Jez’s touching scooter memorial to fallen friend

Barely a day goes by when Jez Kidd doesn’t think about his friend Andreas ‘Fats’ Anastasi, killed in a scooter accident on October 9, 1988.

The pair were only 18 at the time, and Fats had borrowed Jez’s Vespa PX125 to go and get some food from McDonald’s.

Sadly, he never returned.

Contents

In honour of ‘Fats’

Thirty six years on, and Jez has created a Vespa T5 in honour of his friend, featuring a portrait along with lyrics from Fats’ favourite song, Smokey Robinson’s Tracks of my Tears.

“We think about him all the time,” he says. “There isn’t a day that goes by when we don’t think of him. Every year a few of us make a point of going out and raising a glass to him.

The photo of Andreas ‘Fats’ Anastasi on which the portrait is based

“He was the first friend any of us had lost, and at such a young age. At the funeral there must have been 120 scooters following the hearse. It’s something you never forget.”

Jez remembers the night it happened like it was yesterday, just a normal Sunday evening scooter club meeting at the pub.

“Fats wanted to borrow a scooter to go and get something to eat, but no-one would lend him one because he was renowned for crashing them,” he says.

“I gave in to him and let him use mine. At the time, he was pretty much living round mine. Then a couple of hours later another scooterist we know came running into the pub saying ‘where’s Jez? I’ve just seen his scooter all smashed up on Sprowston Road’.

“Before we knew what had happened I’m cursing him, because he’s crashed my scooter, not knowing what was to follow.”

Perfect chance to pay tribute

The news shook the close-knit scootering community in Norwich, and when Jez bought the ‘93 T5 a few months ago, it seemed the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to his late friend.

He had already bought the number plate F4TSA back in 2008 for £800, always intending to use it as a tribute some day, and the T5 just seemed right.

“Fats was the first one of us to own a brand new T5 when they first produced them,” says Jez, “although obviously he had a little ding on it.

“He then swapped it for a custom Lambretta called Antarctic Sunset sprayed by John Spurgeon, who for me was the best in the business.

“He had that for a while, but then ended up smashing it all up trying to ride between a car and some scaffolding.”

The screen from Antarctic Sunset now sits proudly on Jez’s T5, rescued from his mate Chris’s shed and looking for all the world like it was meant to be there.

‘We’re like brothers’

“You just sit back and think that at that age none of us really knew each other, we were just starting out. Now me and my closest friends have had 40 plus years together – we’re like brothers. You think ‘what would Fats have been like?’ Would he have still been as crazy as ever? But he died doing something he loved, riding scooters.”

Jez and his mates had already been to their first rally, in nearby Great Yarmouth, travelling by train before he bought his first scooter back in 1986, an old Vespa 150 Super.

“I didn’t keep it too long because it had the old ignition system which had a set of contact breaker points under the flywheel,” he says. “They would get hot and it’d be a nightmare to start, so I swapped it for the PX125.”

Back then, Jez was working as an apprentice mechanic at Norwich Motor Company on the YTS scheme, and for three years between ‘87 and ‘89 travelled all over the country.

“We weren’t earning a lot of money on YTS schemes, so we were always on a budget, but things were so cheap back then,” he says. “It was amazing how far you could make £27.50 a week stretch.

“We did nearly every rally that there was, though we missed Scotland a couple of times, but that was our get out – the only thing we looked forward to in our teens, just getting out on our scooters, getting pissed up and having a laugh.

Jez’s jacket showing his rally patches

“It was a change of scenery, and the challenge of riding the distance on a two-stroke. We were all young, and we didn’t have a care in the world. What did anyone have to worry about? We had no responsibilities, and could do what we wanted.

“The only thing we worried about was breaking down and being able to fix it, but we always travelled in groups anyway.

“I used to travel everywhere without RAC, with a spare barrel and piston in my glovebox, spare clutch cables, spark plugs, regulator, and if we broke down we had to repair it by the side of the road. I always had a spare wheel, so I’d carry a spare inner tube as well.”

Teenage hi-jinks

He shakes his head and smiles as he remembers some of the “terrible” things he and his mates used to get up to in their youth.

“A mate of ours, Melvin, thought it would be funny on one rally to put a trail of petrol from their tent through all the other tents and light it at the other end,” says Jez. “The next thing you know all the tents are up in smoke and people are diving out of them with all their belongings.

