The Red Bulletin October 2018 - UK

UK EDITION OCTOBER 2018, £3.50

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

Outlander star SAM HEUGHAN Embracing WILD LIVING Women’s biker fest CAMP VC

Stroke of genius ADAM PEATY on becoming unbeatable

EDITOR’S LETTER

A great life-skill is knowing when to quit. Just ask the stars of this month’s issue, who have made it onto our pages for achieving dreams that were never their Plan A. Take our cover star, record-breaking British swimmer Adam Peaty (page 48). He began life terrified of water and certain he would become a fighter pilot. But pushing himself to get into the pool has led to history-making performances that have left a generation of swimmers open-mouthed (never a good thing in a swimming pool).

In between taking shots like this at all-female bike festival Camp VC, photographer Jane Stockdale fulfilled a dream: “I’ve always wanted to get my motorbike licence. This gave me the perfect opportunity.” Page 58

Then there are the founders of Camp VC (page 58), a boundary-breaking, women-only festival in South Wales. The biker chicks ditched regular careers to pursue their true passion: motorbikes.

And Miriam Lancewood (page 38) wanted to be an Olympic athlete and became a qualified teacher before accepting she felt unfulfilled. Her fix? To give up the trappings of modern life and live off-grid in forests.

CONTRIBUTORS THIS ISSUE

DAVID HOWARD

The journalist and editor has won awards for his non-fiction books about the FBI and the American Civil War, so he’s well-placed to tell the story of The Dawn Wall, a film about a six-year pursuit to climb a forbidding face of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park. “I’m fascinated that we can do something the rest of the world thinks is a long shot,” he says. “It’s a reminder that we all have a big thing we can aim for.” Page 70

MARK BAILEY

A contributor to The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times, Bailey has met many A-listers, but he was amazed by Adam Peaty’s ability to switch personas.

“On contact with the water, he transformed from a fun, relaxed 23-year-old into a ruthless animal tearing through the pool,” he says.

“Also, the sight of Peaty’s biceps ensured all the guys working on the photoshoot felt an urgent need to rejoin the gym.” Page 48

Enjoy the issue.

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THE RED BULLETIN

RICK GUEST (COVER)

GO YOUR OWN WAY

NEW

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CONTENTS October

FEATURES

2 8 Anna Calvi

How the British singer/guitarist beat chronic shyness by letting rip

3 2 Sam Heughan

Outlander’s Jamie Fraser on his ‘lucky’ career – and positive fan power

3 8 Miriam Lancewood

The ‘wild woman’ who ditched the rat race and entered the wilderness

4 6 Azizul Awang

They said the Malaysian was too small to be a cycling pro. Bad mistake

4 8 Adam Peaty

The Red Bulletin goes poolside with the British breaststroke gold medallist who just can’t stop breaking world records

5 8 Camp VC

Revs and revelry: inside the UK’s women-only motorbike festival

7 0 The Dawn Wall

Documenting one of the most difficult free climbs ever attempted

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BULLEVARD 9 Sean Conway: breaking endurance

records, sleeping with spiders

12 Why skate when you can glide?

Hop aboard the Segway Drift W1

14 Running up that hill: Red Bull 400 16 How to dive for pirate treasure 18 Grind force: NY all-girl skateboard

crew The Skate Kitchen

20 Get lost in art in Tokyo 2 2 Sing it back: Moloko’s Roísín

Murphy reveals her seminal tunes

24 The restaurant run by robots

GUIDE 81 Hokkaido: more than a ski resort

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06

84 Our essential guide to Hackney 86 All you need for a wild adventure

– packed into a single rucksack

88 Ironman ace Lucy Charles shares

her training tips

90 Watch this space: Omega lifts off 92 This month on Red Bull TV 94 Dates for your calendar 98 A fresh angle on skateboarding THE RED BULLETIN

JANE STOCKDALE, AMY LOMBARD, COREY RICH

26 Yamaha Motobot: built to win

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BEYOND

THE

ORDINARY

Conway on his 2017 world record attempt. A torn quad muscle thwarted him on that occasion

CAROLINE CONWAY

BREAKING THE CYCLE SEAN CONWAY holds the world record for the fastest unaided crossing of Europe by bicycle, but it took a decade of falling off and getting back on his bike to achieve it THE RED BULLETIN

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ean Conway isn’t a name you associate with failure. The endurance adventurer’s feats include several world firsts, such as the longest-ever triathlon in 2016 – an 85-day, 6,760km circumnavigation of mainland Britain, cycling a coastal route from Lulworth Cove to Scarborough, then running to Brighton, before completing the circuit in the waters of the English Channel. But when the 37-year-old Zimbabwean rolled into the Russian city of Ufa on May 11 of this year, exhausted after cycling almost 6,300km across Europe, he was breaking a curse that had haunted him for nearly half a decade.

“I’ve had three failed cycling world-record attempts and it took six years and 96,500km to eventually do the one where everything went right,” Conway says of his new world record for the fastest cycle across Europe: 24 days, 18 hours and 39 minutes. Last year, he had to abandon his first European cycling record attempt after just four days when he tore a quad muscle. Before that,

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“THAT FEAR OF FAILURE‚ OF GIVING UP AND GOING HOME TO NOTHING‚ IS THE FUEL”

“I sweat about a litre an hour, so my kit was sticky all the time,” Conway recalls. “I slept naked, but you’re in your sleeping bag with a day’s worth of sweat.” Nights were spent in roadside storm drains with rats and spiders for company (he eschewed the 380g weight of a tent for a bivvy bag). He wore earplugs, and a Buff over his face, “because, inevitably, something crawls over you.”

The punishing schedule saw Conway ride for as many as 18 hours a day. “The food and the adrenalin numb things a little,” he says, “but even sleeping is painful as your body seizes up.” Low points of the journey included waking beside fresh wolf roadkill, cycling for 1,600km into a 32kph headwind, and close shaves with kamikaze drivers. “In Russia, I started cycling into oncoming traffic so I could see the drivers coming, rather than them driving up behind me,” he recalls. “Stressful.”

But the ghosts of these failed record attempts fuelled Conway’s motivation.

“That fear of failure, of giving up and going home to nothing, is the fuel,” he says.

Letting down friends, online supporters, and sponsors such as cycling insurers Yellow Jersey and Twisted Automotive – the Yorkshirebased vehicle-engineering company that made Conway its ambassador and built him his own custom Land Rover Defender, which he named Colonel Mustard – played heavily on his mind.

In the end, Conway beat the record by nine hours.

“That’s the equivalent of 21 minutes a day. Which, on a bad day, could easily have been down to traffic lights,” he says, reflecting that success isn’t so much about winning as about staying the course. “Ultimately, you work out what you did wrong, then you go back and have another crack.” seanconway.com

CAROLINE CONWAY

S

he’d failed to get a roundAustralia attempt off the ground; and while cycling in America in 2012 – 6,400km into a round-the-world record attempt – he was hit by a truck, fracturing his spine.

The ‘Hiccups’ section of Conway’s website is headed by the statement: “It’s in our failures where we become stronger.” This is a motto he lives by. “You have to,” says Conway. “You can’t focus on the negative, otherwise you’d rip your life to bits. It’s not that I was born exceptionally resilient; you just learn a coping mechanism.”

For this year’s European speed attempt, which started in Cabo de Roca on the west coast of Portugal and took him across nine countries, Conway paid attention to the tiniest details. These included ensuring his seat post was set at the perfect height, to within half a millimetre – “because on a big ride, the small things quickly become the big things” – and swapping his carbon bike for an ‘old-school’ steel frame for added comfort.

Days began in darkness at 3.58am, stepping into a damp cycling kit still heavy with yesterday’s perspiration.

KATIE CAMPBELL SPYRKA

B U L L EVA R D

THE RED BULLETIN

Conway cycled across nine countries in pursuit of the world record. This May, he finally clinched it THE RED BULLETIN

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B U L L EVA R D

Segway Drift W1

ROLLER SKATES REINVENTED

Hoverboards are so 2015. The personal transportation of 2019 is hover-skates

balancing vehicles capable of travelling in separate directions, just like skates.

And that’s the market Segway hopes to appeal to: skaters, dancers, and hip young urbanites with a propensity for gliding around town.

