Introduction

New English Library biker books often get cast as one thing, being of a type, but there is a lot of variation in the stories they tell.

Some are simply exploitation stories, very much in the same tradition as the skinhead books, also published by NEL. Others are dystopian, while some claim to be reportage, either of the history of clubs in the US or the bike club scene in England.

My personal tastes run to those that have a dystopian feel (the Mick Norman books particularly), or an occult element to the story.

With that in mind, The Bikers by Alex Stuart (aka Alex R. Stuart, aka Richard A Gordon), may seem like a strange choice to feature here. The Bikers is not an occult story. There are no ancient priests or forgotten gods. No-one is trying to perform rituals at Stonehenge, and none of the bikes are cursed (not obviously, anyway).

In many ways, The Bikers, although fictional, is contemporary reportage, or at least elements of it are. We’ll get to that in a moment. But, while I don’t have to justify why I like the Little Billy trilogy, I want to understand why, and I think it has a lot to do with the tone and the way Alex Stuart creates atmosphere.

The Bikers is written by Alex Stuart, who also wrote for NEL as Alex R. Stuart. The Bikers predates The Devil’s Rider, the previous book of his I’ve featured here. As mentioned in that article, Richard A. Gordon added the R. to his pseudonym following complaints from Violet Vivian Stuart who wrote historical novels as Alex Stuart (the world of pen names can get very complicated).

It’s worth looking at my previous article here, to get a feel for the other work Gordon wrote, and how that had an influence on The Devil’s Rider (https://stevetoase.wordpress.com/2022/06/14/the-devils-rider/)

The Bikers – First Appearance of The Apostles

The Bikers is a bit of a different beast, but the writing has the same stream of consciousness, descriptive beauty as the later book.

“— The Hanger Lane underpass on the roaring Oxford Road, Western Avenue heading slategrey out of Park Royal in North-West London, on a hot summer day —

— Thirty mean-looking motorbikes straddled and impelled by thirty dirty mean-looking Apostles with enough sleazy wind-whipped mamas to go round every last one of them —

— They’re the Shoreditch Chapter, broken away from the East London Hell’s Angels, and they’re bursting in full feral Festival bound formation, from the shadows beneath the sterile concrete under pass — every last one of them stoned out of his righteous mind, higher than the white clouds in the glazing baking sky — “

Stuart starts The Bikers, by locating the scene so effectively (something he also did in The Devil’s Rider), and the introduction of The Apostles as a presence in contrast to the sterility of the city. What I really love, though, is the poetry of the language. “…full feral Festival bound formation…shadows beneath the sterile concrete underpass…glazing baking sky“

Stuart wastes no time in focusing in on the action, again a feature of New English Library youth subculture books in general and Stuart’s writing in particular. We’re with The Apostles on a run, and then everything goes very wrong. Someone underestimates them, cuts them up on a sports bike, and incurs their wrath.

Although we don’t meet him yet, this is where the central tension in the club is set up, the one that lies at the heart of all the other conflicts in the book; the rivalry between Larry the Lamb, the acting pres of The Apostles, and Little Billy, the real, though absent, president.

These tensions spiral out to the public in their cars “like good citizens all hoping for the two toned sirens of one-toned justice to wail in pursuit”, to the wider country and establishment. The rider of the Super Hawk, who challenges them, comes to represent the straight world trying to put down the bikers, and that means, in the world of the story, he needs to be wiped out.

The fallout from this, with burning cars, dead riders, and the spectre of the police about to start pursuit, sets the rest of the events of the story in motion. With no other plan, Larry the Lamb leads the rest of the Apostles on toward the festival.

For me, The Bikers differs from a lot of the NEL books, because the central setting, the music festival, is based on a real event. More of that in a bit. First, let’s talk about Little Billy.

Alex Stuart doesn’t mince his words. He wants us to see Little Billy as a nightmare in human form. Rather than summarise, I’m going to quote Stuart’s description verbatim.

“Little Billy was born an Apostle, a speeding, rampaging monster. He’s huge and dirty and covered with hair, and what little is visible of his face is enough to freak the minds of half the world’s population.

