Rob Quartermain on Vespas and the mod revival
Hanging out on Carnaby Street, being blown away by the Quadrophenia album, seeing The Jam in ‘78, The Who in ‘79, and riding a little Italian shopping bike all over Europe.
Rob Quartermain was in at the birth of the mod revival, revelling in its sense of anarchy, of a youth culture with an edge where the kids were in charge.
He witnessed its rise and fall, but stuck with the ever-evolving scooter scene while others drifted off to rave culture, eventually becoming president of the Vespa Club of Britain (VCB).
‘A bit of anarchy’
“It’s different now,” he says at his home in Skegness. “But I still love my scooters and it’s still a lifestyle. When you were younger, you were still in control, there was a bit of anarchy attached to it.
“There was an edge to it in the ‘80s. We’d have to battle the bikers, we’d have to battle the casuals.
“You’d meet people from all over the country through going to the national rallies, from Scotland down to the South West. You might not see them for a few years, but they’re still your mates.
“Now there’s no youth culture. It was killed off by the rave scene, with its drugs and peace and love.”
Born in Walthamstow, Rob moved to Chelmsford with his family in the early ‘70s, and got his first experience of scooters.
“There was a lad that lived opposite, and every Sunday morning all his mates used to come round on their Lammies,” he remembers. “They had flares and long hair by then, but they still had the tiger skin seats and all the mirrors.
“A few years later, my older sister’s boyfriend leant me a copy of the Quadrophenia album, and I was like ‘what a brilliant album’. You got the booklet with it with all the pictures of scooters in.
The Who, punk and The Jam
“So I was into The Who, and then all the punk stuff came along and I remember rushing home from school to watch the kids’ music programmes that were on.
“There was one with Marc Bolan and he had The Jam on there in 1977 doing All Around the World, and that was it – I was a Jam fan.
“We went to see them at Wembley Arena at the end of ‘78 and it was the early formation of the mod thing in London. It evolved and by early ‘79 we were going to Carnaby Street every Saturday.
“There was a shop there called Robot run by a black fella, who told us ‘you’ve got to come down next Saturday, they want some extras for a film’. It was called Steppin’ Out, about youth culture in London. Our bit featured the Merton Parkas; we never made it into the film, but we were there.”
Rob also remembers seeing The Chords early on at the Marquee Club, and The Who at Wembley Stadium in August ‘79, supported by The Stranglers and AC/DC.
“What a brilliant weekend that was,” he says. “We stayed at my sister’s, and on the Sunday we went to see Quadrophenia, which had just come out and was only being shown in London. What a film.”
Some of Rob’s rally patches
If only he’d been listening to the right radio station one school night in ‘78, Rob may even have had a small part.
“I went into school, and my mates said ‘weren’t you listening to Capital Radio last night? They wanted mods to go down to Brighton today for filming the beach fights’,” he says. “So I could have been in it, but it wasn’t to be.”
Quadrophenia second chance
That wrong was partly righted nearly 20 years later when, as part of the VCB, he was invited to London by Piaggio for a casting session for a film to be shown on the big screen when The Who performed Quadrophenia at Hyde Park in 1996.
“I got picked out – I knew the woman from Piaggio – and we went down to Brighton and just rode up and down Madeira Drive, no crash helmets on,” he remembers.
Rob in a promotional photograph for Quadrophenia video 1996
“We had backstage passes so I didn’t see it on the screen at Hyde Park, but when they did it at Earls Court I was in the crowd and there was me on the big screen.
“It was the sort of thing you can’t buy. They brought a DVD out, so I took loads of screenshots, which are on the wall in my shed.”
Rob leading the scooters in the Quadrophenia show film
We’re chatting in said ‘shed’, an incredible shrine to Rob’s life in music and scooters, the first of which arrived in 1980 when he was 18, a year after he’d attended his first rally at Southend.
“It was August bank holiday, and Mike Karslake, who lived in Southend, had organised this Lambretta club rally,” he says. “I went with my two mates who I’d formed a band with, called The Yaks, and we had a Bond three wheeler. We weren’t on scooters but I think we got away with it with the Bond.”
