‘I even liked the ads… this was a portal to another world’
In these days of multi-platform media overload Martin Lambert remembers how life changing paper can be
To get to my junior school I had to walk out of our Epsom Cul-de-sac, past a Candy Super Blue Kawasaki Z1B belonging to Lester Boniface then, opposite the school there was a junkyard with piles of old cars. It’s the sort of place that’s disappeared now, and the son of the junkyard owner, Alfie Burroughs, had a Kawasaki H2 (actually, it wasn’t just an H2, it was a Denco tuned, King Cobra H2 and that is really special). It was only about 200 yards from my house to school, but I’d always be late because I was staring at Kawasakis, so maybe it was fate. It was 50 years ago now but I still recall the bikes and the owners like it was yesterday. Anyway, the Z1B said ‘DOHC’ on the engine and I needed to find out what that meant, and there wasn’t much around in 1975 to satisfy that hunger for authoritative information; I needed to feed the passion. My first copy of Bike was August 1975, (with a rather 'large boned' woman in a stars and stripes bikini on the cover!) and I bought it at the newsagents in Coopers Lane, Clacton-on-sea opposite my grandmother’s house (no 82). I read that issue from cover to cover and even if I did not understand it all from a technical perspective I liked the balance of the magazine, the road tests, the features and even the adverts (who remembers CDS screws and Davick Motique?) – this was a portal to another world. From then onwards I bought Bike every month uninterrupted for at least two decades. I knew I needed a moped when I was 16, so I ended up doing three jobs while I was still at school so that I could save up for one before the 16er law came in; I had a 5am start at a newsagent, marking up papers and then doing a paper round, then rolled the courts at the local tennis club, then did an evening shift at a petrol station. So before I was even 16 I’d saved up enough money to buy a brand new pre-restricted Suzuki AP50 for £249, and it lived in my bedroom upstairs until I was old enough to ride it on the road. In reality Bike helped me own the fastest moped at school – proper result.
When I was 17 I bought a tatty 1972 Kawasaki S2, a quite rare 350cc triple. It’d obviously been production raced, so it was a massive saga to get it back on the road. I rebuilt it gradually in my bedroom, before I’d done my bike test, which didn’t go down very well especially when I was caught cleaning the engine in the bath one Christmas Eve.
I bought a new tank and sidepanels for it, but I needed to get the tailpiece painted to match. And one of the great things about Bike was the way it introduced me to so many people. There was an article in one issue about paint finishes, and it talked about a guy called Pete Darvill who ran a company called Mechspray in Rochester. So I took my tail piece to him and he matched the paint to the rest of the bodywork and did the pinstriping. It was a beautiful job. Later, when I bought a Ducati 900SS that needed love I went to Moto Vecchia in Collier’s Wood who helped me sort it out and, naturally, I’d found out about them through Bike.
That sense of being introduced to people, and the idea of the magazine as a portal to another world, is partly why the Oil City Slickers article in October 1977 was so powerful. It featured Ian Kirk and Colin Edwards and their Drouin Supercharged Kawasakis (of course). I favoured Ian’s early Harris framed machine with red metalflake paint scheme and 'blower'. Words like Harris and Dymag were a mantra back then and these bikes about as exotic as you could get. But it was more than the fact that the article was featuring not one but two supercharged motorcycles. It was that Bike had sent Peter Watson to Aberdeen to interview the owners and John Wallace to take the images. In pre internet days Bike made the effort to reflect the cultural and geographic diversity of motorcycling.
I can’t say Bike wholly made me decide to choose a career in the motorcycle industry, but it did not hinder the decision. For a start it made me aware there was such a thing as a motorcycle industry and even highlighted some of the people within in it. Many of the people who I read about then are friends now. Thanks to Bike I gained a broad understanding of motorcycles and the industry. I can appreciate the motorcycle landscape for what it is, and that started with Bike. And I still own the S2, and eight other classic Kawasakis, plus a huge collection of old magazines (mostly Bike).