“It’s madness when you sit back and think back about what we did as youngsters, absolutely crazy.

“Another friend of ours, Wibs, had a head on crash riding his scooter round the campsite like a lunatic. He ended up in hospital and his scooter was a pile of scrap.

“We were forever riding on friends’ licences, memorising stuff and using their names if we got stopped. You wouldn’t dream of it now.”

He also recalled with a wry smile one time when they left behind a broken down Fats, who was in the dog house for crashing yet another borrowed scooter.

The floor of the Vespa T5

“We were going to Margate, and Fats didn’t have a scooter on the road,” says Jez. “My mate Chris lent him his, and we all arranged to meet in the city.

Fats in the dog house

“We hadn’t even got out of Norwich when Fats planted Chris’s scooter in the back of a bus and smashed all the front end in. Chris went absolutely mental, so he wasn’t in the good books all weekend.

“The scooter was still rideable, and he got to Margate, but coming home he broke down, and we all just left him on the side of the road. But he still managed to get home!”

Among the rallies Jez attended with the Norwich Elite Scooter Club were long trips to Morecambe, Oban and Fort William, but the Isle of Wight was always his favourite.

“It’s because of the amount of scooters there – anything between 5,000 and 10,000 over the weekend, and the whole island gears up for it,” he says.

“In every town, the pubs have got different DJs or bands on to accommodate the scootering scene. The island loves it.”

Over the years, Jez has mostly stuck to Vespas, mainly for their reliability.

“The Vespa 200 engine was bulletproof,” he says. “You could go anywhere on them at 60mph all day long.

“I have had one Lambretta, which I wish I’d never sold because it was nice. It was a Series 2 Li150, and I had a bit of custom work done to it and got it looking nice. We’ve all got regrets, and that’s one of them…

“But back then scooters were thrown away in skips. I’ve thrown a Rally 200 frame in a skip, and to buy a Rally 200 now you’re looking at the best part of £7,000.”

Missing the scene

After a few years without a scooter, Jez missed the scene, bought another Vespa and had it sprayed in the style of an ‘80s FILA tracksuit.

“It was called Be Someone, from the Danny Dyer film The Business, and it was on display in elements clothing shop in the city for a few months,” he says. “That was another of my regrets, selling that.”

These days, as well as the T5, Jez has a Vespa PX200, and a newer, four-stroke Vespa 300 GTS automatic, a scooter which massively divides opinion but is increasingly seen on rallies.

“A lot of people have switched to the Vespa GTSs and the Royal Alloys, which I think they’ve nailed on the head as the modern look of a Lambretta,” he says. “The days of sitting on the side of the road repairing a scooter is the last thing you want to be doing – you want to know you’re going to get there. I don’t want to be rolling around on the floor with my hips.

“But there are a lot of purists that don’t move with the times and wouldn’t be seen on a GTS. Maybe they don’t want to ride one because if they did they’d see how good they are.”

Having a choice of both seems a sensible compromise, and Jez admits that “you can’t beat a two stroke, with the smell of the two stroke oil”.

“But if the scene is going to stay, it needs to appeal to the younger generation as well as the die-hards.”

Norwich egg run

In recent years, Jez has been one of the driving forces behind the Norwich Scooter Collective Easter egg run, which raises funds for East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices (EACH).

“John Frary started the egg run, and then I jumped on the bandwagon, thinking we could raise so much more than £400 or £500,” he says.

“We did an event at The Talk with a couple of live bands and a raffle, and raised about £9,000.”

There have since been scooter events at The Adrian Flux Waterfront, a boxing show at The Talk, and Jez has twice cycled from London to Paris to raise funds. Scooterists have now raised more than £70,000 for EACH, with the Easter eggs dropped off at a foodbank en route to the hospice at Quidenham.

As we chat at the Out of the Blue cafe on the outskirts of Norwich, Jez is preparing for the weekend’s Mersea Island scooter rally on the T5, with his son Billy-George riding his Vespa 125 GTS.

“He’s into it now and he doesn’t really go on holiday, so he’s really been looking forward to it,” he says, with Billy-George firmly part of the next generation the scooter scene needs.

The Norwich Scooter Collective meets at the Fat Cat and Canary on the first Monday of every month from 6pm, with riders new and old welcome.

Scooter stories is a series of articles exploring the lives and experiences of scooterists and collectors. Click on the Scooter Stories category link to read more.