But when he’s astride his roaring Harley-Davidson 74, he’s a crude monster no more but a graceful elemental carnivore. He leans into the hurricane wind, arched up and across his apehangers. His right arm runs from elbow down along the gleaming right apehanger, his fingers curling lazily over the dial of the speedometer.

But his arm’s stiff on the left bar. The stump welded to the gleaming metal forearm, which curls slowly into the long rake of double-pronged claws. These take the place of his left hand. The tips of either claw point at where his palm was till the day the shearing rival outlaw axe parted him from the company of his hand and all but two inches of forearm.”

In the North of England, there was a very well known outlaw biker, active from the mid sixties, who did have a prosthetic arm with claws (I’m not going to name them here, but if you’ve spent any time around bikers in that part of the country, you probably know who). Normally I would think that an author has invented his characters completely. In this case I’ve often wondered if Stuart took inspiration from this particular person, especially as the main events of The Bikers is inspired by a real event.

Siddhartha, rock bands, and Hermann Hesse

After blowing the minds of the custom officers, and regaining possession of his bike, Little Billy, rides to nearby Bristol, where he, in quick succession, stocks up on drugs, pulls two girls, and has a fight with some local youths that he effortlessly wins. Following a fairly chaste threesome in a field with the two girls, Billy finds out the band Siddhartha are going to be playing at the festival, and, realising The Apostles wouldn’t miss such an event, makes the decision to ride there and hook up with his club.

Siddhartha always amused me. In these stories, as with many of the NEL books, there are lots of little in-jokes. Siddhartha is a book by Hermann Hesse, as is Steppenwolf, and Steppenwolf the band performed Born to be Wild on the Easy Rider soundtrack.

Siddhartha’s song titles in the book seem to be a nod to another band, heavily connected with British bikers, with International Freedom Farout Fighter and Brainlit Wipeout, sounding like a nod to Hawkwind’s Urban Guerrilla and Brainbox Pollution (released on the same 7 inch in 1973).

Now, I might be wrong on this, as my edition of the Bikers is from 1975 which is two years after the single came out, but the original edition of The Bikers came out in 1971. Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe it was revised for the later edition.

British Country Pubs in the Seventies

One key scene in the book, and one that perfectly sums up both the relationship between the youth subcultures of the time and the tensions in the book, happens when The Apostles are trying to reach the festival and get stuck at a pub five miles from the festival grounds.

Chapter four opens with a great description.

“Old Manny Cutler, wrinkled like a dried brown kipper, is wedged in a corner of the beige button-cushioned benchseats running around the oaken wall of the Green Man’s public bar. He’s shrouded by the shadow of the Somersetshire light falling through the bottled panes of the tight box windows.

The Green Man was once a coaching inn, later it was a free-house. Right now it’s a dusted air-conditioned juke-boxed country laneside outlet for a London brewery, the owners of which would never dare drink their own beer.”

The Green Man is the pub in mist at the crossroads, used by locals, visited by townsfolk, and sometimes ‘invaded’ by bikers. I remember seeing these places in books like the Usbourne Mysteries of the Unknown that might have been the location of a gibbet or a long forgotten murder, passing into myth. You can see public houses like this in the Murdersville episode of The Avengers.

And this was the time of “No bikers” signs put up to discourage the patronage of motorbike riders.

Again, Stuart excels at descriptions of heat.

“The lane is bordered by parched hedgerows, beyond which grows sorry-looking barley in loose and overfarmed topsoil. The nettles in the ditch already bear a blasted appearance, the grass is without sap. The blazing broiling pearl sky overhead is dry, a haze of stale air. Visibility is limited in all directions to about three miles.”

And into this ancient inn and scorched landscape come The Apostles.

This is not the social media fed landscape we are familiar with now. Instead, information arrives in radio news broadcasts, slightly ahead of the arrival of The Apostles themselves.

The bikers have not had an easy time getting this far, only their manoeuvrability helping them evade the police through the festival traffic.

While it might be thought the bikers are natural allies of the festival goers, they are different enough to not sit comfortably with the rest of the counter culture here. Nor are they part of the wider society. This is shown clearly as the Apostles move into the pub and encounter the landlord, with his muttonchops, who has tried and failed to call the forces of law and order.