Each Segway Drift W1 ‘shoe’ can carry a weight of 100kg at 12kph, negotiate a 10° incline, and deliver 45 minutes of powered propulsion. Weighing 3.5kg per skate, they have rubber handles for easy carrying, three illumination modes for night riding (or just showing off), and front and rear bumpers to protect them, but not necessarily you. That responsibility goes to the helmet that Segway delivers free with your $399 (just over £300) pair of e-skates. segway.com

TOM GUISE

Although Segway calls it an e-skate, the Drift W1 is more of a platform than a shoe. Think of it as a mini hoverboard

I

n 2001, when rumours about Segway’s ‘Human Transporter’ first leaked, the media was ablaze with speculation: was this new innovation a hoverboard, a helicopter backpack, perhaps even a teleportation device?

While the stand-up electric vehicle could never live up to the hype, its self-balancing and tilt-steering technology did eventually give us 2015’s hoverboard craze (although not actual hovering ones, as promised in Back To The Future Part II). But now it’s 2018, and Segway has another vision for our self-propelled future: the e-skate.

The Segway Drift W1 uses the same patented gyroscopic technology as the original Segway (now called the Personal Transporter), only at one-tenth of the size and built into a pair of uniwheeled, foot-sized platforms that you step on rather than strap on (which helps when you need to jump or topple off them). As on the Segway PT or a hoverboard, you tilt your feet to move, turn and brake – the difference here being that you’re riding two self-

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SEGWAY

The Drift W1: effectively two miniature Segways that will hopefully be more than twice as successful as their big brother THE RED BULLETIN

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PAVEL SUKHORUKOV/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

TOM GUISE

The average number of steps to complete the run is around 600-800, but in that distance, runners must ascend more than 140m

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THE RED BULLETIN

B U L L EVA R D

T

Red Bull 400

STEEP LEARNING CURVE Planning to run up a ski-jump slope at night?

Here are a few things you need to know…

THE RED BULLETIN

he Olympic ski jump near Sochi is a visceral experience for anyone leaping off it: a 40storey plunge that can see skiers reach speeds of 120kph.

Want a bigger challenge? Try running up it, in the dark.

Any of the competitors in the Red Bull 400, an event billed as the world’s toughest uphill race, will confirm that this is the more harrowing test.

Sochi’s first Red Bull 400 was held last year, and saw Russian ultrarunning husband and wife Dmitry Mityaev and Ekaterina Mityaeva claim the crown after a punishing night run. This October, they will defend their title with a greater understanding of this brutal 400m race. “Running at night is amazing,” says Mityaev. “It’s fast, unpredictable. Adrenalin is high at first, but, for many, after 100m it’s difficult.”

At 200m, as the slope curves steeply, the lungs can’t exchange enough oxygen and breathing starts to burn. “The main thing is not to breathe abruptly,” says Mityaev. The thigh muscles, starved of oxygen and filled with lactic acid, become exhausted, forcing most runners to drop to all fours. “The earlier you start helping yourself, the worse it is,” says Mityaeva.

“We try to help ourselves only in the last 50m.” At that point – with the incline at 75 per cent – everyone is crawling.

“At the start my pulse is 100bpm, by the finish it’s 180,” says Mityaeva. “These are the metres everyone remembers for their whole life.”

Red Bull 400 Sochi takes place on October 13; redbull.com 15

B U L L EVA R D

How to...

Don’t get silver doubloon fever

DIVE FOR PIRATE TREASURE

As a safety specialist for dangerous documentaries, Aldo Kane scoured the Indian Ocean bed in search of Captain Kidd’s booty

“It’s frustrating when you get a glimpse of 800-year-old Chinese porcelain between the ballast stones [rocks used as weights to stabilise ships] and you have to return to the surface. But if you start to take risks, accidents happen.

We shouldn’t be underwater in the first place, so we’re governed by decompression limits and times. When things go wrong, it happens very quickly, especially during an excavation.”

Leave a breadcrumb trail for yourself

“When excavating silt, you reduce visibility down to near zero – it’s like diving in pea soup. The danger is that you get disorientated. We have comms so those at the top are able to talk to us; there are surface marker buoys so people can see where each diver is at all times, and we run reels out to each specific dive site, so if you do ever lose direction, you can swim along to one of these.”

Don’t get snagged when you’re down there

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dangerous work, diving three to four times a day with a camera crew in attendance.

Here are his five rules when embarking on an excavation…

Enlist a first mate

The 55kg ‘silver’ ingot.

A UNESCO examination later determined that it is, in fact, 95 per cent lead

“The buddy system is vital underwater. They check my kit, I check theirs. You’re going down there with air hoses and extractor pumps – stuff that can get snagged, go wrong, or get snared on your life-support system.

You have one person working and another keeping watch over everything.”

Maintain control of your breathing

“As soon as you encounter a problem underwater, you’re on the timer – the sooner you can get someone to a hyperbaric chamber, the better. So you try to train your brain to remain calm, concentrating on slow breathing. It tends to slow everything down and gives you that headspace to be able to make decisions.

When something goes wrong, it’s very easy to hoover up all of your air.”

THE RED BULLETIN

MATT RAY

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hree centuries ago, Île Sainte-Marie, an island off the coast of Madagascar, was a haven for pirates such as William Kidd.

In 2015, Aldo Kane dived among the sunken wrecks in its waters, in search of Kidd’s ship, Adventure Galley. “It’s like a Boy’s Own adventure,” says the Scot. “You’re diving for Captain Kidd’s treasure and you find this bar of silver the size of a book, with a skull and crossbones on it.”

Once the wreck was located by sonar, Kane began his

ALDO KANE, MARTIN VOGL

Kane prepares for a dive off the coast of Île Sainte-Marie

“The main risk with any wreck is entrapment. You’re looking for treasure in the cavities under the silt, going into holds where these bars of silver are kept, and you’re wearing all this kit, sometimes with two cylinders. It’s easy to get snagged.”

New York all-girl skateboard crew The Skate Kitchen have all the ingredients to change the face of the scene as we know it

W

hen indie flick Skate Kitchen debuted at Sundance Film Festival this year, it turned heads, not only because of its honest depiction of a New York all-girl skateboard crew, but because its female leads are the real deal – in the film, NYC posse The Skate Kitchen play fictional versions of themselves.

Their real-life story begins in 2016 with a chance encounter on the New York subway between Nina Moran and Rachelle Vinberg – two teenage skaters who had first met on YouTube – and film director Crystal Moselle, who was fresh from winning a Sundance Grand Jury Prize for her 2015 breakthrough documentary The Wolfpack.

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LOUIS RAUBENHEIMER

COOKING UP A STORM

scripted, it captures a lot of real shit about where we’re from and how things work,” says Moran. Early on in the film, Camille experiences a bad groin injury from her board, something the girls refer to as being “creditcarded”. “The way we speak in the movie is how we talk all the time,” says Vinberg.

“Jayden [Smith, who plays Vinberg’s love interest] had the hardest time adapting to the way the dialogue was performed, because it’s not something he’s used to.”

Post-Sundance, Skate Kitchen is being spoken about in the same breath as classics such as Dazed and Confused and Larry Clark’s Kids, but for the crew it’s the message of inclusiveness that’s most important. “Girls are coming up to us at film festivals and telling us how much they appreciate it. Guys, too,” says Lovelace. The hope is that the film will inspire more girls to take up skating. “We encourage them to not be afraid to go into parks,” says Russell. “To try things that are usually male-dominated.”

“That’s why The Skate Kitchen is so important,” adds Lovelace. “It opens the door to that dialogue. It gives an opportunity to people who didn’t have a voice; a chance to explore these areas without fear of being ostracised.” She could be referring to the film or the collective themselves: the recipe’s the same.

Skate Kitchen is in UK cinemas from September 28; skatekitchenfilm.com

YSANYA PEREZ

Culture

“We were on our way to skate in a park, and she told us she wanted to do a short film and asked if we knew any other girls that skate,” recalls Moran, now 21. “I knew Dede [Lovelace, 21] and Kabrina [Adams, 25] because I went to high school with them, and I knew the twins [Jules and Brenn Lorenzo, 20] from skating in Chelsea [NYC].”

Add Ajani Russell, 21, to the mix, and the crew was born.

Moselle’s short film That One Day, created for fashion label Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, told a fictionalised story of a girl’s experience at a regular male-dominated skatepark, as seen through the eyes of Vinberg’s character. “We became The Skate Kitchen after that,” says Moran. “When I was young, I used to watch a lot of skate videos featuring girls,” says 20-year-old Vinberg. “And in the comments sections, guys would say, ‘She should be in the kitchen,’ or, ‘That’s a funny-looking kitchen,’ so we called our crew The Skate Kitchen to mock that term.”

