Heavy Duty Attitude (7 page)

Impressive camaraderie and self assurance. People who trusted each other bond of brothers. Explanations of their philosophy.
We’re not called The Brethren for nothing. The name wasn’t picked by chance you know? These are my brothers, my family
. Then more serious.
Our trouble is we make good villains.
The lament on the proffered business card,
When we do good no one remembers, when we do bad no one forgets.

Bad munchies. Mars bar, chips, and a coke from a van.

Bonfires of tyres from neighbouring field after dark. Party atmosphere, faces emerging from the black, lit up by the fierce yellow stinking blaze. Laughter as one of the strikers rips the arse of his jeans on the barbed wire of the field as they struggle back over the hedge bearing a dead tree for the bonfire. Ribald and very concerned inspection reveals that the family jewels are intact.

The music from the sound system in between bands. A cracking set. A lot of stuff I don’t recognise, some stuff I do. Anti Nowhere League’s driving rasping gargling version of
Streets of London
running straight on after John Otway’s
Beware of The Flowers
, Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts,
A Burn-up On

My Bike
, Christ, not heard that in years, and then ZZ Top,
Blue Jeans Blues
.

Roaring noise in my ears. Stagger out of main tent, not sure if it’s the skunk, the generators, the booze or the bands. I’m sodden. Around midnight, Bung had had Wurzel and one of the others wrestle me down into the mud amongst the press of the beer tent towards the bar. My first Brethren party so he said I had to be baptised. Half a dozen of them pouring pints over my head, laughing while I buck against the weight and grip of the bikers and call them bastards!

Back at the huge roaring bonfire, all red, orange and white heat against the blackness of the night, Brethren and others sitting and lying around the upwind fringes to avoid the driving acrid thick smoke coming from off the burning tyres.

People increasingly wrecked.
You need to write this down all about how we came together as a band of brothers to ride free and go out righting wrongs.
Laughter from further round the fire at the bullshit. Protests:
no I’m serious!

3 The show
Sunday 2 August 2009

Shit I felt rough. I just lay there unmoving for a few moments after I’d woken up, just to let the nerves that were jangling from this unexpected and rash decision to regain consciousness, recover.

After a minute or so, the bursting need to get out for a piss finally and reluctantly convinced the rest of my body to begin negotiating the process of extricating myself from the coils of my sleeping bag, which seemed to have me trapped like an anaconda after a good breakfast. I fumbled with the zip having untangled my feet slowly and somewhat unsteadily levered myself upright. Thankfully I’d abandoned my boots close by and so I shucked them on and staggered as carefully as I could through the bodies and over to the tent flap.

Peering outside, the world was grey and misty damp. The bonfire out front was a blackened charred mess, steaming gently where coals still glowed red in the centre amongst the ash, while a swathe of soot blackened field stretching out to my left where the smoke from the burning tyres that still gave it a rank sulphurous smell had soaked everything in a clinging coat of sticky ink.

As I trudged over towards the ground’s clubhouse and the relative civilisation of their indoor bogs, I saw there were other survivors. Amongst the field of tents a few bodies were moving about quietly. It felt like the start of a bad zombie film.

Bladder emptied and cold to the bone, I headed over to the burger vans to join a few other souls, my fellow living dead, their voices no more than a murmur if they did speak, their hands grasped around their first hot coffee of the day, and bleary eyed I wondered whether I could face a greasy bacon roll.

Thank God for bacon sandwiches. That’s all I can say.

By my second roll and strong sweet coffee, the grease, caffeine and sugar combination was starting to do its work. That and the fact that the sun was staring to break through and burn off the dank morning mist, was gradually making me feel more human. From where I sat at a wooden picnic table I could see there was a promise of blue skies emerging any time now. It could be a scorcher of a day, I thought.

All told, by this stage, I wasn’t feeling too bad at all.
Well I’d survived for one thing. No one had shown any sign of wanting to stomp or murder me, Cambridge excepted, and I got the feeling that even that wasn’t particularly personal about me. There was something else going on that I didn’t know enough about yet I decided.