When it becomes clear The Apostles have no intention of paying for their drinks, he challenges them, a challenge that sees him throttled, and released to show them the hospitality they expect. Glasses are smashed, the jukebox is taken over, and people are fornicating on the benches. This is no longer the 1970s timeless British pub, where Old Manny Cutler can spend his final days safely in his corner. This is a place of anarchy and violence, more likely to be seen in the cities than in the endless summer of the British countryside that never really existed.

The counter culture is not a monolith and, again, this is something Stuart is very good at portraying.

Dan Lewin is part of the counter culture, but rather than being the unleashed rage represented by The Apostles, he is a far more reasoned voice, an intellectual side – a person who overstepped the mark in Ulster, attracting the attention of the Security Forces, and has also written articles about The Apostles. He is someone who knows how thin the line he is treading is, but can see the way the situation is spiralling out of control.

Lewin is not a gonzo journalist. This is not Hunter S Thompson opening his apartment to the Oakland Angels. Lewin is calmer and more reasoned. He knows the heat The Apostles are bringing down on themselves. On them all. And he confronts Larry the Lamb, explains the situation he’s in, “Don’t you realise you’ve slapped the British Lion right in the face?” Then, when Larry asks him from the solution, he tells him the unpalatable truth.

“You must remove your colours, you can’t jam it through this traffic advertising it to every citizen just who you are!”

Unsurprisingly, this causes tensions in The Apostles. The idea of dropping their colours is seen as a coward’s way out, even by those who regard it as the best option. Wildcat leads a faction on bikes, still flying their colours, while Larry the Lamb remains behind, and then a further split between those who decide to stay with their bikes and those who choose to press on to the festival. Carolyn, Dan Lewin’s girlfriend, curses the way the festival has brought bubbling tensions to a head, and knows what effect the Apostles could have amongst the festival goers. When the publican succumbs to his wounds, she turns to Dan and says “Let the dead bury the dead.”

The Isle of Wight Festival

Here, Stuart changes the focus to the festival, and this is where we start to get into more contemporary events.

In the book, the festival is held on the British mainland, somewhere in the south-west, but it soon becomes clear that the inspiration for the event Alex Stuart writes about is the Isle of Wight festival.

The Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 was a huge affair, held in the August of that year on the western side of the Island. During the previous two festivals held on the Isle of Wight, the organisers were able to negotiate a location with the landowners, but due to pressure from local communities, the festival location was brought under the planning system. This meant the only site available to the organisers was East Afton Farm, Afton Down. This had consequences for the festival, most notably giving a hill where people could gather and watch the bands for free. Also, the Hells Angels were in attendance.

This was a significant time in the history of the club. Two British bikers, Buttons and Harley Pete, had gone over to the US to get permission for official charters in the UK. Once they were back, they had to confront the presence of unchartered, unofficial clubs using the Hells Angels name. A major faction of these clubs, who were friends and supported each other, were known as ‘the amalgamation’ in contrast to the official ‘All England’ represented by the officially sanctioned charters.

While the history of this time is not mine to tell, what is clear is the presence at the Isle of Wight of both sides. In his biography, Buttons talks about going to the island with trouble planned, and there were clashes between the different factions throughout the festival.

The connection between the bikers and festivals is long and not always straightforward, from the Rolling Stones using the British clubs as security for their Hyde Park gig in 1969, followed by the mess that was Altamont later in that year, continuing on to the Stonehenge Free Festival of the late seventies and early eighties.

At the Isle of Wight, the organisers were using a security firm, rather than bikers. Finding themselves outside, the bikers teamed up with the White Panthers and some Young Liberals to attack the fence. This resulted in an all out battle with the security guards, the latter using iron bars. Following the rising atmosphere of violence, the security patrols employed by the organisers were replaced by regular police.

There are obvious parallels between the festival in The Bikers and the Isle of Wight, but two things make it really clear this was the inspiration, and probably based on the account in Buttons book.

