November 2006

Lambrettas Down Leafy Lanes: The Scooterist as Ruralist

Peter Hughes Jachimiak

Introduction
The seeds of this paper were planted in my mind many years ago—when Paul Weller’s album Wild Wood was released in September 1993, to be exact—and they have been slowly, but steadily, germinating in my thoughts over the past thirteen years. Following a more recent reading of legendary Welsh Folk musician Meic Steven’s autobiography, Solva Blues (2004), I began to compare, contrast and contemplate more fully two scooter-related photographs.  I realized that the term “ruralist” is perhaps applicable as not only the name of an obscure, half-forgotten group of artists from the late-1970s, but as a valid methodological approach: an adaptable “ruralist” analytical framework could be successfully applied outside of the narrow confines of art history to the aspects of the social examined by cultural studies more generally.

This essay, then, examines the notion of the “ruralist”—someone who deliberately leaves the stifling confines of the city to immerse himself within the invigorating expanse of the country—in relation to the appropriation of the Italian motor-scooter.  It contemplates the ways in which we can understand the scooter-rider—or scooterist—as “ruralist.”

I have chosen the Italian motor-scooter—in particular, the Lambretta and Vespa makes—as an example of late-twentieth-century motorcycling culture for the following reason. It is an object primarily designed for purely practical reasons, as an economical post-war mode of transport, but, due to the phenomenal global influence of youth culture over the past fifty years, it has now achieved great social and cultural status—that is, “style” value—way above and beyond its economic or “use” value. For, despite the proliferation in recent years of “younger” Japanese models, these classics of Italian design are thought of by those who consider themselves (perhaps to the extent of arrogance) as an elite within this particular motorcycle market as the design which, achieving global appeal, is worthy of obsessive idolization. The very mention of Lambretta or Vespa conjures up mental images of an “idealized European-ness”—as, after all, the Lambretta and Vespa are regarded as fashionable accessories which guarantee their owners instant peer admiration and stylistic credence. Posing in the sunshine, while draping yourself nonchalantly over the seat of a Lambretta or Vespa—no matter what town or city in the world you find yourself—means that you instantly exude an air of cool that is best understood as “Italianicity” (Barthes 33).

“Italianicity”: The Italian Motor-scooter as Urban, Inner-city Chic
The potential scooter market of the early- to mid-1960s consisted of aspiring, working class, urban/suburban youth. The transformation of the scooter from an affordable mode of transport to a counter-cultural icon was a result of its re-appropriation by the Mod subculture, resulting in the scooter becoming the symbol (“weapon” even) of an entire generation of rebellious and, crucially, mobile youth.[1]  Indeed, the Mods’ obsessive attitude towards consumption, and their related re-appropriation of commodities such as the scooter, was due to a heightened sense of self-absorption and bodily display.  In other words, they were absolutely preoccupied with style, especially the Continental stylings of the more cosmopolitan, inner-city French and the Italian youth:

The sharp, short jackets and trim, tapered trousers which looked so right on a Vespa signified an easy, carefree, lighter approach to life. It was an approach which fitted perfectly within that notion of ‘The Leisure Age’ which was increasingly seen as the hallmark of post-war prosperity throughout the West. (Polhemus 45)

While throughout the 1970s and 1980s the scooter-rider mutated from Mod to Scooterboy, [2] the on-going prominence placed upon the inherent Italian design and styling of Lambrettas and Vespas meant that “Italianicity” was an ever-present constant no matter to which subculture the scooterist belonged. Even while aimlessly cruising the humdrum towns and cities on his (or, very occasionally, her) Lambretta or Vespa, the “Italianicity” afforded by being on the road upon such machines allowed the rider—no matter how transitorily—to take off (if only in his mind’s eye) to the exhilarating hustle and bustle of an Italian city.  Indeed, in a mid-’90s article in FHM on the lasting appeal of the Lambretta and Vespa, one young, male scooterist articulated concisely this almost magical quality of the Italian motor-scooter:

