Michael W Salter

Punks on Scooters – The Bristol Mod Revival 1979-1985 (Tangent Books)

The mod revival of the late Seventies wasn’t all about London, although you’d be hard pressed to find evidence of this a lot of the time. Despite this, out in the provinces the same processes that drove the capital’s change from punk to Mod were happening. Documenting the Bristol scene, Michael W Salter has written a vivid and well-remembered account of that era, and of its gentle change into the scooterboy world of the mid-80s.

Michael is of the same generation as a lot of us on the scooter scene, being too young to be a ‘proper’ punk, but being in just the right place at the right time to get on the start of the fledgling Mod revival scene.

Documenting his, and his friends’, conversion, the meetings and fights, his introduction to scooters and weekends away, this story is a hugely familiar one to myself and, I suspect, many others of you out there.

It’s a tale that’s told with a great deal of self-deprecating humour, of ‘characters’ and oddballs, and tales that sound unlikely until you stop and think ’Oh, hang on… I remember something like that happening’!

The author has a great skill in documenting those formative years without making the story any more about him than it needs to be, and his typically Mod-like attention to detail shows that he was truly engrossed in it at the time, before drifting away once the scooterboy world opened it’s arms to other fashions, ones that had previously at best had no connection to scooters or, at worst, open hostility.

The book is rounded out with several appendixes from other notables of the local scene of the day, and a good nod to the legendary Bristol band Colonel Kilgore’s Vietnamese Formation Surf Team rounds the book off.

At around 150 pages it’s just the right length for an account of this size, and is detailed enough that you can place yourself there.

One thing that I didn’t realise until I’d finished it, is that there are no illustrations apart from the front cover. I think that speaks volumes for the eloquence of the writing that they’re not missed. For a great trip down Memory Lane to the birth of today’s scooter scene, this book flicked all the right switches for me. Nik