Since then, the collective’s feminist approach of love, understanding and inclusivity – they skate with guys – has seen their profile explode.

Vogue heralded them as “New York’s coolest all-girl skate crew”; Nike asked the girls to endorse its first female-only skate shoe; they collaborated with Pharrell on his G-Star RAW campaign, and The New York Times dubbed them “fashion’s favourite girl skateboarders”. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood came knocking, with Moselle taking the concept of her short film and writing it large.

In Skate Kitchen, Vinberg plays Camille, a 18-year-old Long Islander who takes up an Instagram invite to hang out with a female skate crew.

Like That One Day, the film blurs the lines between documentary and fiction, with authentic conversations and language. “Although it’s

THE RED BULLETIN

B U L L EVA R D The Skate Kitchen, clockwise from top left: Dede Lovelace, Jules and Brenn Lorenzo, Ajani Russell, Rachelle Vinberg, Nina Moran and Kabrina Adams

THE RED BULLETIN

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B U L L EVA R D

Borderless art

LIVING IN ELECTRIC DREAMS

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TEAMLAB

TOM GUISE

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? It’s a bit of both. This near-featureless room at the MORI Building Digital Art Museum in Tokyo is filled with projection-mapped light and sound that reacts to people moving around and touching it. The work, by Japanese art collective teamLab, is titled Borderless because the 50 installations flow into one another throughout this 10,000m2 maze of rooms. Forests of lamps flicker on around visitors, iris-covered trampoline-floors dilate when jumped on, and digital flowers even bloom in your teacup at the exhibition café. teamlab.art

THE RED BULLETIN

The immersive 3D exhibits at teamLab Borderless are created by 470 projectors powered by 520 computers

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B U L L EVA R D

Róisín Murphy

B

efore Moloko appeared in 1995, the electronic music scene was just too serious. But then the Sheffield-based duo injected a dash of playfulness, mashing up elements of disco, jazz and funk to create international dance hits such as Sing It Back and The Time Is Now. In 2003, Moloko’s Irish-born singer Róisín Murphy left to embark on a solo career, experiencing success with the 2005 album Ruby Blue and 2007’s Overpowered. And this summer she released four 12-inch singles that brought her love for the dancefloor to the fore. Here, Murphy, 45, lists four tracks that influenced her music.

For more of Murphy's choices, head to redbullradio.com

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“I saw Grace Jones perform in Florence in 2003. She killed it with one spotlight, some steps and a wind machine. She showed that a true performer doesn’t need fireworks; you’re able to change the mood with a small movement. After the gig, a friend took me to her hotel. I wanted to say hi, but [Jones] shouted, ‘Get these people out of here!’ That’s not the way to meet your hero.”

MINA NON CREDERE (1969) “After I released Overpowered, I took a break. My next big project was an EP of covers of Italian songs [2014’s Mi Senti].

My [Italian] partner had played me this song and I loved it.

Mina is perfect. If you watch her TV performances from the 1960s, she's in control of everything: her appearance, voice, songs. Covering this was a big deal – it pushed my voice way out of its comfort zone.”

SONIC YOUTH TEEN AGE RIOT (1988)

FRANK SINATRA SUMMER WIND (1966)

“I saw them play live in Manchester when I was 15.

The band members would throw [bassist] Kim Gordon into the audience over and over again and she kept climbing back onto the stage.

It was so wild and cool. The next day, I went to the record exchange and swapped my U2 records for [Sonic Youth album] Daydream Nation, which includes this song. It changed my life for ever.”

“There’s a video where Sinatra is recording this song with a big orchestra. He’s like, ‘Stop, you weren’t playing that right,’ or, ‘This needs to soften,’ which is so impressive. He’s in control of not just his voice but the context of his voice.

When I’m recording, I’m not passive-aggressive, either; I’m aggressive-aggressive. But that’s important – I need to emotionally connect to what the music is doing.”

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FLORIAN OBKIRCHER

Four tunes that influenced the former Moloko singer’s career

GRACE JONES I’VE DONE IT AGAIN (1981)

GETTY IMAGES

“GRACE JONES BOOTED ME OUT OF HER HOTEL”

EXPERIENCED DRIVER DEPICTED

WHAT AR E YOU BUILD ING FOR ?

B U I LT T H R O U G H E X P E R I E N C E … E AR N E D O N T H E T R A I L

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B U L L EVA R D

Food

NO HUMAN COOKED THIS MEAL The dish pictured was prepared entirely by a mechanical chef.

Welcome to the world’s first robot restaurant

A

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The rotating woks don’t only stir-fry, they self-clean, too

free, all ordered via an electronic kiosk. In fact, the only human in the kitchen is a ‘garnish employee’ who adds your toppings. And probably talks to himself a lot.

With seven woks at work, the kitchen serves as many as 200 perfectly cooked meals an hour. What’s more, the whole set-up has no need for a dishwasher, because it cleans itself. It does this using less than 1.1 litres of water a minute, which the founders claim is 80 per cent more water-efficient than your average home dishwasher. spyce.com THE RED BULLETIN

TOM GUISE

Once you’ve ordered your food at the kiosk, the ingredients are mechanically chosen and cooked. Within three minutes, a perfect dish is served to you

CHRIS SANCHEZ

restaurant with no visible kitchen staff is usually a bad sign, but at Spyce in Boston it may be the shape of things to come.

Spyce’s fully robotic kitchen prepares meals from scratch and delivers them in less than three minutes, for just US$7.50 (around £6) a plate.

The restaurant is the brainchild of four MIT graduates tired of paying through the nose for a decent takeaway lunch. Michael Farid, Brady Knight, Luke Schlueter and Kale Rogers believed there had to be a more efficient cooking process, so they built the prototype in their fraternity basement. It works by feeding ingredients from a series of hoppers into a constantly tumbling induction wok, evenly searing the food at the optimum temperature before delivering it to the bowl.

The quality of the cooking system was so impressive, it drew the attention of Michelin-starred chef Daniel Boulud, who devised a series of salads, stir-fries, curries and grain dishes for their menu, available in seven customisable options including vegan and gluten-

B U L L EVA R D

Motobot

RIDE OF THE ROBOTS Meet the droid built to defeat one of the world’s greatest motorcycle racers

A

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at 1m 57.504s. The Italian racing legend, with almost 30 years’ experience to draw from, did it in 1m 25.740s – a cool 32 seconds quicker.

The robot uprising abated, Yamaha plans to continue to advancing Motobot’s capabilities with the aim of developing ridersupport technology for its consumer line of bikes. Or, as Motobot might describe it, softening us up for the inevitable judgement day. global.yamaha-motor.com

The race of things to come: Motobot can navigate a circuit at 200kph

TOM GUISE

1000cc Yamaha YZF-R1M).

Beneath its carbon-fibre skin are actuators for operating the bike’s steering, throttle, clutch, brakes and gearshift pedal, as well as trackrecognition sensors and a machine-learning brain for honing its driving line and lap times. In its first year, the objective was merely to drive in a straight line at 100kph.

Two years on, it was lapping tracks at 200kph, with its ambition sensor focused on exceeding human capability.

By the end of 2017, Motobot finally got to do what it was created for: race Rossi. At California’s Thunderhill Raceway Park, the machine clocked a lap

YAMAHA MOTOR

s AI and robotics advance, the fear that machines will one day rise up to supersede us becomes ever more legitimate. This concern is only fuelled by a creation such as Yamaha’s Motorbot – built to out-race a human on a motorcycle. And not just any human: nine-time MotoGP World Champion Valentino Rossi. It speaks, too, with a challenge for Rossi: “I was created to surpass you. I’m improving my skills every day.”

At least it’s honest. And in the three years since making its debut at the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show, Motorbot’s abilities have indeed grown.