Rob’s first scooter was a Vespa 90 bought from Gareth Brown, later editor of Scootering magazine and still a good friend.
Vespa 150 Super
Being a 90, it wasn’t long before he upgraded to a Vespa 150 Super with 3,000 miles on the clock for the princely sum of £200.
Rob with the Vespa 150 Super
“It had little eight-inch wheels, but I had it for about five years and did national rallies up and down the country on it, and it was brilliant,” says Rob. “In ‘85 I bit the bullet and bought a brand new P200E, and I’ve had P ranges ever since – the best Vespa ever made. Such a wonderful, reliable scooter.”
Rob started doing the national rallies, from Great Yarmouth to Torquay, and Morecambe to the Isle of Wight.
“For some people it was a religion, they had to do every one, but I picked what I wanted to do,” he says. “The scooterboy scene came along, with army greens and Doc Martens, and I think it reached its peak in ‘86, and then came the riot on the Isle of Wight.
“I think the people putting on scooter rallies were trying to follow the fashions. On the Friday night they had Edwin Starr, and it was pissing down with rain but there were thousands of people all watching him because he was ‘the man’.
“On Saturday they had Oi! bands on, like Condemned 84, and I don’t know if people got bored. But, as far as I remember, the beer prices were going up over the weekend so the beer tent got set on fire, and then they started on all the food places, and those big gas bottles – when they go they go. They were going on the fires and exploding.
Just a few of Rob’s rally pin badges
“How nobody got killed, I do not know. That killed it a little bit for me – I didn’t do another scooter rally like that for a year or so, I just involved myself with the Vespa club stuff.”
European tours
In ‘86, he rode down to Barcelona with Gareth for Euro Vespa, arriving in time to watch England play Argentina in the World Cup in the bar on the beach-side campsite.
Into Europe, the Barcelona banner in blue
“There were 20 or 30 English in the bar, and the rest were Spanish,” he says. “When the hand of God goal went in, it all kicked off, chairs got thrown about. All the campsites had armed guards, and they came in waving pistols about in the air. But they chucked all the Spanish out and we watched the rest of the game.
“Gareth was writing for Scootering mag at the time, and he wrote it up over three issues – it was an adventure.”
From 30 Brits in Barcelona, nearly 300 went to the following year’s Euro Vespa at Krems near Vienna, with a similar number attending in ‘88 at Aix-les-Bains, France.
Rob in 1986 with his original “alarm” Vespa
“There was a bit of trouble there, so in ‘89 at Kaiserslautern in Germany, we were only limited to 50 tickets because of poor behaviour,” remembers Rob.
“It was another exciting one, because at the time it was the biggest American garrison in Europe, and it ended up in a fight on the Friday night with a load of Yanks.
“There were a couple of Wolves football hooligans, and the Hammers Vespa Club was basically the ICF (Inter City Firm, connected to West Ham), and it just kicked off.”
Rob outside Upton Park in the early ’90s
French scooter holidays
After he met his first wife, Hazel, in 1989, the pair took regular scooter holidays down to the south of France.
“It took two days to get there,” he says. “French motorways are wonderful. You ride until you need petrol, have a fag and a coffee, and do the next leg. Once you get into that rhythm, you can crunch miles.
“That was our holiday for several years – different places in the south of France, always on the P200. A lot of people who saw us were in disbelief, but people have been doing it on scooters since the ‘50s.”
Other European trips included to San Remo in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.
Arriving in Croatia on a Vespa World Day
A busy ‘98 Vespa club rally at the Brentwood Centre in Essex sparked interest from Pontins, who contacted scooter rally organisers across the country.
“Nobody got back to them apart from me,” says Rob, who was representing Chelmsford Scooter Club (CSC). “I went for a meeting with them and they wanted me to do something in Prestatyn, but I was like ‘no, I’m from Essex, if I’m going to do it I want to do it somewhere locally – what about Camber Sands? It’s that or nothing’.
