68 Tom has flown just below the radar for too long, a sucker for his own misfortune. Shortly after getting on United, almost instantly in fact, the injuries began. First the shoulder, then the knee. Nathan Rule said ‘It’s not like you had to relearn a load of tricks when you felt good enough to ride again is it Tom?’ Half jokingly, but somewhat accurately too. I saw it as a compliment. Tom’s repertoire of tricks would probably fit on the back of a train ticket, but what he can do, and how he links those things together, he does very, very well. As the title of this piece suggests, of the tricks Tom can do, he does them with a masterful touch, always looking comfortable and confident, whether it’s locked in a high and long icepick, or popping out of a difficult smith hardway. He makes it all look so easy. A comeback of sorts, you could call it, and an overdue one at that. Hailing from just outside Hull in East Yorkshire, Tom has grown up around some of the funniest and most bizarre assembly of characters I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time with. James Cox and myself traveled out to Barcelona to start Tom’s interview. I felt like we were gatecrashing their holiday, which we essentially were, but you can learn a lot about a person by the company they keep. The Hull locals are like a bunch of prototypes, not actually people, just one-offs, God testing some ideas out. Patrick Van Straten has a tail, like some hangover from early man, Nathan Rule can’t walk past a fruit machine without checking if it’s ‘paying out.’ He doesn’t have a phone either, choosing to get in touch with girls he meets by intermittently reactivating his Facebook account. Upon losing his job on a building site Carl Wood remodeled his bedroom to look like a building site office, complete with a brick collection under his bed. Then there are the ‘quieter’ guys, like Charles, and for some reason Patrick is terrified of Charles. I don’t see it, he seemed like the most normal out of the lot of them. When everyone has their backs turned, Charles must be eyeballing poor Patrick and running his finger across his throat. I saw Tom Hasnip set fire to Carl Wood’s hair, by that point, an incident like that was completely normal. The Don announcing at the top of his voice at a spot we were trying to be slightly incognito, “SANDY! [points over his shoulder] LEDGE! RAIL!… DROP!!!” We all looked puzzled and The Don continued walking back to the group, smiling. Nobody had any idea what those three words referred to. A set-up in Don’s mind that only he could see. The Don and Patrick left and the Blyths moved in. Tom Blyth’s strong opinions make him an easy target for Nath and Carl to goad into a debate, and vice versa too. The heckles and comebacks are so harsh they’d shut Richard Pryor down. There’s Cory Beal, a Canadian who spent last summer in Hull and in turn, acted accordingly within this amusing cast. Cory was like a petty thief, stealing a hire bike when he had a puncture and taking a girl’s phone after he’d slept with her, to make sure she couldn’t call him back. They fight like brothers, real fights, only to make up after someone mans up and makes an apology. They’re all humble to the point of almost shunning any outward appearance of getting ahead. It seems that none of them had particularly bad upbringings – “It’s weird we all ended up like this isn’t it?” Nathan would say. A few of them are rich already, Patrick is the heir to a mayonnaise empire in The Netherlands, I kid you not. Yet with all this chaos and these strange idiosyncrasies, you get the sense of an unbelievably tight scene, like characters from Lord Of The Files, or The Lost Boys, all for one and one for all, or something like that. They squabble like brothers do, but rarely have I seen such a tight group of friends. For reasons that will become clear, it seems like these strong friendships were integral in Tom sticking with riding and getting over the issues that plagued his childhood.
I’m a few days into this ‘holiday,’ when one morning I suggest to Tom we go and sit down somewhere to get some of the interview done. “All right man, yeah. What you thinking?” Nathan suggests we go to Starbucks with him. It’s part of his daily routine, I’m surprised to notice that he gets a tea, not a coffee. ‘Tea! From Starbucks?’ I think. A cup of hot water and a tepid teabag. They don’t even add the milk. We sit down towards the back as the place is busy, all of Barcelona is busy. In fact, this might be the busiest I’ve ever seen a city. Continuously, relentlessly for the week we are there the streets are packed with shoppers and families in a seemingly never-ending Spanish holiday. There’s Coxie, Charles, Nathan, Tom and Myself. Coxie gets out his phone and starts laughing. “Even though I was fucking smashed last night, I somehow managed to take that.” We all take a look at the screen, about ten of us lined up against a wall, late at night, drunk, with a homeless man at our feet. He’s either crawling away, or we’re stood on him, like a trophy from a big game shoot. Stranger things have happened this week. I saw a man with a tail, for christakes. I point at the motley line up of reprobates and ask, “How long have you known all that lot in the photo?” Tom: I’ve known Nath since I was 12, Charles since I was 12… Pat too. James: What about Blyth? Same I think, 12, maybe 13. Albion: But you’re not from Hull are you? No, ten miles out. A small village. Any riders from there? Carl Wood. He’s a fucking lunatic. James: Tom told me yesterday that when Carl lost his job on a building site he… [laughs] Yeah he turned his bedroom into a site office! He hammered a massive building site banner into his wall, had his Skill Saw in there with him, he kept bricks under his bed. Why would you keep bricks under your bed? They were sample bricks, so I took the piss and told everyone that Carl had a collection of bricks under his bed. He went mental about that as usual. I once said in another old interview that ‘Carl Wood was the third best brickie in Yorkshire’ and he goes mental and goes ‘I fucking wasn’t, I was the third best brickie in EAST Yorkshire!’ [laughs] My coffee feels light so I take the lid off. Half empty. “Fuck’s sake, what the fuck is this?”, “Give it here, I’ll get it topped up for you,” says Nath, with an unexpected show of chivalry. “Can you do mine too?” asks Coxie. “And get me a water,” adds Charles. Nathan disappears with his orders. I move the dictaphone towards Tom, it’s getting louder in the Starbucks. Barcelona keeps getting busier. You had a really rough time with injuries didn’t you?