Firstly, in the chapter of his biography on the Isle of Wight festival, Buttons says,

“I knew that if serious trouble happened we could drop our patches and duck into the crowds until the advantage was back with us. I was prepared to stand and fight – but on our own terms. Not theirs.” (pg 139 Buttons: The Making of a President).

The second is the incident around the camp of the none All England Hells Angels (Buttons doesn’t call them amalgamation in his account, and other sources just call them Hells Angels.)

This is a report of what happened, according to the Underground Press.

“At 7pm on Saturday, 60 police surrounded the Angel’s camp, and in a one-to-one confrontation ordered them to play it cool. One of the catering staff had complained that an Angel went into the women’s loos and the police asked them to remove the swastika [flag]. Angel’s leader Buttons, would only agree if the police requested everyone else at the festival to remove their flags. The police retracted their demands and left the Angels alone for the rest of the festival.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Stuart took direct inspiration from these events for The Bikers, but where it goes next is very, very different.

On the Edge of Collapse

In much of his writing, Stuart gives a sense of a world in the same place as Mad Max (the first film), a feeling of a pre-apocalyptic country.

“Above the grounds are parched trees and inconsequential scrub and patches of heath severely diminished by the encroachment of artificially fertilised ploughlands.”

“The countryside beyond the Festival grounds seems peaceful, much as it always has done, save for its strangely colourless look, but it is doomed already. The organic content of the soil in the valley has fallen below the safe 8 per cent minimum, it has been exploited too quickly.”

This is a world that is dying, and the chaos of the festival isn’t even a symptom.

In contrast to the rest of the Apostles, Little Billy rides straight in, barely paying attention to the security he hits with his bike, or his two pillions getting grabbed from the pillion seat.

The Forces of Law and Order

And this is where we meet Chief Inspector Molt, the representative of authority inside the festival. When we first meet Molt, described as “Little Billy’s old friend, and moral benefactor“, he is in the process of telling them to take down their swastika flag, echoing the real events at the Isle of Wight festival. Here, Stuart explains the symbiotic relationship between the police and groups deemed to be on the outside of society.

“Molt, who is tall and hard with a sharp nose dominating a face obviously designed as a meat cleaver, hates the Angels. It is his career to hate the Angels. They have made his reputation. They give him a reason for living. If he ever succeeds in destroying them, he’ll be destroying himself.“

This truth is not just limited to bikers and the police, and becomes a lot more stark when police have to justify certain budgets.

While Molt does have a force of constables with him, they are not used to the conditions they have to work under in the festival, while the bikers are completely at home, and Stuart gives a really good sense of the Police losing control of the situation. There’s a great line where Stuart explains that Molt can understand the bikers, and can understand himself, but the crowd that surrounds them is an unknowable and ungovernable force. He can manage the bikers, but the mass of people who surround him? Not so much.

This section also contains one of my favourite descriptions, which is so evocative for anyone who has attended a big festival.

“Coke cans crunch beneath police boots, the ground is strewn with newspapers and abandoned programmes; fruit peel and empty Embassy packets the cardboard shredded for the manufacture of roaches.“

And the tension increases. This is definitely where Stuart excels, both in terms of the tension between Little Billy and Larry the Lamb, and the wider festival. At one point he describes the festival as a fortress of people, then focusses in on details like a guard dog getting killed and falling on a couple in a sleeping bag, with the crowd rising in number from 180,000 on one page to 200,000 on the next.

He also uses the shorthand of other festivals that ended in disaster.

“Lots of people are making uneasy private references to Altamont, and astrologer freaks checking up the dates come to the conclusion that it’s one helluva bad weekend to bring so many people together because the vibes are very negative.“

While this was written in the seventies, long before the real disenchantment of people in the eighties and early nineties under Thatcher, he talks about thousands of students starting out straight and finding there is no place for them in the world of work.

Woven all the way through the narrative is the sense of the day getting hotter. Whether that is intended as a metaphor for the heating up of tensions is unclear, but having been at very hot festivals (Glastonbury 1995, for example), Stuart continues to capture this. A sense of heat is woven through a lot of the language, for example,

“A burning harvest does not direct its own flames – That’s for the wind to do.“

And Stuart perfectly captures the way this hysteria can be whipped up, many years before the idea of social media manifested. One interesting detail here is the mention of Citizen Action Committees “declaring their intention of defending Society against these marauders.”

