MotorCycle International – July 1989

By 1989 my monthly column had rather portentously become ‘Lore’, and this one appeared in the 50^th issue of MotorCycle International, which I now published by very my own company and which I’d launched four year earlier from the ashes of  WhichBike? It reads a little own-trumpet-blowingly, but may provide an insight to the state of the ‘bike magazine business at the time which in 2020 feels like a golden age!

It’s rather ironic that the masthead on our newly launched sister mag, Silver Machine, bears the Iegend ‘Lawyers. Guns and Money’ above my description as publisher. (SM was actually a re-worked version of the classic-oriented Motorcycle Enthusiast which I’d bought two years earlier – MW). Ironic, because although this was originally intended as a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reflection on the life of an harassed magazine publisher, the last minute decision to pull Lore from the June issue had a great deal to do with all three.

I suppose I feel duty-bound to explain this abrupt display of blank paper to the thousands of bitterly disappointed readers who besieged their newsagents demanding refunds, but stem warnings from my lawyers, the precarious state of our overdraft and the threat of retaliatory action from the big guns of motorbike publishing sadly deter me from doing so. What I can offer by way of explanation does, however conveniently, dovetail with the primary thrust of this month’s epistle which, as you might expect, comes under the general reading of ‘Fifty Glorious Issues of MCi – An Old Man Remembers.‘

This ‘ageing hippy’ as Mr Editor (Tom) Isitt (And a great editor to boot – MW) wittily refers to me elsewhere in this issue is in fact a money-grubbing capitalist whose progress up the mountain of Mammon is unfortunately impeded by an irritating and apparently irreducibly idealistic streak. Unfortunately, and this is perhaps what lsitt was implying, my background in publishing was in something most of you are too young to recall, the ‘underground‘ or ‘alternative’ press. The advantages of this are mixed; a tendency to trust people and situations on face value but an equally strong tendency to react cynically, even angrily, when such people and situations betray that trust. In business terms this underground experience also leads to a rather wilful, ‘if it feels right, do it whatever the odds‘ attitude which needs to be tempered by a financial acumen if bankruptcy is to be avoided. Which is one of the reasons why those mags I worked on back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s courted closure on a monthly basis.

The point of this moisty-eyed nostalgia is that ironically enough, MotorCycle International wouldn’t exist were it not for traces of the ‘ageing hippy‘ ethic still curdling in my brain, but whether or not someone else would‘ve started up such a mag in the past five years is entirely debatable. A secondary consideration is that I have, for better or worse thrice broken the mould of ‘bike publishing in this country only to see other, more powerful and, it must be said, professional organisations plagiarise or adapt the new concepts flung gauntlet-style at them and make a great deal more money out of it than I have. Bitter? Damn right I‘m bitter and that bitterness lay behind my decision to become a publisher myself and turn Which Bike? into MCi.

If you need justification for this conceit, look back at Bike which championed choppers and a thinly veiled druggy lifestyle when the existing rags were still promulgating the cosy platitudes of the Barbour jacket generation. A few years later when ‘bike sales were actually booming and Bike had had its quite obvious effects on the rest of the motorbiking media (and Back Street Heroes was a twinkle in Steve Myatt’s eye), I launched Which Bike?, the antithesis of Bike (thus engendering much ridicule) but an honest attempt to reflect the fact that in a then bouyant market no-one was offering comprehensive, objective tests and information about the ironware on offer. The initially quarterly What Bike? emerged in its wake, as did buyers guides in various existing monthlies.

Launching MCi eventually gave one or two other people the idea that a motorcycle magazine that didn‘t pander to the then all-persuasive yob-ethic could actually work, so now we have MotorCycle Review and MotorCycle (& Workshop)… (Both satisfyingly shortlived, ho-ho-ho – MW)

No, I’m not going to pound my well worn soap-box on the subject of too many mags diluting the market and in turn weakening the motorcycle lobby, but I will say that it’s a bitch doing what you believe is something different and being emulated or even ripped off by those who have the resources to do it (or at least promote it) better. This observation was in part triggered by Mr lsitt’s request that I leaf back through Lore’s back pages for major gaffes that he might add to his own litany of dumb predictions catalogued elsewhere in this issue. Surprisingly – alright, smugly – I couldn’t find any of my grim portents that had ultimately proven to be nonsense. True some of them may yet prove to be so (that’s the beauty of sticking largely to long-term soothsaying), but most of my fears for the state of the market, the lot of the motorcyclist and anything else I’ve arrogantly chosen to pontificate upon, have been vindicated.

Indeed since much of this doom-mongering has turned into fact, I’ve spent numerous dark nights searching my soul as to the point of continuing the wearying, inevitably thankless task of publishing magazines that rely on a dwindling and seemingly ultimately extinct readership, especially when it’s so hard to make it pay.

And this is where we get to last month’s conspicuous lack of printing ink on page 88. June’s Lore was to’ve catalogued our experiences trying to promote and sell advertising space in Silver Machine. It you haven’t yet seen a copy, Silver Machine is another attempt at something new, namely to use the rocker ethic that I grew up with to unite those classic bike fans not obsessed by the ‘Originality is God’ syndrome together with a younger generation who aren’t buying the race– or Paris Dakar–replica schtick being parlayed to them by the bulk of the trade.

Perhaps because it’s finally dawned on a certain Big Publishing Company (EMAP, who owned Bike, MCN etc, in fact – MW) that M. Williams has started things they’ve later had to buy or transmute from existing organs, a sequence of events took place which made it impossible for Silver Machine to compete on equal terms not only with their own magazines, but with other independent titles. Conveniently orchestrated largely through third parties (E.g. magazine distributors and advertisers – MW), after we’d had enough internal problems getting the bugger to press anyway, my indignation at the behaviour of those concerned augured a particularly vitriolic diary of events which horrified our lawyers. Turning the whole thing into a satire amused them heartily (they said), but wasn’t sufficiently fictional at heart to pass the libel yardstick.

Where does that leave me, MCi and the collective ‘us’ who read the thing? Well after fifty issues, we’re still up against a government seemingly determined to eliminate motorcycling as we know and love it, a trade largely frightened and confused in how it should respond, and a publishing
empire who by their very might dominate the bulk of the few remaining in advertisers how it should it respond, and a publishing empire who by their very might dominate the budgets of the few remaining big advertisers who invariably see numbers rather than quality of readership as their primary raison d’etre but do very little to champion or protect the longer term interests of their customers. As long as I remain as its owner however, MCi will continue to offer a more rounded, committed and hopefully intelligent overview and the opportunity to advertise to the readers that actually buy their motorcycles that the trade admits are its salvation. That was the original aim of the magazine, which at the time was cautiously approved (if not always supported) by the trade and almost universally derided by our competitors.

Like any haIf-way decent mag, MCi has grown and changed organically: the design has matured without losing both its concision and that aIl-important ability to excite the imagination, sections like Despatches and Beyond the Orient have come and gone due both to reader response (or lack of it!) and editorial subjectivity, and most significantly perhaps, our gamble to go ‘perfect bound’ and drop the Used Bike Buyers Guide in order to free-up more pages to features (and give our other sister rag, Used & Classic Bike Guide, a reason for being!) actually paid off circulation-wise. And the changes will doubtless continue…

‘It’ll last no more than two months,’ sneered the editor of Bike when MCi first appeared. Since then our circulation has risen, Bike‘s has fallen dramatically. and he’s no longer editing any magazine.

Yup, whilst I can afford to be proud, I can’t deny that I’m ‘ageing’, but in the increasingly tough and nasty times we live in, I think I may have to get that ‘hippy’ streak surgically removed…

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