Gradually as the sun came out the rest of the bikers began to emerge. Bung sat next to me and I couldn’t look at him as he put away a full English off a paper plate and then lit up.

‘You look as though you fancy another one of those,’ I observed. ‘Yeah, maybe I will,’ he said, ‘You offering? Nothing like a good fry-up to set you right for the day.’

 

I’d walked into that one I realised with a resigned smile. Well I could do with one more brew I decided.

 

‘OK you’re on,’ I said getting up. ‘I owe you for last night anyway. The works?’

 

‘Great.’

 

So I watched him put away another piled high plate with undiminished speed and equal apparent satisfaction.

 

‘So,’ I asked as he finished up, ‘what happens now?’

 

‘Well Wibble wants a chat with you a bit later but hey it’s a sunny day so it’s just kick back, relax and enjoy the show I guess,’ he said expansively.

By this time it was gone ten and Bung announced that he wanted to check out the bike show entries and so for an hour or so we wandered along the rows of parked up, primped, painted and polished entries.

To start with it felt much like most of yesterday afternoon. Again I was careful to stick with Bung and the Freemen since I guessed that show or no show, I didn’t fancy running across any of the Cambridge crew on my own.

But then as the morning wore on the mood seemed to change. It was imperceptible at first, to be honest to start with I thought it was just me and my hangover kicking back in as the baps and shots wore off. I was feeling rough, but then as the knot of Freemen and their brothers began to coalesce around Bung as we made our slow way through the show field I began to realise that it wasn’t just me. They really were becoming increasingly distracted, and closed off. By the time one of the strikers found me to say Wibble was ready to talk there was little or none of the relaxed chattiness of yesterday. They were changed, quiet, tense even, as though through some silent telepathy that I as an outsider wasn’t privy to, the pack had become aware of some danger on the horizon and I was glad to get away.

Which seemed odd, since the evening was billed as the really big bash of the weekend, the point to which the club’s premier party of the year was supposed to be building.

*

And so it was around noon by the time I managed to talk to Wibble. We camped out at a trestle table with yet more coffees and some more half decent bacon rolls.

‘Well how’d you get on?’ he asked, ‘Speak to the guys?’

 

‘OK I guess, but your blokes didn’t really seem in the mood to be chatty this morning. I tried to quiz those two kids I rode in with for a while yesterday.’

‘Oh yeah?’ he said sounding genuinely interested, ‘so how did that go?’ ‘Well Danny’s OK, he was happy to talk. But the other one, Jesus.’ ‘What, Charlie?’

‘Yeah, I think that’s his name. That kid’s a natural for you guys though isn’t he? Christ, what an attitude.’

 

Wibble grinned, ‘Yeah well, I guess it’s just in the blood.’

 

I was tempted to ask him what he meant but decided I’d leave that for the moment. It didn’t seem that important. Instead I’d get on with the interview. We sat and talked for about an hour and for some of it I got what I regarded as the standard biker pitch.

 

Looking at my notes, to start with it was all very much the usual stuff I was expecting to hear.

 

We’re just bikers and we do our own thing. People have always got a downer on us because we live by our own rules.
Sure there’s punch ups, sometimes people have a go, and we have to defend ourselves
.

 

It was funny. According to The Brethren it always someone else’s fault that the violence started. As they saw it, they were always the provoked ones.

Sure some of the guys have done time. It doesn’t mean the club’s a criminal outfit.
We get a bit tired of the cops talking about us like we’re some kind of international organised crime mafia. We ride around with patches on our backs so we stand up for who and what we are, we’ve got websites up with our photographs on it, we do events like this. How much more fucking visible could we be? We stand out from Joe citizen a mile. Is that really what organised criminals would do?

Sure we’ve got some tough guys; sure we’ve got a bad rep. But individuals aren’t the club. Look at the cops. How many bent cops are there? But whenever there’s a bent cop people don’t say that the cops ought to be disbanded? Well mostly no one.

Look at what’s happened recently. You haven’t seen any of our guys on film killing some newspaper seller by clubbing him to the ground from behind for no reason have you? Let me ask you what would have happened if that had been one of us that shoved that bloke Tomlinson after that demo in London and not a cop? What would have happened then?