Again, with a story that repeats itself throughout the world, where there is a moral panic, there is a politician waiting to exploit the situation for his own ambitious gain.

Sir Frank Rutledge is described as hungry and ambitious, a Conservative MP with a background in a North-East stricken by unemployment. Rutledge is portrayed as knowing how to lever the press, even to the point where he embarrasses his PM. When the reports of what happened with the Apostles in London reach him, he knows he has the cause he can lever to generate publicity and momentum to help him to achieve his very self-serving goals. he describes the bikers as the enemies.

“They can have no claim upon our mercy and our compassion. The Permissive Society has dealt compassionately with their kind for too long. The army must send in units after them immediately. If necessary it must be given the power to deal with them on the spot. They cannot expect the justice they deny others.“

It’s telling how this language presaged almost exactly the language used for New age Travellers and the Convoy in the 1980s by the Conservative government in general and Thatcher in particular.

What’s really interesting in this section of the book, is how insightful Little Billy is portrayed as a leader. Rutledge thinks they will not only smash the bikers easily, he also thinks the crowd will turn against them. He realises if they went after the bikers at that moment, the bikers would be outnumbered and easily dealt with, but if the army is sent in, then the rest of the festival goers aren’t going to take it lying down.

Linda

By this point in the story, Linda and Little Billy have been reunited. As Larry the Lamb has been forced to surrender his temporary hold on the presidency of the club, he’s also been forced to surrender his relationship with Linda, which Linda didn’t seem to have much say in – the book apparently portraying her relationship as part of the role. It’s worth pointing out here, that these are pulp books and though some have more nuanced portrayals of roles of women in subcultures (see the Mick Norman books), they aren’t always very advanced in the way women are shown. However, it has to be said Linda is with Little Billy out of choice rather than obligation, and it may be her arrangement with Larry is more about maintaining status.

It is around this time in the story when Linda drops a trip, and goes on her own journey which crosses and intersects with the main storyline, but has its own trajectory.

Drugs have a long history with the various subcultures in the sixties and seventies, as well as into the decades that came after, and acid in particular has a certain folkloric place in the festival subculture, particularly following the announcements at Woodstock.

In such an environment the trip does not go well for Linda. The festival is a pressure cooker, and Linda feels like the epicentre of the chaos and stress. The manifestation of the paranoia that is building throughout the festival.

“But for Linda whose mind is skyhighing, dizzily, on acid the universe is not as beautiful. She inhabits a confused world where rumours are as irresistible as the plague, in which everything is directed at her personally. She’s wandered from the Angels’ tent, suddenly conscious that at any moment the hordes of uniformed gas-masked monsters from some other world might descend to rape and torture her. And now she drifts from point to point of the massive crowd, through the setting sun.“

Linda does not have a good time., with even the sky looking sick, and soon finds herself on stage.

The stage at any festival can become a focus for conflict and contested space, because whoever controls the stage controls the narrative. This can be seen at Altamont in particular, and I think this, rather than Isle of Wight, was probably the inspiration. At Altamont the stage is crowded, contested, seeing both occupation by people who are wasted as well as the bands, and the bikers who are moving in between the musicians. In this clip after Marty Balin gets knocked out, one of the bikers takes to the mic.

In The Bikers, Linda finds herself on stage and grabs the mic, shouting, “THE ARMY’S COMING IN WITH TANKS AND GUNS AND THEY’RE JUST USING THE ANGELS AS AN EXCUSE TO SCREW US ALL! WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?“

Again, we see how the stage is used to try and affect the mood of the crowd, when Miles the compere tries to blow the word “Peaceful”, to the crowd who aren’t exactly receptive, something that again echoes Altamont.

There are also echoes of the announcements at the Isle of Wight when one of the organisers started ranting from the stage at the audience.

The Army

The big difference between these festivals and the one in The Bikers is the presence of the army.