Birth of Camber Sands weekenders
“I got my way, and from 1999 we promoted it, got a brand new scooter to raffle off, and tried to get as many companies involved, like Doc Martens and all the big scooter companies.
“We got 2,500 people at the first one in July ‘99, taking over the whole site just before the school holidays. At the first one we had Edwin Starr, a banker, plus DC Fontana and The Riffs.
“It carried on for 17 years until 2015 and by then Britannia Hotels owned Pontins and they made things harder. It became less and less appealing.”
The CSC also organised the Winter Warmer scooter rallies at Hemsby on the Norfolk coast.
From competitions secretary, to editor of Vespa News, Rob became president of the VCB in 2013, growing the membership from 1,000 to 3,000 by the time he relinquished the reigns five years later.
His time with the VCB brought him into contact with scooterists from all over the world, each with their own separate culture around the bikes.
“Abroad, it isn’t necessarily driven by the mod / scooterboy thing at all,” he says. “There are clubs in Kuwait, Israel, Albania, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Thailand etc.
“I was on holiday in Phuket, in the old town and I saw this Vespa club thing advertised. It turned out I’d missed it but the day before there had been 10,000 Vespas there.
“There was a Vespa World Day in Bali and it was huge – 20,000 scooters. I remember being in Mantova in Italy, and a group had ridden quite a way from Vietnam, and they were sitting there with all the British lads and lasses.
Scooter trinkets abound in Rob’s shed
“They gave me this little engraved thing, and it was a really touching thing. Scooters transcends everything. I went to Derry last year for a Vespa club rally, and it doesn’t matter what side of the divide you come from in the scooter world.”
Modern scooter rallies
Rob, now 62, believes that too many scooter events these days are focused on rugby clubs and drinking, but he’s still more about the riding.
Skegness has always been an important stop on the scooter rallies
“In the past 10 years, the Vespa club stuff is more appealing to me,” he says. “Rugby clubs fall over themselves because of the amount of beer they can sell, and it seems to be more to do with drinking, with more camper vans turning up and less to do with scooters.
“I just love the riding. We did the Lakeland 100 recently and it was a challenge – I was absolutely knackered afterwards.
‘It was 120 miles from Kendal through all the passes, which was stunning. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The other week there was a thing called Beat the Bikers in Matlock Bath, an Inland seaside resort with the river, fish and chips, and amusements. I’d always wanted to do it.”
Choice of three scooters
These days, Rob has a choice of three scooters, a 2016 Vespa P150, one of the last of the P-series; a 1981 Spanish Lambretta Jet 200; and a Vespa Cosa from the late ‘80s.
The P150 is painted as a replica of a ‘Spirit of ‘76’ Vespa Rob owned in about 1986.
“After The Jam split I was really into The Alarm, and their thing was the poppy, so I painted poppies on the side panels and mudguards,” he says. “During the Covid lockdown I stripped this one down, rebuilt it and got stickers done.
“After a couple of years it looked a bit tatty, it had done nearly 40,000 miles, so I found someone in Bradford who painted it properly. It was a husband and wife team – he sprayed it and she did the magic on the top.”
The very original and standard Jet 200 was bought earlier in 2024, as was the Cosa – the Marmite of the Vespa world.
“People either love them or hate them,” he says. “I’d sold my GTS and I always have a look on Facebook marketplace and this came up.
“What really attracted me was the Malossi 210 built by Rob Kerr, Norrie’s son. It’s actually a wonderful ride, different to the PX, but I think a lot of people have missed out by not riding one.”
We’ve headed to the main strip in Skegness, where Rob lives with his partner Sue, and he reflects on what more than four decades of scootering means to him now.
‘A way of life’
“It’s a way of life, and we came up with that strapline for Scootering magazine back in the ‘80s on a drunken night in the pub with Gareth,” he laughs.
“But it’s also about friendships. I’ve made friends with people from all over the world.”
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.
