50 YEARS OF BIKE: BIKE CHANGED MY LIFE
Founding editor Mark Williams didn’t set out to change lives. But...
My teenage years were really shaped by music paper the Melody Maker and Bike. At school I was listening to all that period rock music and was a massive Wishbone Ash fan. I turned 16 in 1974 and left school that May, just in time to read Bike’s test of a 50cc KTM Comet Cross. So while all my friends bought Yamaha FS1-ES I went to Comerfords in Thames Ditton and bought a KTM.
I got a job for that summer in a bike shop in Bognor Regis, so I rode the KTM up and down from Berkshire to the south coast every week. I was only working as a kind of gofer, but they took me on because they were selling loads of Fizzies, so they wanted someone that could talk to sixteen year olds. In those days lots of these kids had never ridden a bike when they got their parents to sign the HP forms, so I’d teach them to ride at the back of the shop – imagine, a sixteen year old teaching other sixteen year olds how to ride a bike, and then they’re out on the road. It really was a different time. I wanted to get an apprenticeship as a bike mechanic, but I couldn’t find one that would take me on, so I became an apprentice electrician with a big company in Farnborough. There were about ten of us apprentices, and we all had mopeds. Mainly Fizzies, but one Suzuki AP50 and my KTM. When I was seventeen I went to Motorcycle City and part exchanged the KTM for a Honda CB250K4. I got my first big bike in the early eighties. It was a Suzuki GS750 and that buy was certainly influenced by the test that I read in Bike too. I’d also been reading the travel stories, starting to understand that a bike was the only way to travel, so when I saw a little review of Ted Simon’s Jupiters Travels, and then read the book in 1979 that continued a thought process that made me want to ride around the world.
In the 1980s I got a job driving tourists around north Africa in Land Rovers and old ex-army Bedford trucks. I’d be away for nine months of the year, but people would bring me out copies of Bike to keep me in touch. When I finished working in Africa I came back home and bought a Yamaha XT600 and rode to and around Morocco in 1990. From then onwards my real focus was planning a round the world ride.
I was going two-up with my girlfriend Sara, so we wanted a bigger bike than an XT. In late 1994 I bought a 1992 BMW R100GS with 3000 miles on the clock, at least partly with information from Bike’s ‘Used Bike Bible’. I’ve still got the bike and I found that page, torn from the magazine in a file a few days ago. The bike’s now got 68,000 miles on it. We left in August 2000 and came back in 2003 having travelled through 36 countries on five continents, suffered two broken bones and more punctures than I can, or care to, remember. We went out through Iran, Pakistan, India, East Asia to Australia, then down through north, central and south America, and back up through Africa. I loved the challenges of keeping the bike running: changing the prop shaft on the roof of a Guatemalan hotel surrounded by magnificent smoking volcanoes; gluing the starter motor back together 12,000 feet up on the icy Peruvian Altiplano; removing the collapsed gearbox bearings from the casing by dumping it on the campfire, on the shore of Kenya’s stunning lake Nakuru. The joys of adventure biking. When we got back I didn’t want to return to the previous life, so I went to Merton College (and actually I might have first read about their motorcycle mechanic’s course in Bike) and did a two-year City and Guilds motorcycle technicians course. From there I spent 12 years working on Triumphs for Jack Lilley, and now work as an independent Triumph mechanic.
The BMW is now stuffed in a lock-up with my other neglected bikes, and I run a Tiger 800 and have a Yamaha TRX850 on the road too. And does anyone want to sell me a Yamaha TDR250 project? I wanted to buy one after reading the tests in the late eighties, but it never happened, so I’d like to tick that box. Get in touch…
And I guess all of this goes back to that KTM Comet Cross, and that goes back to Bike magazine. I’ve still got loads of old copies in boxes in the loft. I’m less keen on Wishbone Ash now though. But I hear they are still going too.