Unlike other AI vehicle projects, Yamaha’s plan wasn’t to build a self-driving bike, but a humanoid robot to pilot an unmodified motorcycle (in this case, a

THE RED BULLETIN

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“ I used to be scared of singing” Lauded by fellow artists and music critics alike, ANNA CALVI takes her distinctive brand of rock to the next level on her new album, Hunter. Here, she tells us how she overcame crippling shyness to emerge as a singer, and why anger is a useful emotion Words FLORIAN OBKIRCHER Photography MAISIE COUSINS

On stage, Anna Calvi is a force of nature, pacing around, shredding her guitar, switching between powerful operatic singing and ear-splitting shouts. She saunters down the catwalk-like stage, then stops, making direct eye contact with an audience member. Calvi walks gradually closer, eyes still locked, until she’s on her knees, her forehead pressed against theirs, while still playing a wild and wheezing guitar solo. In that moment, and many others during this London gig, it’s clear what makes Calvi stand out from her musical peers, and why she now counts Nick Cave and Brian Eno among her fans.

Off stage, by contrast, the two-time Mercury Prize nominee and former member of the judging panel is calm and softly spoken. But her conviction is no less present. As she sips tea, smiling occasionally, she talks about her third album, Hunter, a bold and noisy rock record on which the 37-year-old from Twickenham explores sexuality and breaking the laws of gender conformity…

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the red bulletin: Your music career began in 2008, and since then you’ve built a reputation as one of the best and most inventive guitarists around.

How did you first fall in love with the instrument? anna calvi: I started playing the guitar when I was eight years old. I was a very shy child and it was a way of having a voice. It gave me an identity I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Having witnessed your wild live show, that comes as some surprise...

Actually, until my mid-twenties I was quite phobic about singing. I wouldn’t sing at all, ever – not even in the shower.

Why was that?

I just didn’t think I’d be able to do it, because my speaking voice is very quiet.

Then I thought that it must feel so liberating to use your voice that way, and I was curious – could I do it?

So you started as some form of personal therapy?

Yeah, like really letting go. If you’re introverted, you’re holding in a lot of stuff and you need to find an outlet,

Calvi’s wild stage performances have boosted her growing reputation as a must-see live artist

“If you’re holding stuff in, you need to find an outlet – for me, it was singing”

hair.” Is that a nod to the idea that we can be both hunter and hunted?

Yes, we like to put labels on things, but actually the world isn’t like that. I felt very restricted by what a woman is meant to be and how they’re depicted in culture, having to be perfect and passive. And if they want to be powerful, to be heard, they have to behave like men. I imagine how useful it would be for a young version of me to see a more realistic depiction of a woman going out into the world and hunting for whatever pleasure she wants, without any shame. Someone who’s the protagonist in her own story.

Calvi: “I wanted the music on this album to feel really wild; for the voice and guitar to be this raw, unleashed energy”

whatever it is. For me, singing was how I let go of all that energy.

Do you remember the moment you tried it for the first time?

I was at my parents’ house and they were getting the floors done, so there was no furniture. There was this natural reverb, so I just very quietly started humming to myself. I thought, “Maybe there’s something I could work with.” That was the start of me trying to become a singer.

How do you go from not singing at all to being praised for your operatic skills?

I just practised for hours and hours and listened to singers I loved, like Nina Simone and David Bowie.

How do you practise?

When you train your voice, you go through different stages. First of all, you need to strengthen your voice like a muscle. It’s like in football: you need to be able to run around the pitch without being out of breath. And then it’s about learning techniques you can forget about later, but that allow you to be freer in your voice. And then more recently, for my new record, I experimented with singing higher, because previously I always used the low, darker tones of my voice. There’s something about singing high and loud 30

that feels even more freeing. And because it’s a record about wanting to be free from any restraint and be liberated in whatever way, the subject matter made it feel thematically right to sing higher.

How do you translate a desire for liberation into an album?

I wanted the music on this record to feel like freedom, to feel really wild; for the voice and the guitar to be this raw, unleashed energy that won’t be contained. There are a lot of songs that imagine a more utopian way of experiencing the world as a queer person. There are moments where I wanted to sound really beautiful.

There’s this contrast between very loud, primal, brutal sounds and moments that are meant to feel more intimate and vulnerable.

In the song Hunter, you sing: “I dressed myself in leathers, with flowers in my

“This record is about wanting to be free”

Why do you think so many people still cling to old gender stereotypes?

I think things are changing gradually, but it’s like the tide: you make some progress and then things go back a bit. But I feel we’re going in the right direction. A lot of the problem is that the people who have the power, who decide what gets shown – in the film industry, for instance – are all white men. Until the people at the top represent a wider spectrum of society, we’re going to have the same problems.

Conservative political parties are on the rise across Europe – what’s your take on the current situation?

It’s a weird combination of things being really positive and really negative at the same time. On the one hand, you have these extreme caricatures of the most toxic kinds of masculinity. But on the other, you now have young people who don’t want to live by the same gender binary, because it’s much easier to be a queer person than it has ever been.

What’s hopeful is that it feels like young people now are way more aware of politics and seem more clued-up and liberal than they’ve been in a long time.

Why is that, do you think?

I imagine it must be the internet. They have access to the world and can connect with like-minded people in a way that wasn’t possible in the 1990s. Back then, women had to show they were one of the boys and that they were fine going to a strip club. That was their way of coping, whereas now it’s OK to be angry that things aren’t right. That’s really important.

There’s always this attitude towards the angry woman: “Oh God, shut up!” But anger is an important and essential part of change – you have to be angry that things aren’t progressing to have the energy to do something different.

Hunter is out now; annacalvi.com THE RED BULLETIN

The incredible good fortune

As he makes the transition from small-screen heartthrob to legit movie star, this Scottish actor isn’t basking in the limelight. He’s quietly rallying fans to change the world – and, in the process, their own lives

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EDITOR XX

The picture with the car seems like an afterthought, because the photoshoot has wrapped. Hands have been shaken, cheeks kissed, thank-yous imparted, empty drinks cans crushed and chucked into a plastic bag. The stylist, the groomer, the publicist, the photographer and his three assistants, the friend-slash-business partner and the videographer have all picked their way down the slippery and bulbous sandstone that juts from the spine of California’s Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu, to the lot where actor Sam Heughan is changing out of sweaty outdoor apparel in a big trailer.

Heughan – or probably his publicist – would like a quick shot of him with the Audi R8 Spyder on loan for the duration of his stay in Los Angeles.

Afterwards, Heughan will get behind the wheel, with his friend-slash-business partner riding shotgun, and drive the £120,000 supercar – the kind Tony Stark owns in Iron Man 2 – down around 8km of switchbacks on Corral Canyon Road, before turning left onto the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, and heading for Santa Monica for some hard-earned downtime.

ILLUSTRATOR

Words LEAH FLICKINGER Photography STEVEN LIPPMANN

of Sam Heughan

I

n the picture Heughan posts the day after the Malibu photoshoot, the 1.9m-tall actor stands on the driver’s side in a slightly rumpled grey denim shirt and jeans, gazing into the distance through tortoiseshell Garrett Leight sunglasses. The late-July sky is an astounding blue, you can see the marine layer rising off the Pacific, and four desiccated stalks of chaparral yucca stand stiffly behind him as if they couldn’t get out of the way in time.

The resulting social media post will garner hundreds of thousands of comments, likes and retweets. Heughan’s Outlander co-star Caitriona Balfe will rib him on Twitter with the hashtag #grannydriver. Websites and blogs will rush out stories about their ensuing Twitter conversation.

Fans will swoon at the adorableness of it all.

Heughan is OK with all this, even though it’s a level of attention he didn’t sign up for. Because a thing you need to know about Sam Heughan is that he believes he’s very lucky. In fact, he almost can’t believe how lucky (“You start looking over your shoulder,” he says). It’s not that he doesn’t work hard: he endured years of rejection before his big break, he turns himself inside out for every role, and the demands on his time are more intense than ever. But still. He’s lucky he got cast in Outlander, which changed his life: the scripts, the offers, the Audi waiting for him in any city he visits. He’s lucky he has amazing fans – people really listen to him. And he’s lucky he was brought up in such an idyllic part of the world.

In Google’s satellite view, the village of New Galloway in south-west Scotland, where Heughan grew up, looks like a tiny dot in a big green sea of forest. Heughan and his older brother Cirdan were raised by their artist mother Chrissie. His father was not in the picture for most of the life Heughan remembers – he prefers not to discuss this – but it was a tight-knit, supportive community, the kind where doors were left unlocked and there was always

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“You have to work out a get-together with music and food and revelry. The family home was a restored outbuilding near the ruins of Kenmure Castle, just over a kilometre south of town. Chrissie made ends meet with a number of jobs, but Heughan mostly remembers her dedication to her art. “She instilled in me how tough it would be as an artist,” he says. “How difficult it is to make a career out of it. Probably my work ethic as well; that you have to work hard to get something.”

