynamic of coats to wear, acting more like a flaming sail and probably reducing your top speed by a good five or ten miles an hour.

None of us wore helmets. The law didn`t kick in until summer 1973 – and sadly I had moved on by then. But hats now appeared. And this style addition really did pose a serious problem. How do you speed around with a cloth cap on your bonce without the damn thing going AWOL? It had to be wrenched down tight to stop it disappearing. But then we all got into blue beat music. Akin to reggae, but more infectious. We loved it. But it came with its own uniform. Neat suit, parka on top...and a tiny hat. Being a resourceful kind of pauper I steered clear of the real thing and bough myself a cheapish felt hat, got the scissors out and trimmed it down to the regulation half inch brim. Tasty. But keeping that thing on your head at speed was a nightmare. I found the only way to do it was to tilt your brainbox down a full forty-five degrees, hoping the g-force would keep it in place. But even that trick failed me occasionally and found me ripping a u-turn to retrieve the little monster as it vanished up the Harrow Road.

If all this wasn`t enough to throw you off kilter, then we all noticed that mods were changing their seated posture on their scooters. For some time it was the fashion to perch precariously on the front two inches of your seat with your bony knees and the toes of your Hush Puppies protruding from the front side panels. This lasted awhile....and was a recipe for frost bite in the winter. Some mods then tried sitting right at the back of the seat, arms outstretched. Didn`t do it for me. Not a racer. So I went back to being comfortable....and dangerously out of fashion.

Screens were in and out on a regular basis. I had a bargain basement plastic excuse for a screen. Little fragile thing, Cracked in the mighty winter of `63 and eventually just fell off as I took advantage of a tail wind down hill and hit just under seventy. Scared the proverbial out of me. Fact is I was more of a fair weather rider. Always have been. I had to ride in the rain and snow to ferry girlfriends around, but never felt safe on those puny wheels. And if the girl was an inexperienced pillion passenger – leaning in the wrong direction at every bend and curve – keeping the scooter stable was a fight against the centre of gravity.

In spring of `64 we started hearing rumours about a showdown with rockers at the coast. The media had fanned the flames of the clashes between mods and rockers over the previous year or two. Making it out to be more of an issue than it was. Ok, I`d had a taste of it – literally – when riding home in the dark one night a car drew alongside me, windows down, jeering group of leather boys hanging out....and then a bottle of urine thrown in my face. And me and my group of mates had hot-footed it from a youth club when it had been invaded by a dozen or so rockers. Overwhelmed we jumped on our wheels and fled. But in the bank holiday battles that raged briefly that year the mods tended to outnumber the rockers who were a fading force. I cried off. Made my excuses and kept well away from the beaches.

But for real scooter style, be it Vespa or Lambretta, you had to get yourself a first class paint job. My first was a rather feeble effort: green side panels with an anorexic yellow stripe in-line with chrome side bars. The ultimate style, of course, was the chromed side panels. Stunning. The reflections. The chrome. The intimation of untold wealth. Hmmm.... So out of my league again. But the paint job I did go for suited me – and even today looking back at the grainy monochrome snaps of my TV175 I still reckon it was a great style. Racing green with wide English mustard yellow stripes and large white number decals. Bugger....why did I ever sell it...?Simple answer I suppose. I wanted a car. It was 1965.

Nowadays everyone takes hundreds of photos on their phones every year. Back then film was expensive and the you had to pay to get it developed. And the resulting photos were always disappointing. But I cherish the few photographs I have of my Lambretta TV175 and the style wars we endured together.

If you get the two-wheel bug it lasts a lifetime. I`ve had motorbikes over the intervening years and enjoyed my dry day rides out in the countryside. By the time I decided I wanted to return to scootering and began searching online for a replacement for my TV175 prices had gone sky high and well and truly put paid to that dream.

So many years have gone by taking most of my memory with them that I can`t remember where the scooter went, who I sold it to...and what fate lay ahead for it. I recently did a licence plate search for it on the government vehicle tax site in the hope it might still be out there somewhere – renovated to within an inch of its life, gleaming, rust free, purring for a new owner.... But no. It`s gone. Bugger. Bugger. Bugger...!

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Footnote: A few years back I was contacted through my band`s management by an agency requesting to use one of those fast-fading photographs of me sat on my Lambretta back in `63. They represented the Fred Perry company and were compiling an in-house year book for the employees and staff at the company. They liked the period photo, particularly noting the Fred Perry shirt I was seen wearing. I agreed to a one-off payment together with three copies of the book for my children. A couple of years later a friend told me they`d seen me in an advert on TV. A Fred Perry ad. I immediately rang the agency and complained that they were using my copyrighted image without my permission. They apologised profusely. They had lost my contact details. The payment was swiftly made to cover TV and shop advertising use of my photograph. More money than I had ever made with my bands, Kaleidoscope and Fairfield Parlour...combined.

But that ain`t the end of this little tail end tale...

It wasn`t a Fred Perry shirt I was wearing perched like a dandy on my scooter. It was a cheap market knock-off. Yep – you guessed it. I couldn`t afford the real thing.

Perhaps I should buy meself a Scomadi or a Royal Alloy to satisfy my craving for the two-wheel thrills of so, so long ago...

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