Back Street Heroes

Hello and welcome to the first issue of BSH in 2026 – the forty-third year of the magazine’s existence! Oh, and a belated Happy New Year (or an early one if you’re a subscriber). It’s January, and that means there’s not a huge amount going on in the biking calendar on the grounds that (a) it’s colder than Evil Edna/Grotbags/Fenella from Chorlton & The Wheelies’ (delete as applicable) ti…, er, bosom, and (b) the roads’re saltier than a whole pirate fleet of sea dogs, meaning that any riding you do is, inevitably, followed by an extensive period of the jet-washing of one’s motorsickle to get the corrosive kack off. You can see why so many folk park their bikes up for months on end, can’t you? Well, the sensible ones…

Held on a farm above the little town of Usk in Monmouthshire, it’s one of the few gatherings of the vintage chopper clan we have here in the UK (they have loads on the Continent, why do we have so few over ‘ere?), alongside the 101 Run and The Trip Out (and, yes, the Early Hook Up, too, o’course). Its attendees are, in the main, aboard suitable machines, mostly chops or classics: Panheads, Shovels, Iron’eads, Evo Sporties, a few Brits, a smattering of older Japs and, while the ‘show’ bikes’re parked mostly in the very evocative old stone farmyard, the camping field itself’s always crammed with bikes that’re worth a second glance. Almost everywhere you look there’s cool shit, if you’ll pardon my vernacular, and folk’re friendly and willing to…

IT was in an online ad on t’internet and, while he had, as I said, planned to do the Iron’ead next, he couldn’t resist enquiring. He spoke to the seller, came to an understanding, sold a few things and, lo, the Shovel came to his workshop. The best laid plans, eh? It was a stock ’76 FXE Super Glide, a 74-cube (1200cc), and was complete but in bits which, he says, was handy as he knew he wouldn’t be using most of the original parts so it saved him having to strip it down. The engine in it was good – it’d been fully rebuilt by the previous owner: new bearings, pistons, rings, barrels bored to +0.010 over stock, new gaskets throughout, and the cases, heads and rocker covers’d been vapour-blasted.…

The Rejects’ 182 show in Whitstable, though, sounded nice (and there were some windmills I hadn’t seen nearby), and the latest of the infamous summer storms wasn’t due to hit that area until late that afternoon. Wow, that sounds almost organised for me, doesn’t it? Hmm, Whitstable, what do I know about Whitstable? Well, apart from the fact that it’s famous for oysters? (Nasty, slimy things – thankfully, as there’s no ‘r’ in the month so they shouldn’t be around.) Well, not a lot actually, but I had seen that, the day before, Whitstable carnival had been on and it was, this particular year, themed on Dr Who as Peter Cushing once lived in the town. Alan Davies, off QI, once wrote a punk song about this, did you know…

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David Law, the owner and builder of this Honda Shadow 125 chop, lives on the outskirts of Barry*-Central, or Southend-on-Sea as it’s known on maps, and, having got back into riding after, nearly, a 25-year gap, and making a Sinnis Apache 125 his own, got a little sick of being mistaken for a youngster because he was on a small bike. He’d always liked choppers and so decided he’d build himself one out of a 125 so that he could ride legally, and then sell it to fund his full licence (and aboard a purpose-built chop, people’d stop mistaking him for someone who didn’t need to shave yet). Back in 2023, he picked up a ’99 VT125 Shadow as an unfinished project as just a pile of parts, really. He…