Let’s get that straight from the beginning, it’s got to be an Italian scooter; Japanese ones just won’t do. It’s because of the Continental thing, riding around wearing your Gucci loafers with no socks on a sunny day. Of course, in this country you have to wear crash helmets and it’s normally raining, but you can still pretend you’re riding around Milan. (qtd. in Ville 70)

With this understanding of the Italian motor-scooter as the epitome of classic modernist design (and its social and cultural appropriation during late-modernity), I will now examine four “case studies,” which demonstrate that such an “urban” mode of transport as the scooter has been transposed, perhaps rather surprisingly, amid the “rural” more readily than we currently appreciate.[3]

The Scooter and the Rural: Case Study # 1 – The Brotherhood of Ruralists
The Brotherhood of Ruralists were a loose collective of seven artists who “expressed a similar feeling for nature, realism and the past” (Rudd 64) and euphorically declared their somewhat ill-defined and illusive manifesto over dinner on 21 March 1975.[4]  Ann Arnold, one of the Brotherhood present that evening, recalls their self-naming:

The word “Ruralist” was, as Peter Blake said, more “to do with the fact that we were all in the country. It was not quite that much about the land; it was about being in the country. It was a word which first came to mind. Nobody liked it, which is the extraordinary thing, and everybody tried to change it,” that is until Graham Arnold found the dictionary definition of a ruralist as being “someone who is from the city who moves to the country,” which so exactly described what they each had done as to settle any further argument. (qtd. in Usherwood 49-50)

Collectively driven by a hatred of abstraction and conceptual works, the Brotherhood of Ruralists had moved—both geographically and metaphorically—into the country with the aim of feverishly producing more inspired examples of figurative-orientated work. Despite their certain ostracism from the London-centric art establishment and the British gallery-going public, they felt they had no choice in doing this:  “The art schools—they thought—were dreadful, the gallery system pernicious, the critics ideologically motivated and ignorant, the museums and art councils dominated by sinister coteries. London, city life in general, was best avoided” (Martin 7). So, “[t]hey withdrew from the rat race of ‘the Smoke’ to the peace of deepest rural England to work with the spirits and the spirits of those places in harmony” (Nahum 8), while “[i]n their more exalted moods they feel at one with their great and much invoked mentors William Blake and Samuel Palmer; seeing every hill, wood, blade of grass, blade of corn as invested with a spiritual presence” (Martin 7).

Sharing a passion for Elgar, Blake, Palmer, Wordsworth and the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelites, and having rejected life in the metropolis (re-locating to various parts of the West Country—thus, becoming “ruralists” proper), they set about producing and self-promoting their highly-stylized versions of Arcadia through a process of semi-communal living, co-operative creativity and self-protectionist exhibitions.[5] Typical of their output is, perhaps most famously, David Inshaw’s “The Badminton Game” (1972-3) which adorns the cover of The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (1988).

It is perhaps of no surprise that the Ruralists—in both their steadfast desires to escape London and embrace the traditional (“outdated” even) art practices deep in the countryside—opened themselves up to overt criticism. Not only self-contained, they strove to be self-sufficient: in effect, independent from urbanity. By both working in the inspirational countryside and literally living off the land, they reinforced the notion that they were ruralists at one with the rural.  Ann Arnold explained, “We were never isolated from our surroundings. We lived and worked where we were. We exhibited literally anywhere, from a barn to a major gallery and rather resented accusations of ivory towers” (qtd. in Graham Arnold 19). They were accused by their critics as parochial and wallowing in rose-tinted romanticism; thus, by definition, any concept of the ruralist utilized here is critically imbued with such notions of nostalgia, sentimentality and tradition.

