After leafing through the final Dirt (yes that's done as well), I let nostalgia get the better of me and got hold of a copy. It was disappointing to be honest, they'd obviously rushed it - I guess the decision to stop the print edition was quite sudden. Two decades of history had been reduced to a few badly written and atrociously edited articles about favourite pictures and covers.
I don't know whether any of you guys will even read this, and if you do I expect to be roundly mocked for being so earnest, but Ride really did change my life. I started reading when I was a naive 10 or 11 year old kid and it opened my eyes to travel, alternative lifestyles, overlooked areas of cities, and, of course, incredible feats on a bike. For better or worse I was (and still am really) horrendously middle class (I went to the cricket last night for heaven's sake) so BMX felt like something genuinely countercultural and thrilling to me. Alongside real life local riders this was because of the way it was portrayed by the magazine.
I still have a stack of copies at home from the early 2000s when Mark Noble was editor, Pill and Lard produced 90% of the content and Jeff Stewart occasionally contributed mammoth essays about roadtrips through forgotten parts of America. Often the best stuff hardly mentioned riding at all - thinking particularly of his trip with the Gonz and his pieces about Denver and Austin.
I don't think I'm looking at this through rose tinted glasses. I'm a words person, I've always read prolifically and now work with newspapers. In my opinion there was some real gold back then - there was a lot of dross as well but at least there weren't many spelling mistakes or grammar errors. If you want to be taken seriously as a magazine the basics like this are paramount. Someone, presumably Noble, had an English GCSE which is more than I can say for a lot of the recent editors and contributors. It felt like it was written by adults, for adults (although the censoring of f--k always amused me, especially as it appeared so frequently. I still pronounce this differently to fuck in my head).
Of course, it was inevitable that it was going to stop at some point. I'm partly to blame - I stopped subscribing years ago, as the quality slid and the content became increasingly gimmicky to appeal to a generation of kids with short attention spans. For a while it looked like The Albion might take up the mantle as the publication of choice for more mature riders but of course this has gone now as well. (And really, as much respect as I have for Banners, Benson & co, those guys could benefit from some lessons about brevity. Hope I'm not being hypocritical here!).
Anyway, excuse my ramblings, it's just a shame that we no longer have a coherent, interesting and reasonably educated outlet to reflect our eccentric little subculture. RIP Ride, you had a good run.
Topic: The last Ride UK cover (Read 19059 times)