The young Heughan had a wild imagination and was awestruck when Highlander re-enactment groups came through town in summer. “I was like, ‘This is what they do every day! They just fight and pretend to be soldiers!’” he says. “It was kind of cool.” There’s an anecdote that appears in almost every story about Heughan, to the point where it now sounds almost mythical: as a child, he would scramble among the crumbling ruins pretending to be one of King Arthur’s knights or Robert the Bruce – the 14th-century King of Scots and national hero – brandishing a sword he’d hammered together from scraps of wood.

Heughan was still years away from hunk status and his own oversized Highlander alter-ego. Back then, he wore chunky glasses with thick lenses – “I had very bad eyesight. Still do” – and considered himself “slightly overweight”. It was also around this time that he thought it would be cool to be a magician when he grew up. “I used to go to these magic shops and buy decks of cards and try to learn tricks.” But whenever there was a gathering, Chrissie would stand him up and make him perform, which he didn’t like. “I hated the attention,” he says.

The family moved to Edinburgh when Heughan was 12, and he attended a Steiner school, where qualities such as individuality and social consciousness are nurtured equally alongside academic achievement.

He also got involved in the city’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, first behind the scenes and then on stage.

After graduating from high school, Heughan indulged a few years of wanderlust before auditioning for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. He got in on his second attempt and was still a student when, in 2003, he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in David Greig’s play Outlying Islands. It was another 10 years before he would be cast in Outlander, following a steady string of small movies and TV roles, a stint as Batman in a touring production, and several pilot seasons in Los Angeles.

In 2013, Heughan returned home after spending all his money, wondering how much longer he could live out of a duffel bag, not knowing where his next pay cheque would come from. Just weeks before being cast in Outlander, he found himself adrift.

What did he want in life? Did he want a family?

Would he need to work in a bar again? Could he do this for the rest of his life?

AIMEE SPINKS/STARZ/SONY PICTURES TELEVISION

The 38-year-old Scottish actor is best known as kiltwearing, honour-defending, auburn-haired Highland warrior Jamie Fraser in Outlander, the hit TV series based on the wildly popular history/fantasy/ romance novels by Diana Gabaldon. The show has launched a million thirsty Pinterest boards devoted to Heughan’s dazzling blue eyes, his impossible cheekbones, his cleft chin, his knees, his chiselled torso, his hands, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. Then there’s the NSFW fan fiction…

Now, with several high-profile new film roles, Heughan is rapidly morphing from cult icon to mainstream star – all the time spearheading an unlikely passion project designed to transform people’s lives. And it seems to be working.

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who you are and what you stand for”

A

week before the Malibu car photo, Heughan is in the light-filled lobby of a hotel in SoHo, New York, on a baking July afternoon. In the heat, his real-life brownish-blondish hair is starting to hint at unruliness. He’s relaxed once settled in the hotel’s outdoor courtyard, leaning back in his chair and pulling a knee up to his chest, and never once checking his phone. He considers questions carefully, answering in long sentences and stifling occasional yawns, having flown in from Glasgow the day before, shortly after the end of filming for Season Four of Outlander, due for broadcast in November. “There was a wrap party on Saturday,” Heughan says, power-eating a protein bar in a way that suggests he missed lunch. “It was fun, but I was exhausted.”

It’s a lot of work, being this lucky. Tomorrow is day one of back-to-back interviews for his first major feature film, The Spy Who Dumped Me, which also stars Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon. In a few days Heughan will fly to Los Angeles, where, among other things, he will talk to more journalists, appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, walk the red carpet at the film premiere, and carve out regular gym time to bulk up – “I’m trying to get as big as possible” – for

Leader of men: Sam Heughan plays Highland warrior Jamie Fraser in the new series of Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon THE RED BULLETIN

his next movie, Bloodshot, based on the best-selling Valiant comic, with Vin Diesel.

Heughan didn’t get into acting for the endless press junkets, the constant attention, the talking about it all. The way he saw it, it would be an escape, a chance to embody someone else. “You’re hiding behind a character,” he says. “You’re not yourself.”

(The real Sam Heughan is quite boring, according to Sam Heughan. When he looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see what all the fuss is about.)

“It’s funny,” he says. “Acting is probably five per cent of the job. Doing the actual thing you want to do is the smallest part. Sometimes you wish, ‘God, I just want to do my job and go home and switch off.’”

Off-screen, he’s passionate about fitness and the outdoors and is a natural athlete. Heughan has numerous marathons and triathlons under his belt, and has relied on disciplines including Muay Thai, Krav Maga, CrossFit and weightlifting to build muscle. He gets great satisfaction from setting goals and pushing himself, and from the enormous effort he puts into preparing his body for his screen projects. And as his career has developed, Heughan has thought a lot about what that means. When you’re this lucky, you have a responsibility, right?

“You have to work out how you want to present yourself,” he says. “Who are you? What do you stand for?” For Heughan, this began to crystallise about eight years ago. He was on a celebrity running team that supported Bloodwise, a leukaemia and lymphoma charity. During a gala fundraiser at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Heughan was blown away by the resilience of some of the kids with cancer who shared their stories. “That kind of strength is something I would love to have,” he says. He now serves as president of Bloodwise Scotland.

Another epiphany came when he moved back to Scotland in 2013 to shoot Outlander (he’d been living in London for a decade or so). “I fell in love again with the country that I was born and brought up in,” Heughan says, “and found it so rewarding to climb and hike.” He started posting snippets of his workouts and sharing his goals and his efforts to bag Munros – Scottish peaks of 3,000ft (914m) or higher. Fans ate it up and pledged money to support Bloodwise.

Buoyed by his enthusiasm, many also started pushing themselves to bag their own figurative “peaks.”

Heughan realised he had an opportunity not only to do something special for fans, but also to rally them to make a difference. An opportunity to take all the attention that was focused on him and redirect it towards a greater good. By late 2015, along with his Glasgow-based trainer John Valbonesi, he had formalised the idea for My Peak Challenge, a programme that empowers participants to set a goal – fitness or otherwise – and get the support to achieve it while raising money for charity.

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”I dream of an escape place with

When he looks in the mirror, Heughan says he “can't see what all the fuss is about”

a canoe somewhere”

A

lthough their numbers may be small

by Cumberbitch or Belieber standards, Heughligans are a loyal and passionate group. And not just because of the eye candy. “He’s a handsome fella, I’m not gonna lie,” says Kim Lovelady, 46, the co-founder of the official Heughan’s Heughligans fan page, which has around 60,000 Facebook followers (mostly women).

“From the day he was cast as Jamie, he just seemed genuine and kind,” says Lovelady, who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. “He wanted to do right by longtime Outlander book fans, to get the character right. You can tell he has a good soul.”

Thousands of Heughligans from around the world have helped transform his casual call to action into a global movement. To date, My Peak Challenge has around 10,000 active members in 80 countries, has raised £800,000, and was able to fully fund a clinical research trial in partnership with Bloodwise.

Half of the £90 annual membership fee goes straight to Bloodwise, as well as hospice organisation Marie Curie. Plus, My Peak Challenge raised enough money last year to underwrite the first full-time director for Cahonas Scotland, an organisation that educates people about testicular cancer – a disease that has directly affected Heughan’s family. (My Peak Challenge members also raise money independently for these and other personal causes; the Heughligans and additional Outlanderrelated fan communities do their own fundraisers through merchandise sales and other campaigns.)

In return, My Peak Challenge participants receive a customisable 12-month daily training plan, complete with step-by-step exercise tutorials and regular motivational videos starring Heughan.

There’s an extensive recipe collection from expert nutritionists, and all those who sign up to the service also get access to a private Facebook group where members of staff at My Peak Challenge help troubleshoot issues, and fellow Peakers give virtual high fives and provide accountability.

Heughan frequently pops in. “I’m there pretty much every day, even if I’m not commenting,” he says. Last year, there was an organised gathering in Scotland, with roughly 1,000 Peakers from all over the world paying their own way to get to Glasgow for a weekend of hiking, group training, and a formal gala where they had the opportunity to meet Heughan himself. Tickets for the weekend sold out in seven minutes.

Plans for an event next year are in the works.

Heughan could easily have lent his name to any number of organisations doing good work.

