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News from Hells Angels MC Baltimore
| Headline: Respectability and red tape at the bikers' bash |
| Thursday - 08/28/2008 |
| Referrer: FT.com |
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The man beside me at the motorbike festival drag strip made me nervous because he was a Hells Angel. I made him nervous because I am a journalist. The Hells Angels are the world's most infamous motorcycle club. This is partly because journalists love writing about how infamous it is. Mutual suspicion results.
I was there in pursuit of a story unremarked in the acres of print devoted to the club's criminal connections. This concerns the counter-intuitive exploits of the British Hells Angels as an events management business.
The Hells Angels are "one percenters". These are motorcyclists who wear their condemnation as a lawless minority among bikers as a badge of honour. Hells Angels membership is not open to women, law enforcement officers or people who think motorbikes are boring. In Canada, Hells Angels are associated with drug dealing and in the US with violent affrays.
In the UK the most public manifestation of this secretive club is as organisers of the Bulldog Bash, which I attended recently. Melvin Benn, founder of Festival Republic, which owns the huge Reading and Leeds music festivals, eulogises the event as: "An almost perfect example of a festival that gets it right. It knows exactly who its market is and does not try to be anything it is not." The durability of the Bulldog Bash has business lessons to impart even if your favoured mode of transport is a BMW saloon rather than a chopped Harley-Davidson.
According to Bilbo, the suitably Hobbit-like head organiser of the Bulldog Bash, the festival was set up 21 years ago to replace a defunct custom bike show in Kent. One weekend every year it attracts about 20,000 people to an airfield in Warwickshire. That makes it "one of the UK's biggest small open-air festivals" by the standards of Neil Greenway, founder of the efestivals.com website.
Mr Greenway doubts whether all of 2008's record number of outdoor festivals will recur in 2009. Market latecomers and impending recession are stretching demand too thinly. Mr Greenway says: "The key to survival for smaller festivals is to have a clear target demographic."
The Bulldog Bash ticks this box as a bike festival run by bikers to which music has been added as an afterthought. Its core brand value is to celebrate biking as a revolt against authority rather than in its newer incarnation as a display of consumerism. This was encapsulated at the Bulldog Bash in the T-shirt slogan: "It takes more than co-ordinated leathers to turn a [expletive deleted] into a biker."
The attendance of crowds of men with alarming tattoos and motorcycle-club back patches added subcultural lustre to the event. But there are not enough of these customers to keep the festival going on their own. A wider constituency is attracted by the quarter-mile drag strip where riders can "run what they brung" - shred their tyres at speeds illegal on public roads. Mainstream motor-show organisers have only recently woken up to the potential of such entertainment.
Admittedly the drag strip was not functioning when I visited it with Echo, a Hells Angel co-opted as a media minder. A yellow digger was making repairs, to derisive cheers from the crowd. Alternative fun was in full swing nearby. Helmetless stunt riders thundered round inside a Wall of Death, swerving up and threatening punters with decapitation before zooming deftly away. The live ammunition shooting gallery was doing healthy business. And in the music tent, heavy bands rocked dirtily.
The selection of stalls along the site's main drag also demonstrated a canny finger on the niche market pulse. If you needed a chrome exhaust pipe with a removable sound baffle to annoy your neighbours, you could buy one. If you wanted a fire-breathing witch-lizard tattooed down your spine, you could get it done on the spot. Concessionaires did not expect to make big profits but rents were correspondingly low.
The Hells Angels on the 20-man committee running the festival are not aggressive in the commercial sense. They could easily jack up the entrance fee from £55 ($102, €69). Smaller music festivals charge £70 and upwards. Echo's justification was that "most bikers don't have a lot of money - after paying for a ticket they've just enough for a few beers and some bits for the bike". That smacks of a mutual rather than a City ethic.
The club is also unwilling to take risks with prices because it needs to balance returns with sustainability. Most private business owners ponder this trade-off, too. According to Bilbo, the bulk of any profits are ploughed back into future attractions. Last year, savings from past bashes paid for veteran plank-spankers Status Quo to perform.
The biggest risks to the Bulldog Bash are reputational and regulatory rather than financial. "Gentleman" Gerry Tobin, a 35-year-old Hells Angel, was shot dead by an unknown attacker on the M40 after the 2007 Bulldog Bash. Local councillors ignored police advice to cancel this year's festival. Warwickshire Constabulary responded with blanket security on local roads. The on-site security provided by the Hells Angels was rigorous, too. A hulking biker on the gate warned your wimpish, Volvo-driving correspondent that any misbehaviour would be punished with expulsion. Funny how a desire for respectability can creep up on outlaw bikers, just like everyone else
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