However, both the urban and the rural met during their scooter-riding artistic incursions into the countryside at home and abroad:

By then Graham Arnold had married Ann and they were living at Ashington in Sussex. John and Diana were desperately hard up but saw a cottage they liked in Suffolk. In those days you could still pick up such places for a song and they bought it. The distance between them didn’t mean that they were cut off from Arnold-inspired outings; like those to Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham by Lambretta to have exultant encounters with the genius loci that just might, they hoped, transfigure their own work one day, too. (Martin13)

1958, August: buys new Lambretta (£164) for travels to Italy … 1960: Returns to England, via Turin and The Alps, with only enough money left to purchase petrol for Lambretta—lives off the fields and sleeps beneath the stars. Main spring of Lambretta breaks in Alps under weight of canvas and oil paints and speed becomes restricted to 20 m.p.h.; journey takes seven weeks. (Graham Arnold 22)

Therefore, the term “ruralist”—with regards its methodological weight—implies not only the measured and determined move away from all the ills of urbanity to that of soothing rurality, but the notion that such a transition is imbued with a steadfast nostalgic sentimentality based upon a return to traditionalist painterly methods. Crucially, though, it also founded upon an ever-present reliance upon certain aspects of modern urbanity, hence the Ruralists’ necessity for Lambrettas as rudimentary transport.

The Scooter and the Rural: Case Study # 2 – Meic Stevens at Caerforiog, 1969
Having established the concept of the “ruralist” (while removing it from its pure art history context), we can now consider the following three scooterist case studies from an informed “ruralist” standpoint.

The picture of Meic Stevens is a pretty typical fading family snapshot, a split-second capturing of a father-and-daughter moment. This particular father-and-daughter moment is, as far as this article is concerned, significant as the shared experience depicted takes place upon the back of a Lambretta.The photograph, entitled “Me and Wizz at Caerforiog, 1969” (Stevens 185), shows Stevens—wearing indigo denim jacket, sunglasses and, without the hindrance of a helmet, sporting typically-styled late-’60s hair—riding, almost paradoxically, a late-’50s Lambretta across the grass, towards a low dry-stone wall, of his then rented home (Caerforiog, a former farm).[6]  With the late afternoon sun casting harsh shadows and a poorly-secured rear “L plate” hanging at a precarious angle, the scooter and its rider playfully speed away from the photographer so that the pillion passenger—Wizz (Stevens’ blond-haired little daughter, Isobel Eiliona)—holds on to her father; unafraid, in total trust. The modest speed of the Lambrettas’ motion means that both father and daughter’s hair is tousled in the breeze.

It is a photograph—at once of its time and timeless—that captures, not only the inseparable bond between father and daughter, but the notion that such an urban, “Italian” mode of inner-city transport is capable of being at home in such Welsh rural surroundings, to the extent that, within this casual snapshot, the scooter, father and daughter, the innocence of childhood and the sun-soaked grass and stone seem to suggest a Zen-like unity. Indeed, for Stevens—as this was all just two miles further up the valley from his home town of Solva—it was the culmination of both an urge to escape from the drudgery of the city and the longing of a homecoming. Thus, importantly, this is the moment that Stevens became a “ruralist”:

The long driveway led to a large open farmyard, with granite buildings on the right and the old fifteenth-century farmhouse on the left bordered by a semi-circular walled lawn. At the back there was a large garden with apple trees, overlooking fields that swept gently down to the River Solva in the valley bottom. Caerforiog was perfect for us, cheap to rent and just what I’d dreamed of after all those years tramping around English cities and towns as a song and dance man. (Stevens 188)

And, while in such idyllic, yet isolated, surroundings, Stevens felt the need to get hold of some rudimentary transport:

I needed some form of transport other than the horse, and so I bought a second-hand motor scooter from my brother Martin, who sent it down from Gloucestershire on a British Rail lorry. This was real entertainment: Tessa and Wizzy roared as they watched me trying to ride the bloody thing around the stony pot-holed farmyard falling off all the time. Once I went over the handlebars, flat on my face in a huge muddy puddle. It must have looked like a movie stunt and it certainly made them laugh. (Stevens 189-190).