The path he has chosen is exponentially harder and will only succeed if he can continue to fully commit. He still handles his own social media accounts (“It’s manageable at the moment,” he THE RED BULLETIN

says). But leveraging his social platform does come with downsides – trolls, for one. “People have dug into the private lives of myself or loved ones or people I know,” Heughan reveals. “I feel that’s invasive. Pretty horrific, actually.” However, at the same time, the actor knows there would be no My Peak Challenge without Twitter, and he says the majority of fans are “amazing.”

H

eughan has no problem admitting he’s prepared to work in a bar again “if it all comes crashing down”. But with his acting career going from strength to strength, that seems unlikely. His name is doing the rounds as a possible James Bond, his Instagram account has now attracted more than a million followers and is growing by thousands each day, and he has his own line of clothing for Barbour.

In 2017, readers of Hollywood gossip blog Just Jared ranked Heughan their favourite actor of the year, ahead of the likes of Brad Pitt, Jamie Dornan and George Clooney, which is pretty remarkable considering that Heughan is still not regarded as a household name. It seems it won’t be long.

His star is clearly still in the ascendancy. But in the meantime there’s a My Peak Challenge Spring Gala to organise, ambitious membership goals to hit (15,000 for 2019; 100,000 by 2025), and an ambassador scheme to implement. Heughan would like the work of My Peak Challenge to branch out into educational initiatives, and to bring in more charities so that members have a wider range of choices where to direct their money. There’s also a fledgling side business called the Great Glen Company, which will make and sell products tied to his Scottish identity, such as a limited-edition whisky and a porridge (Heughan is passionate about both).

Then there’s the Bloodshot movie, a possible second film he’s excited about (“Touch wood!”) but can’t discuss, and more scripts and offers. Plus at least two more seasons as Jamie Fraser. And after Outlander? “That’s the question,” Heughan says.

“What’s it going to be?”

This is, of course, unknowable right now. And even as his fanbase keeps growing, and the roles and opportunities keep coming, Heughan is drawn to the simpler stuff. He’s eager to get back to his first love, theatre. A family would be nice. And, at some point, “A real time-out. I dream of a little place on the water or on a loch in Scotland. An escape place with a canoe somewhere.”

And what would Heughan do if it all came crashing down? “I’d like to be remembered as someone who made a difference and left the world a better place,” he replies. “And was also a reasonably good actor.”

Season Three of Outlander is out now; amazon.co.uk 37

The hunt for freedom

The job, the home, the mobile phone, the sense of security… former teacher MIRIAM LANCEWOOD gave it all up and shrank her life down to whatever she could carry in a 25kg rucksack.

The Dutchwoman and her husband have now lived in the wilderness for eight years, and have found what we’re all seeking: happiness, time, and a cure-all that doesn’t cost a penny Words WALTRAUD HABLE Photography JULIE GLASSBERG

Now a hunter-gatherer, Lancewood has learnt how to kill wild animals

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Changed priorities: Lancewood gathers firewood five times a day

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THE RED BULLETIN

iriam Lancewood has no reason to hide. But, should she so choose, she could drop off the radar in an instant and disappear into the Rhodopes, the mountain range in southern Bulgaria that she calls home. The 1.6m-tall Dutchwoman knows exactly how to move around without leaving a trace, skills that she learnt from the land.

Lancewood outwits wild animals that pick up her scent by climbing into the trees. “That way, they can no longer get wind of my scent, but I can target them from above.” And she gathers dry willow or pine for her daily fire.

“They’re denser than other woods, so I can cook over an open flame without giving off too much smoke.”

Lancewood, 34, has lived mostly in the great outdoors for eight years.

She’s never without a bow and arrow – or her husband Peter, a grey-haired man some 30 years her senior. The two of them are never in one place for long. And, at the godforsaken altitudes they frequent, no one asks them for a camping permit. The couple have now covered about 5,000km together.

Lancewood is a former PE teacher from a small town in eastern Holland; he grew up on a sheep farm in New Zealand and is a philosophy lecturer and trained chef. The two of them met while travelling in India, and one thing led to another. They trekked around the Himalayas, then Lancewood went home to New Zealand with Peter and tried to make a life for herself. On the surface, THE RED BULLETIN

everything was fine: she had a teaching job, friends, a roof over her head. But inside she was in turmoil.

“It took me four years of studying to realise that I didn’t enjoy teaching or working with children,” she says.

“And I didn’t even like competitive sport, although I’d trained to compete in the pole vault at the Olympics. I felt like a failure.”

The pressure of maintaining a routine that didn’t feel right was unbearable. She yearned for freedom. “But I couldn’t even define what freedom was. And how would I? None of us grows up in freedom.

We’re like budgies in a cage, not eagles in the air. All I knew was that I’d obviously lost my backbone due to all the comfort I was surrounded by.” Peter had similar thoughts. So, in 2010, they jacked it all in, sold their possessions and moved to the mountains on New Zealand’s South Island for seven years. Now, they’re exploring Europe. Later this year they’ll head to Australia.

No job, no address, no running water, no toilet, no bed, no car, no mobile phone. But for every thing Lancewood has given up, she says, she’s received something; her watch is gone, but she now has time. The sale of her car unleashed a previously

hidden strength of will to get wherever she wants to go on foot. She swapped four walls for a green living room with no start or end. But she still has to work for it: Lancewood carries 25kg of kit. “I’m the younger, fitter one,” she says. Peter, who can feel every one of his 64 years in his hips and knees, lugs a 15kg rucksack.

They carry cooking utensils, a penknife, a change of clothes, a tent and a sleeping bag. If it rains for days on end or gets really cold, they seek shelter in empty huts. “But I can’t put up with enclosed spaces for long. You can’t hear the birds or the wind.” The couple don’t own sturdy shoes; they wear open-toed hiking sandals in both summer and winter. “If we wore socks or hiking boots, they’d always be wet. Your feet dry out more quickly in sandals.”

And if it gets really cold in the winter, she just steps into a stream. The temperature of running water is always above freezing, at least.

Lancewood doesn’t have filthy fingernails or missing teeth, or any visible signs of having abandoned civilisation. Though it has been six months since her last hot shower, she smells as fresh as a daisy. She could easily be the poster girl for some sportswear manufacturer. She has dazzling green eyes. Her legs are clean-shaven. Her teeth are pearly white. If she runs out of toothpaste, she makes do with ash.

And when she couldn’t get rid of her dandruff during her first weeks in the great outdoors, she washed her hair in her own urine. “I’d discovered that tip in an old book of medicine,” Lancewood says. “It was revolting.

I think that’s when I finally jettisoned the last of my social mores.” And her dandruff never came back.

Lancewood positively exudes health and strength. “Scaling down my possessions and hunting have changed me,” she says, putting down her hunting bow to fish an arrow from her rucksack. “My life outdoors has made me physically stronger.”

She stretches the bow and narrows her eyes in concentration, her biceps quivering as they tense. “I think that very thing is the key to happiness:

Washing her hair in her own urine solved her dandruff problem 41

The pair have covered 5,000km in the wild and are heading for Australia

Lancewood was vegetarian, but her new life changed her eating habits. ”I now crave wild meat,” she says

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physical strength dispels fear, and the lack of fear in turn creates space for happiness and freedom.”

Lancewood used to be a vegetarian, but her new life rapidly changed her eating habits. When she withdrew to the wilderness in New Zealand and the first winter depleted her strength and supplies, she set her sights on catching an opossum, an animal seen as a pest in New Zealand. Weeks would pass before she succeeded.

Lancewood taught herself to read tracks and imitate rutting noises.

“Eventually I laid a trap,” she says.

“In those early days I’d never have hit an opossum with my bow and arrow or hunting rifle. My attempt to cut off my catch’s head with an axe went disastrously wrong. I cried for hours because the thing suffered so badly.

And when it was finally dead, I had to skin it. It was a bloody, hairy mess.

“No normal person would have liked [eating] it,” she continues. “It would have been much too tough and the taste too intense. But I didn’t know any different. Now I have a real craving for wild meat. It gives you so much more energy than the watery rubbish we get in village shops when we pass through.”

Lancewood hunts and Peter cooks.

Hares, wild goats and birds are all dismembered with her mini-saw and the fold-out blade of her 20-year-old Swiss army knife; she doesn’t have special tools. And nothing is wasted.

“I’ve never got sick from something I’ve hunted myself,” she says. A doctor friend regularly stocks up their firstaid kit. “We often get colds in Europe where we come across people every other day,” Lancewood says. “When we lived in isolation in New Zealand, we were totally healthy.”