It was when I asked him the ‘why?’ question that he got serious. As he spoke over the next few minutes, even though I recognised in what he was saying a philosophy that Damage had espoused from time to time, I felt as if I had touched, almost for the first time, the heart of it. What it meant to be a Brethren.

The government, the cops, the status quo, they don’t like us. Most people are scared and the government likes to keep it that way. The government says do this, do that, or don’t do this, don’t do that, or we’ll punish you, or society will disapprove.

Well fuck the government and fuck society. What right has anyone got to tell me how to live my life?’

I caught a glimpse in what he was saying of a fundamental rage lurking under the surface, a fury against any sensation of powerlessness driving a fierce elemental rejection of ever, ever, allowing that to happen.

And people do run scared, they knuckle under, they obey the rules, they live their lives within the boundaries that the system has set for them. Well not us. No fucking way.
We’re the ones who won’t just knuckle under, we’re the ones who won’t just go along, and we’re the ones who won’t just obey.
And that’s the reason that they all hate us.
Because we stand up for ourselves.

So if you want to try to tell me what to do, then you’d better fucking watch out. Because we won’t just not take it, but we’ll come right back at you with every fucking thing we’ve got. If you start it, then you’d better be prepared to go all the way because from our side it’s going to be total retaliation, no fucking mercy.

Why? Because it’s the only way to make sure they learn the lesson and next time they’ll leave us alone.

Can we defeat the government? No.
Can we keep it out of our space?

Yes we can, but only by defending that freedom tooth and nail. The only defence is all out war. That’s what people need to get if they want to understand us and what we’re about. Freedom’s not free. If you want it and then want to keep it, you have to be prepared to fight for it and to guard it every second of the day.

Damage had been a fan of something he’d called the anarchist alternative to NATO, which as far as I could make out from what he’d said seemed to involved dismantling the state and letting everyone have their own M16 assault rifle to keep in their wardrobe instead.

‘Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice?’ I had suggested, as we came to the end.

‘Yeah, something like that. And it’s why we are so loyal to each other. We all know that we’re in this war, we’re all fighting on the same side, and it’s a big fucking enemy we’re facing and if we don’t all stand absolutely shoulder to shoulder against it, it’s going to take us all down.’

It was simple really. In defence of their freedoms as they saw it, The Brethren under this philosophy had taken the line of logic to its ultimate conclusion. They saw themselves at war with any authority, whether government or society, that attempted to infringe their freedom.

Then I got it. When it came to the outside world, they were their own NATO. And an attack against one was an attack against them all. ‘So what’s the problem with the local crew then?’ I ventured, ‘there seems to be a bit of an atmosphere.’

 

‘They’re hurting a bit,’ he said matter of factly, ‘they lost a guy earlier this week.’

‘Did they?’ I asked in surprise. ‘I hadn’t heard anything about that?’ ‘You should have, it was in the papers.’

And then I made the connection and remembered the striker with his arm in a sling. ‘The thing in Leeds? That was one of your people?’

 

Just then Bung stepped over and interrupted. He’d obviously caught the Tomlinson reference.

‘And at least if one of our guys had done it, he wouldn’t have been hiding behind a fucking balaclava or have taken off his colours so he couldn’t be identified,’ he said. ‘We stand by what we do.’

‘Have you noticed how cops around the world these days are always wearing balaclavas so they can’t be recognised?’ he continued. ‘No.’

 

‘Well they are,’ he insisted, ‘Just watch’em next time on the news. You’ll see.’

 

Wibble cocked his head at Bung expectantly.

 

‘Yeah,’ said Bung, to the unspoken question that had obviously just passed between them. ‘I’ve had the call. Five minutes or so they said.’ Wibble nodded gravely, as though lost in thought for a moment as to what this might mean.

 

‘OK, thanks,’ he said as he stood up.

 

‘Looks like we’re going to have to wrap this up here for a bit,’ he said to me.

 

‘Why? What’s happening?’

 

Then he just smiled at me as if he was tremendously pleased with some secret surprise that he was about to pull off.