The Scooter and the Rural: Case Study # 3 – Paul Weller at The Manor, 1993
Another father/child image—and, once again, one with a Lambretta as the focus—is Lawrence Watson’s striking image of Paul Weller and son, astride a gleaming white SX 200,[7] at The Manor residential recording studios, during the time of he was laying down tracks for the Wild Wood LP.[8]  Recorded during April and May 1993, Wild Wood is regarded as Weller’s “come back” album.  It was declared a “distinctly rustic return to form” (“That’s Entertainment” 116) that significantly “evoked pastoral times past” (McLean 86). Weller acknowledged that this album was committed to tape in such convivially peaceful rural surroundings, and much was made by the music press that The Manor was “an oasis of rural repose in deepest Oxfordshire that Paul Weller has almost come to feel is his second home” (Snow, “We All Make Mistakes,” 60, 62). The image under analysis here, entitled “Natty Weller, his friend Josh and his father head for the hills, Spring 1993” (Watson and Hewitt 22), depicts Weller, in vintage Levis and sleeveless Fair Isle top, sandwiched between his young son (in front) and his friend (behind), all astride the Lambretta. Belching a cloud of blue smoke, the scooter is being revved by Weller, seconds before it is to bolt (we surmise) across an expanse of a daisy-spotted grass towards the tree-lined horizon that is out of shot towards the left. Weller and son Natty (Nathaniel), nestled together, are locked in shared concentration, staring into the distance to which they will, in a second or two, speed off. The father’s chin rests reassuringly upon his young son’s head; their arms—in expectant unison—grip the handlebars. Meanwhile Natty’s friend precariously clings onto Weller’s waist; looking away from the camera, both his expression and facial features are hidden from us.

Like the highly personal Meic Steven’s photograph discussed above, this too is, essentially, a candid moment whereby a tender instance of father and child bonding is fleetingly captured and forever preserved. Furthermore, it is yet another example of the scooter—amid a rural setting—not only epitomizing such a moment of innocence but, without any hint of incongruity, bridging the divide between a peaceful pastoral existence and the aggressive urban energy Weller thrived upon beforehand. In fact, during the entire recording of Wild Wood, Weller’s Lambretta—providing endless opportunities for communal joviality and frivolity—became a focus of the media’s attention:

Smack in the middle of The Manor’s tiled and panelled period entrance hall sits a gleaming white Lambretta. Lovingly-polished chrome is revealed if you pull down the spotless panelling and the all-important SX 200 badge sparkles at the front … [H]e circles his pride-of-place scooter, lovingly toying with it and apparently happy to answer all naïve, never-a-scooter-boy queries. (Heath 45)

The Lambretta, providing such a focus, becomes the iconic means by which the former urbane-ness of Weller’s musical persona is softened and fused with the rural. In true “ruralist” fashion, here was Weller rejecting his urban past for a rural future—all the while suggesting a change in both identity and personality: “Now professing a growing passion for the countryside and for folk music, Paul Weller has certainly come a long way from the urban anthems of ‘In The City.’ People, get ready for the mellower Weller” (Heath 41). Indeed, it has been discernible: “[f]rom The Jam to The Style Council to Paul Weller, there has been a move from urban to suburban to rural” (Lester 72).[9][10]

This transition from urban Mod to rural folkie, allows a mood change also, from uptight preoccupation with now-ness to whimsical sentimentality for the past. One reviewer noted, “[t]he title track bespeaks a weary disgust with the way things are, but this city slicker seems, if anything, inspired by the great outdoors to nostalgia, regret and melancholy” (Snow, “Q Reviews,” 114).