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VSSLGEAR.com

W

hen Lancewood first lived in the wilderness, her biggest problem was an unexpected one: boredom. “I didn’t miss the city.

But I couldn’t just sit there doing nothing.” The books they’d taken with them were read and reread.

Once Lancewood had cleared her sleeping place of stones, she’d frantically look around for something to do. “There’s constantly stuff to do in the wild – you have to collect firewood five times a day, wash the dishes and clothes in the river – but I felt bored and unbalanced.

The problem was I had no aims or future. It was like I was walking through a fog, and that was scary.”

The fog lifted as her senses gradually heightened. “When I look at the mountains now, they’re not boring. I don’t just take in their outer form; now I notice their colour and mood, too. I can smell the rain coming. I can tell when an animal is watching me. I can hear the wind in the trees.” This may sound hippyish, but Lancewood doesn’t like the comparison. “The nomadic lifestyle is more like that of a top sportsperson.

It’s designed to keep the body fit – otherwise you won’t hack it.”

She has also learnt the value of rest. “Sleep is an underrated

panacea,” Lancewood says. After weeks in the wilderness, she began to notice how much her energy levels increased if she slept for 10 or 12 hours. “I wonder how much people spend on so-called superfoods. They sleep for five hours, mask their fatigue with caffeine, and then think healthy eating will take care of the rest. My advice is to go to bed early – you’ll be amazed. Problems are often just down to a chronic lack of sleep.”

Though she hasn’t had to see a doctor in years, Lancewood knows nature can’t cure everything. “I might live like some primitive beast, but I’m not crazy. If either of us got sick, of course we’d go and see a doctor.

We’ve got money set aside for that.”

Every few weeks, she and Peter go to a town with their bank card to stock up on supplies and contact their families. They spend about €3,000 (£2,700) a year on food, clothes and hiking gear. They hitchhike rather than pay train or bus fares. And they make money from the interest on

”I’ve found my place and it’s here in nature”

Adapting to life in the wild has taught her lots of things – chiefly, how to stay alive

their savings. Peter sold his worldly goods years ago and stashed away €60,000 (£54,000). The sum has remained pretty constant ever since.

“We have money,” he says. “We just want to spend as little of it as possible.” As far as Lancewood is concerned, money means one thing: time. “If I buy an expensive car, I have to slave away in a job for years to pay it off. But if I don’t spend the money in the first place, I have it for other things, like living.” Which is why she’s happy to give up comforts such as a hot shower or a clean toilet.

“You don’t have to be a millionaire to give up work,” she says. “Security can have the opposite effect. I often see beautiful houses that are empty because their owners are at work to pay for them. If I had to pay off loan instalments, I’d be worried about missing a payment.” If you stop looking for security, Lancewood says, you might get a chance to find out what freedom is. For her, it means having all the time in the world and getting to know nature.

If Peter should ever become less physically able, they’d give up on their current life. “We’d look for somewhere we could stay put, but it would still be somewhere out in nature,” says Lancewood. Peter nods and says he’d think about getting a donkey so that he wouldn’t have to carry his stuff on long treks.

But they take care of problems as and when they arise, not before.

That’s Lancewood’s motto. “Fear is contagious. Of course I get scared, like during really bad storms when lightning could strike at any minute,” she says. “But I’m also aware that fear passes as quickly as it comes, as long as you don’t feed it with thoughts to fan the flames.”

Lancewood has one foot in the past and the other in the here and now. You can talk to her about tanning animal hides, but she can also discuss artificial intelligence.

“I’ve found my place and it’s here in nature,” she says. “It’s like roots are growing from the soles of my feet.”

And then Lancewood is off again, almost silently, with her bow and arrow slung over her shoulder.

A few seconds later she’s out of sight, swallowed up by the woods.

Watch Series Seven of Ben Fogle: New Lives in The Wild on Channel 5; channel5.com 44

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Track cycling World Champion AZIZUL AWANG on…

TURNING WEAKNESS INTO STRENGTH Malaysia’s first Olympic medallist in cycling started out as a kid racing in the backstreets. But some saw his lack of height and power as a barrier to success. Here’s how the ‘Pocket Rocketman’ proved them wrong

2 Don’t give up the fight

I was leading the 2011 World Cup series in Manchester when a Spanish rider crashed into me. I came around lying on the track, got back on my bike and rode the last 100m, despite the pain. Then I looked down and saw a 15cm splinter piercing my calf – I thought I was hallucinating from concussion! I had surgery and did rehab and physio in Malaysia. It was so hard starting again after three months off the bike. But with the support of my family and coach, I fought my way back.

3 Focus on the future

Winning gold in the keirin at the 2017 World Championships meant a lot to me. It’s a very special race; even if you’re on good form, you can’t win without a plan. I failed many times. When you don’t win a race, it’s difficult, but you have to stay hungry. Thomas Edison failed 99 times, and the 100th time he invented the light bulb. The best piece of racing advice I’ve ever had is: “Give everything, leave nothing.”

4 Work hard, then work harder Medal-winner, father-of-two, national hero… Awang has achieved so much by the age of 30 – but he won’t rest until he’s tasted victory at Tokyo 2020

1 Use your disadvantages In my first World Cup final, in Melbourne in 2008, I was the smallest rider, using the smallest gear – but I beat them all” AZIZUL AWANG

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When I started out, people doubted me because of my physical size. I took that as a challenge and looked for ways to overcome the disadvantage. I found that leg speed is my speciality, so I used it to counter the power and strength of the big guys. I use a higher RPM in the race, around 160. In training, with a higher gear, I can even hit 200 for short sprints [more than three complete revolutions a second, under load].

In my first World Cup final, in Melbourne in 2008, I was the smallest rider, using the smallest gear – but I beat them all.

The level has risen so much since Rio that it’ll take more to win Olympic gold in the keirin at Tokyo 2020. I’m trying to increase my muscle mass – strength plus speed will mean more power on the bike.

My half-squat was around 150-160kg, while other world-class sprinters do at least 200kg. So it’s time to push further.

My coach says, “Train hard and race easy.”

5 See the track as a playground

It can get really intense in high-level competition, and I see most of my rivals getting stressed and expending a lot of energy on that. For me, after I’ve trained really hard, the big race is the time to enjoy myself. When I step onto the track, I’m in my playground.

Azizul Awang is a Rapha rider; rapha.cc Interview MATT RAY Photography BAKRI HAFIZ HISHAM THE RED BULLETIN

Words MARK BAILEY Photography RICK GUEST

The Aqua Man

No one can get close to ADAM PEATY in the pool. The British breaststroke specialist does things mere mortals shouldn’t be able to do, breaking records and amassing silverware at a pace few athletes could ever hope to match.

The 23-year-old is clear on why he’s able to leave the pack behind: he’s sought out his biggest strength. And made it a weapon

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t a private pool in London’s Canary Wharf, Adam Peaty is scudding through the water like a human torpedo. For most swimmers, the breaststroke is a lazy paddle deployed at beaches and pool parties, but Peaty has weaponised the style. His size 12 feet and hyper-flexible legs thrash like whirling propellers, while his 38cm biceps and 117cm chest pump waves past his body with ruthless, mechanised power.

Up close, it’s a devastating spectacle of athletic aggression. But Peaty’s physical strength is matched by an equally potent mental game-plan: to identify your best talent, then push it to new limits. That’s why his left arm is tattooed with images of a roaring lion and Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea: warrior-like symbols that represent his fearless hunt for world domination and sporting immortality.

Peaty is the Usain Bolt of the swimming world – a superhuman talent whose record-shattering speeds are redefining the limits of human potential. The Olympic 100m breaststroke champion and winner

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“In the pool, it’s war.

You get into this gladiator mindset – and I love it”

Peaty was scared of having a bath as a child – his brothers had told him sharks swam up through the plughole

“At the Olympics, I got a massive adrenalin rush, 52

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of five world titles, he has already broken the world record for the 100m breaststroke four times, most recently at the European Championships in August, when he produced a stunning new record time of 57.10s. He has now made more time gains in just over three years than all other athletes had managed in the previous nine. Amazingly, Peaty’s winning margins are double those of Bolt at his recordbreaking peak (see page 57). The 23-year-old boasts the 12 fastest 100m times in history and hasn’t lost in the event in four years. Not content with dominating his signature 100m event, he has also slashed the 50m breaststroke record (now 25.95s) four times.