The use of the military in the British Isles was very much in the news at the time, because of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In 1969 British forces had been deployed in Ireland as part of Operation Banner, following riots that had seen ten people killed, including a 9 year old boy, with 745 injured. The army would have a presence in the six counties until 2007 as part of Operation Banner.

However, in 1971 the use of British forces in British domestic settings, and particularly against people the government decided were enemies of the state, was very much in the forefront of the national debate. It’s no surprise that one of the main elements of The Bikers is the use of the military.

Stuart makes explicit this link between the deployment in the book and the situation playing out on the streets of North Ireland, when the police withdraw, to coordinate the next stage of their operation with the ex-Ulster Infantry Companies.

One of the elements that they bring from the streets of Ulster is the use of less than lethal rounds. It’s no secret that the British government had developed rubber bullets for use in crowd control situations. It’s also no secret that these could be just as devastating. https://rubberbullets.longlead.com/chapter/rubber-bullet-history-northern-ireland. The weapon Stuart mentions is the discussed here at the Royal Armouries site, which was designed to take a number of different rounds, with its main ammunition the stun bags. I can’t find a reference that these exact weapons were used in Ulster, but it is possible.

However, the army was not deployed against civilians on the British Mainland in the seventies, and while that didn’t change in the 1980s, the increasingly militarisation of the police under Thatcher, seems to have been predicted by Stuart in The Bikers (along with a number of other writers such as mick Norman). this was particularly visible during the Miner’s Strike, such as at Orgreave, and during the Battle of the Beanfield.

The atmosphere of the time is very well summed in the song 1984 by New Model Army

It’s also worth noting that there have long been rumours that the military were used at the Beanfield, disguised as police in blue boilersuits with no numbers on their uniforms.

In the world created by Alex Stuart, the military are embarrassed by the position they are put in by the politicians to become involved in domestic disputes, a situation that is tense, putting battle ready men, some almost certainly dealing with PTSD, against kids.

“And the incredible singer of Miraculous Dimensions, she opens wide and screams out over the fences into the startled ears of the instantly alert soldiers out of Ulster who by now are very fast on the riot trigger…into the headphones of the Royal Armoured Corps boys, who’ve dropped into the party with three Saladin Mark 2 Armoured Cars, among other armoured forms of transport.“

In The Bikers, there is a real contrast between the measured writing depicting the Police/army discussions and the chaos of the festival in earlier scenes.

Then the dawn comes.

The weather again is used by Stuart to warn of what is coming, with its bloody red striations. Throughout the last part of the book, the rising temperature echoes the rising tension, which may seem obvious and trite but is incredibly well written, almost poetic in places. Fires burn, and the music has carried on throughout the night, but rather than create division between the bikers and the crowd, the presence of the army and police has galvanised the cohesion.

Sex in the Dirt

Sex scenes in New English Library books are there to titillate, and shock, and for that reason they can often grate to a modern audience. It’s interesting though, that the sex that is shown between Little Billy and Linda is portrayed as loving and affectionate, and the scene where a ‘starlet’ who has been abandoned by her producer escort, turns to the bikers for her sexual fantasies is shown as consensual, when assault was often used by other authors to provoke a reaction. Rather than using assault as the shock value (which does appear in a lot of the NEL books), the shock comes from her being a willing participant.

Resolved

Although the drama widens out, the central conflict is still between Larry and Little Billy, and throughout they have circled each other through the festival, with Little Billy trying to find his rival, while Larry stays out of the way and attempts to take out the stronger fighter without confronting him directly.

And the fight is a bit of a disappointment. Or not really. What I mean by that, is by modern dramatic standards there is no real tension, because Larry the Lamb is wildly outclassed as a fighter by Little Billy, and even when he draws a knife this is no contest.

If the fight was written now, there is a good chance, at some point, that Larry the Lamb would have got the upper hand, maybe leading us to think Little Billy had lost. Not here. Larry the Lamb is lost, probably from the start of the book, but when he starts playing for time, Little Billy takes off his shades (something he never does, and that is a cliché), then tears his prosthetic claws through Larry’s wrist to leave him bleeding out of a severed artery (on a pile of Jerry Cornelius and Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers).