Employing both the distinctly analog (as opposed to digital) sounds of yesteryear (the muso’s equivalent of The Brotherhood of Ruralists “dated” painterly techniques), Weller found himself increasingly described as a “traditionalist” by the music journalists, to the extent that his method of creating music was, resonating with true “ruralist” tendencies, akin to that of a carpenter fashioning “new furniture seasoned from old wood.”[11]

Indeed, when asked “Where did you get all the imagery from for Wild Wood … all the weavers and woodcutters and sunflowers?” Weller admitted, “they kind of come from me reading stories to my kids” (qtd. in Lester 72). Weller’s inspiration for writing such rural-inspired music is, of course, in keeping with what Michael Bunce has termed the continuation of the “armchair countryside” (37-76), a constructed rural which has, at once, both everything and nothing to do with the actual countryside. The “armchair countryside,” with both literature and advertising at its heart, is, for many urbanists, their only contact with the rural. Particularly prevalent within the tradition of children’s storytelling, it forms our adult imagination, experience and interpretation of the rural:

Like so many of our world images, our perceptions of the countryside are first acquired in childhood … They are perceptions too which, as children, we absorb from older generations and the values of the culture in which we are raised. Yet many of our most durable and stereotypical images of the countryside come from the literature of our childhood. (Bunce 63)

The Scooter and the Rural: Case Study # 4 – Scootering, Advertising and the Rural
As I pondered the images of Stevens and Weller riding their respective Lambrettas, I simultaneous revisited my piles of dog-eared copies of the monthly magazine Scootering. A revelatory realization slowly dawned on me. Flicking through page after page, studying the many “Feature Scooters,” “Scooter Reviews,” “Events,” “Features” and “Regulars” on offer within each edition, it became startlingly obvious that scooters are, more often than not, displayed in a suburban or even an outright rural setting rather than the (perhaps as expected) urban, inner-city environment. In this way, Scootering appeals to the “inner ruralist” even within the most “urban” of scooterists.

Advertising within Scootering, echoing the suburban/rural (rather than urban) content found elsewhere within the magazine, incorporates, partially or wholly, elements characteristically recognizable in marketing as the rural. For example, in the November 1999 issue, within the Scooter Trader (UK) supplement, is a quarter-page ad for “two new limited edition fine art prints,” each featuring (and, thus, of particular consumer interest to the magazine’s readership) vintage Vespa and Lambretta models (36). Both products on offer are from original works by Roy Barrett, and are “limited editions of 600 prints.” While “A Way of Life” (17” x 13.5”, £43.50) is clearly aimed at the Mod scooter-riding fraternity,[12] the other—“One Careful Owner” (15.75” x 8.5”, £35.95)—is of particular interest here as it presents a sole Lambretta as a rusting (yet potentially highly restorable) heap amid the rustic charm of a garden brick wall and entangled weeds and bushes.[13]  A late-1950s Lambretta, with twin “bicycle”-styled seating and ochre-tinged paintwork (resulting in its rusting bodywork being almost indistinguishable from the original paint scheme), seems to merge organically—thus “naturally”—into the autumnal hues that surround it. It is, then, amid such unchecked undergrowth, open to the corrosive effects of the elements; yet, it is also seemingly being “reclaimed” by nature—a man-made object “returning” to mother earth.

Likewise, within the June 1997 issue is yet another quarter-page ad that incorporates the rural within its layout (36). Promoting “Bristol 6 Scooters,” the ad is headed by the name of this particular scooter outlet in a rainbow-like arch of bold type, under which a landscape quietly nestles. In a modern-day take on a traditional wood-cut print, we see the low-lying sun, a lone deciduous tree and rolling hills through which a white-lined road makes a weaving, up-and-down, in view, out of view, cut. It is, in a rather simplistic yet quaint manner, a distillation of England’s green and pleasant land. Yet, due to the juxtaposition of the pleasing naivety of this scene along with the words “Bristol 6 Scooters,” we are able to imagine, quite easily, a gaggle of Lambrettas or Vespas disappear along this road, into the horizon of this Arcadian idyll. Of course, the suggestion that the gently undulating hills that make up the Avon countryside provide the ideal inviting terrain for mellow-minded scooterists is further reinforced by what the iconography of this ad does not suggest.

In other words, this is clearly not an advertisement aimed at a scooter-riding stockbroker, nipping in and out of the London traffic, who commutes back and forth between the City and the London Boroughs. Within this ad there is no evocation of a chic café quarter, populated by preening, Perrier-drinking poseurs. Instead, the landscape that promotes Bristol 6 Scooters is quintessentially rural, and, as such, suggests that scootering is a peculiarly pastoral preoccupation, all centered around temporary escape into the countryside for a picnic or a pub lunch.

The Scooterist as Ruralist: Towards the Eradication of Binaries
Such heightened appropriations of the Italian motor-scooter should be understood as the point where spatial polarities, especially the urban and rural, meet. Yet, we must also remember that “the rural/urban divide has been kept alive by a binary model of thinking, peddling ideas of separation, difference and even opposition between the urban and its rural other” (Cloke and Johnston 11). Of course, “one way of breaking free from binary understandings has been to pursue alternative systems of logic, developing multifaceted and fuzzy logics with which to transcend binary assumptions of either/or” (Cloke and Johnston 14).

I would insist that one way of moving towards achieving such an alternative is the concept of the “ruralist.”  The next logical step would be to imagine an intermediate arena—or ruralist/scooterist “third space”—such as, for example, Stevens of “Caerforiog, 1969” or Weller of “The Manor, 1993” within which scooter-borne ruralist can exist. If we return, momentarily, to the reasons behind The Brotherhood of Ruralists earnestly wanting to break with both the urban and the London establishment, a sequence of binaries saturating late-modernity are made explicit:

In the very early days when ideas about the Group were being formulated … [t]he world was split into chunks … Country versus Town, Masculine versus Feminine, National versus International, Feeling versus Thinking, Individual versus Society, Work versus Leisure, Figurative versus Abstract … [Whereby] Masculine won against Feminine, City against County, London over “the Provinces.” Tradition lost to Innovation, Figurative painting lost to Abstraction. (Ann Arnold qtd. in Graham Arnold 19) 

Meic Stevens’ candid image not only reminded me of the Wild Wood shot of Weller on his Lambretta, but confirmed to me that the scooter, within its uniquely “rural” environment, was still an aspect of the “urban” that, instead of being incongruent amid the pastoral, seemed to help bond the falsely modern with the authentically old in a ruralist/scooterist “third space.” Indeed, this seemingly irreconcilable incongruity—that scooter-borne urban subcultures are incompatible with a rural existence—was dispelled, surely once and for all with the publication of The Mod Years, 2006. For an article within, “Mod Goes to the Country” (21-24), highlights the ever-growing presence of scooterists at the Goodwood Revival. A nostalgia-wallowing race meeting held each summer amid the Arcadian splendor of the grounds of a country house near Chichester, it is attended by scooter riders (faultlessly adhering to period detail, with both their clothing and bikes from the 1950s and 1960s only), who are prepared to “brave B-roads, cow pats and wasps” (Myatt 24).

The scooter is no stranger to the rural, as any issue of Scootering—or a Lambretta- or Vespa-sponsored coffee-table text—often shows the Italian motor-scooter amid the countryside. To rid ourselves of a restrictive, binary worldview, which only serves to compartmentalize falsely our conception of the motorcycle and its rider (seeing, for example, the scooter and scooterist as merely an urban phenomenon), we can use a ruralist approach to motorcycling culture and so open ourselves up to road-user “fuzzy logics.”

Recognizing that the scooter—a cheap, affordable, “urban” mode of two-wheeled transport—has been immersed within contexts that are intrinsically “rural” means seeing that the Italian motor-scooter is being “used” in late modernity in a radical way. Such a transformation of an “urban” mode of transport into a vehicle for experiencing the “rural” is typical of today’s striving for the traditional and the authentic. Thus, applying the term “ruralist” to the scooterist not only acknowledges the scootering “third space” that exists between the urban and the rural, it enables us to feel at ease with leaving the city behind as we head out into the countryside on a Lambretta—riding pillion or at the helm.