The confrontation between Little Billy and Larry the Lamb is only one of a pair that needs to be resolved before the end of the book, and even when the leadership of the Apostles is settled, the army are still waiting outside, Rutledge is still looking at how he can lever the incident to progress his political career, and Inspector Molt is continuingly annoyed to be surrounded by idiots.

The Media

The media in The Bikers is not portrayed in a good light. While the freelance journalist Dan Lewin is a more radical writer, placing his work with underground magazines, there is no doubt who the public broadcasters and journalists are working for. This is clear at the start of Chapter 12, when a slight trickle of people (2000 out of a total of over 200,000) leaving the festival are intercepted by TV crews. While the interviewer asks leading questions.

“Did you see the Hell’s Angels attack people? Did they attack you? Isn’t it disgusting? The sympathy of the people of Britain is with you, my dear. thank you so much for speaking to us!”

It’s made very clear that the narrative will be controlled.

“Not all the interviews however are such smoothly-conducted exercises in the art of indoctrination through the media. But those which aren’t are not, of course, exposed to the curious and embarrassing gaze of the masses later.”

Again, this predicts a situation that became very prevalent under Thatcher, particularly around the Battle of the Beanfield and Orgreave. At both, footage shown on the news was switched to make it look like the police were reacting to aggressors, rather than instigating the violence. It’s worth watching the account of The Battle of the Beanfield by Nick Davies who was travelling with the Convoy at the time.

In this interview with ITN journalist Kim Sabido, he talks about how ITN at the time self-edited the report on the Beanfield. You can contrast the footage filmed by Sabido and his camera crew with what actually went out.

The Conclusion

Linda continues to be an observer, high on acid and seeing the patterns in the world, the way the storm above and the storm below will break. Even though she is watching while tripping, she has a clarity, seeing the stage as an embryo where the trouble will be born. A place where the more violent elements of the crowd are gathering for what is coming. The rest are just trees in the jungle, for the army to move through. Siddhartha are still playing, despite the risk to life and limb from electrocution, while outside Major Trenchard points out that many of the festival goers are from “good, propertied families. And they’ll raise hell if anything happens to their errant drug-taking children!”

Galtby, his subordinate, agrees, expressing his surprise. “I suppose it is astonishing how far people will go against the national interest to protect their children!”

Trenchard’s reason for his concern becomes clear in the aftermath. But first, the army enters.

Linda is still watching from the hill, and can see the soldiers gathered, described as gasmasked infantrymen from an H.P. Lovecraft nightmare. And that final confrontation is chaos, with soldiers fighting through the resisting crowd, with the weather against them, and the bikers fighting back. Behind the stage, a special force moves into place, trying to take out the band, and everything falls into close-quartered urgency, with the troops out in the crowd unable to be effective because of the press of people and the inability to identify the real dangers, like Little Billy who uses his claws very effectively in such an environment.

Eventually, with the storm still coming down, the music stops, the violence subsides. In the aftermath, Little Billy makes it out to meet Linda, while Major Trenchard’s wayward son lies in the mud, one of the causalities, of a police and military operation that is a complete failure, even when it succeeded.

Is The Bikers a good book? It’s an amazing read, and one of those gems of pulp fiction that comes along very rarely. It’s atmospheric, lyrical, and in many ways, prescient for what came in the eighties. Little Billy is a great anti-hero, and, for me, far more interesting than many in the New English Library youth subculture books. The story itself is well written, and the atmosphere, from the ever present weather to the press of the crowds in the festival, is beautifully captured. Moments like when the Apostles arrive at The Green Man, are incredibly evocative, to the point you can almost hear the radio and taste the road dust as it bakes in the summer sun.

It does a good job at looking back at recent history (the Isle of Wight Festival), and forward toward the social dystopia that was Britain under Thatcher, particularly the way the police were used against groups that were deigned by the authorities to have put themselves outside polite society, whether that was by choosing an alternative lifestyle or invoking their right to withdraw labour in protest.

Very much of its time, but a hell of a read.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to read my ramblings!