Notes

Works Cited

Barnes, Richard. Mods! London: Plexus Publishing Ltd., 1979.

Barthes, Roland.  Image, Music, Text.  London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977.

Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories.  London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1988.

Brown, Gareth.  Scooterboys.  7^th ed.  London: IMP Ltd., 2005.

Bunce, Michael.  The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape.  London: Routledge, 1994.

Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. 3^rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

Cloke, Paul and Ron Johnston.  Spaces of Geographical Thought.  London; Sage Publications, Ltd., 2005.

Cosgrove, Stuart.  “Neat Jackets in Jerusalem.” New Musical Express, 10 January 1987, 24-25, 33.

Cox, Nigel. Lambretta Innocenti: An Illustrated History.  Sparkford: G. T. Foulis & Company, 1996.

Graham Arnold. Machynlleth: Machynlleth Tabernacle Trustees, 1992.

Heath, Ashley.  “The Natural.” The Face, July 1993, 40-46.

Hebdige, Dick. “The Meaning of Mod.” Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. London: Routledge, 1996. 87-96.  

Hutchinson, Roger. High Sixties: The Summers of Riot and Love. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company (Edinburgh) Ltd., 1992.

Ingham, Chris. “The Don.” Mojo, April 2000, 74-80.

Lentz, Graham. The Influential Factor. Horsham: Gel Publishing, 2002.

Lester, Paul.  “Paul Weller: Last Man Standing.” Uncut, December 1998, 54-74.

Marwick, Arthur. The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958-c.1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

McLean, Craig.  “He’s Proper, Paul Weller.” Word, August 2003, 82-89.

Martin, Christopher, ed. The Ruralists.  London: Academy Group Ltd., 1991.

Moore, Jerrold Northrop, Laurie Lee and Peter Nahum.  The Ruralists: A Celebration. Barley Splatt: Ruralist Fine Art Ltd., 2005.

Moynahan, Brian.  “The Brotherhood of Ruralists.” The Sunday Times Magazine, 3 October 1976, 78-84.

Myatt, Steven, ed. The Mod Years, 2006. Horncastle: Mortons Media Group Ltd., 2006.

Odgers, Caroline.  “A Move to the Country.” Country Life, 23 April 1981, 1112-1113.

Polhemus, Ted. Street Style: From Sidewalk to Catwalk.  New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1994.

Reed, John.  Paul Weller: My Ever Changing Moods.  London: Omnibus Press, 2002.

Rudd, Natalie.  Peter Blake.  London: Tate Publishing, 2003.

Sarti, Giorgio. Vespa: 1946-2006, 60 Years of the Vespa. Sparkford: Haynes Publishing, 2006.

Snow, Mat.  “We All Make Mistakes.”  Q, October 1993, 60-64. 

---. “Q Review: New LPs.” Q, October 1993, 114.

Stevens, Meic.  Solva Blues:  An Autobiography. Talybont: Y Lolfa Cyf, 2004.

“‘That’s Entertainment’: An Overview of Paul Weller’s Back Catalogue.” Q, December 1995, 116.

Usherwood, Nicholas.  The Brotherhood of Ruralists.  London: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd., 1981.

Ville, John. “VRRRRRRRRUM! Serious Scooters.”  FHM, September 1994, 70-74.

Watson, Lawrence and Paolo Hewitt. Days Lose Their Names and Time Slips Away: Paul Weller, 1992–1995.  London: Boxtree Ltd., 1995.

Wilson, Mervyn. The Rural Spirit.  London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1990.

Discography

Stevens, Meic.  Rain In the Leaves: The EPs, Vol. 1.  Sunbeam Records, 2006.

Weller, Paul.  Wild Wood.  Polydor Records, 1993.

Filmography

Jerusalem.  Dir. Richard Belfield.  1987.

Summer with the Brotherhood.  Dir. John Read.  BBC2, January 1978.