“For the first 50m of a 100m race, you feel like you’re flying,” explains Peaty, pausing for a rest, his chest still heaving from the effort. “At the Olympics, I got a massive adrenalin rush that delayed the pain, and then, oh my God, it hit me.

But in the World Championships it was like someone was crushing my legs and taking a crowbar to my biceps, triceps and forearms. I’m used to pain, because I go through it every day. But if a normal person experienced that volume of lactic acid [the substance released into your bloodstream during intense exercise, which triggers burning pain] they would pretty much die because their body isn’t used to flushing it out.”

N but then the pain hit” THE RED BULLETIN

obody could have predicted Peaty’s success. Growing up in Uttoxeter, Staffordshire, the youngest of four, he was terrified of water. “My brothers told me sharks could swim through the plughole, so I hated even having a bath,” he recalls. “My first memory of swimming was just trying not to drown. But I started to mess around with my mates and enjoy it.”

Before succeeding as a swimmer, though, Peaty had to abandon his big childhood dream. “I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” he says. “I was obsessed with speed and history, and I loved World War II flight battles. I wanted to shift all that into a career. But I’m too tall [1.9m] to be a pilot, so I would have maybe joined the Royal Marines.”

However, by broadening his perspective and keeping his mind open to new ideas, Peaty found a way to channel his military ambitions into sport.

“Swimming has a lot of similarities: speed, selfimprovement, discipline. And, just like in the military, I get to push my limits every day.”

Peaty wasn’t blessed with talent in every sport.

Ask him why he got into swimming and he laughs, “I wasn’t good at anything else.” He liked running, but wasn’t especially fast. “I’m all or nothing,” he says.

“If I’m not the best, I won’t carry on. It was the same 53

“Every day, I think to myself, ‘This meal, workout or decision will make me faster or slower.’ I always choose faster”

with running or playing Monopoly: if I lost, I would wipe the board. But when you find something you’re good at, you can use that drive in a positive way.”

Even within the swimming world, it took Peaty a while to identify his talents. When he had a trial at the City of Derby Swimming Club, coach Mel Marshall was appalled: “She wanted to chuck me out of the pool because my freestyle technique was so bad.”

But when Marshall saw him swim breaststroke, she thought, “Bloody hell, this kid is good.” It was a pivotal moment: Peaty realised he needed to work with his genuine strengths, not chase empty dreams.

“You have to weigh up your options and choose your path. I wouldn’t be good at other strokes.

Breaststroke is my forte, so I put everything into that.”

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Asked why he got into swimming, Peaty says, “I wasn’t good at anything else” THE RED BULLETIN

eaty began training with Marshall in Derby before and after school, which involved grim 4am wake-up calls and endless 40-minute drives for his mum.

But when he was 17, he saw fellow British breaststroke swimmer Craig Benson reach the semi-finals at the 2012 London Olympics. “I had been messing around in a field with my mates the night before, and I thought, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ It was time to step on the gas.”

Armed with a clear vision of his future path and an authentic example to follow, Peaty began to train harder, eat healthier and think smarter. “Anyone looking to be the best at whatever they do has to be obsessed with self-improvement,” he says, “Every day, I think, ‘This meal, workout or decision will make me faster or slower.’ I always choose faster.”

Peaty’s new commitment and determination earned quick rewards. In 2014 he made his breakthrough, beating South Africa’s Cameron van der Burgh, the Olympic champion, in the 100m at the Commonwealth Games. He earned four gold medals at the 2014 European Championships and set his first world record in the 50m. In April 2015 he set his first 100m world record, before picking up three gold medals at the 2015 World Aquatics Championships.

After his 100m gold at Rio 2016, Peaty also produced some comic-book heroics in the second leg of the 4x100m medley relay, when he gobbled up a two-second deficit to go from last to half a second ahead, inspiring Britain to a silver medal. Afterwards, the USA’s 23-time Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps walked over and said what the rest of the world was thinking: “What the fuck, man?”

The new superstar could have bathed in his success, but instead he chose to push even harder.

“It was no longer about winning, but about how long I could dominate for,” Peaty says. Upgrading his goals yielded spectacular results. At the 2017 World

Aquatics Championships, Peaty took the 100m by 1.32s and the 50m by 0.53s – miraculous margins in a sport usually won by the length of a fingernail.

In person, Peaty is far from the robotic zealot his superhuman performances might lead you to expect.

He refuses to let his confidence slip into arrogance; he’s polite and friendly company, quick to descend into boyish chuckles. He makes self-deprecating jokes about how his gran is more famous than him (his nan Mavis became a social media star for her tweets during Rio 2016). And, despite having dedicated thousands of hours to winning in the water, at the 2017 European Short Course Swimming Championships in Copenhagen he handed his gold medal to a shell-shocked young girl: “Giving away my medal might inspire someone for years to come.

That’s much better than leaving it on a shelf.”

The self-confessed obsessive is actually also a fan of quality downtime. Peaty believes his other loves inject valuable perspective after endless laps of the pool. He relaxes with box sets ranging from US dramas (Ballers, Billions) to comedy (Silicon Valley, Modern Family). He listens to grime, hip-hop, house and rock, from Jaykae, Tory Lanez and Post Malone to Metallica and Architects. He’s also a passionate petrolhead, and talks excitedly about his Mercedes C63 S. “My dream car changes every month,” Peaty says. “It was a [Ferrari] 488 GTB, but now I’m swaying towards a [Lamborghini] Aventador.”

It needn’t be a pipe dream, with more success on the immediate horizon. After another successful 2018 season, winning four gold medals at the European Championships, Peaty is due to return to the international stage for the World Swimming Championships in China in December. “The Worlds are ‘short course’ this year [held in a 25m pool, not the standard 50m ‘long course’] which we don’t take as seriously but I still try to win. But by January and the new long-course season, I’m going to be fully firing. With Tokyo 2020 on the horizon, I’m all in.”

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is rivals are so desperate to learn his secrets before the Olympics that some countries have even started filming Peaty at races. “They sit in front of me with a camera,” he laughs. “It’s normally China or Japan. You see it in the pool as well, with underwater mirrors and cameras. America did it. It’s a compliment, I suppose.”

But Peaty has unique physical gifts that no amount of video analysis can teach. He has hyperflexible, double-jointed knees that inject extra power into his kick. “I can get hyper-extension in my knee so I can whip out more power when I kick,” he says. “If you can keep the top half of your legs, 55

“It’s all or nothing.

If I’m not the best, I won’t carry on”

Mind the gap How Adam Peaty’s gamechanging dominance in the pool compares to other sporting greats and their closest rivals

100m breaststroke Cameron van der Burgh 58.46s

Adam Peaty 57.10s (WR)

2.35% Marathon Mary Jepkosgei Keitany 2:17:01

Paula Radcliffe 2:15:25 (WR)

1.29% 100m sprint

NEIL WEBB @ DEBUT ART. MAKE-UP BY LINDA JOHANSSON @ ONE REPRESENTS, USING WELEDA

Tyson Gay 9.69s

Usain Bolt 9.58s (WR)

1.14% Long jump Carl Lewis 8.91m

Mike Powell 8.95m (WR)

0.45% 100m butterfly Caeleb Dressel 49.86s

Michael Phelps 49.82s (WR)

0.08% THE RED BULLETIN

your quads, quite narrow and whip your lower legs back, you’re more streamlined, so I can generate more power without exposing myself to drag.”

While other breaststroke swimmers kick like a frog, Peaty performs a squat-like thrust. That’s why his rivals can manage 55 strokes per minute while Peaty can unleash 58-60. “Most people have a wide, slow kick, but mine is narrow and fast,” he says.

“Not many people can get to my stroke rate, but I can’t get to their stroke rate at backstroke or freestyle. Your gifts don’t mean anything unless you point them in the right direction.”

This is a key theme for Peaty: he doesn’t rely on his strengths, he enhances them. Under the tutelage of Marshall, he trains for 35 hours a week, swimming more than 11km a day (with Sundays off). In the gym, you’ll find him performing 150kg squats and 130kg bench presses or flipping heavy tractor tyres.

“I like pushing the limits of the body,” he says. To fuel his brutal training, he eats 6,000 calories a day – more than double that of the average man.

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eaty’s enviable skills have won him deals with big-name brands such as Omega, and left him in an almost unique sporting situation where his biggest rival is himself.

While his opponents are still trying to swim the 100m in under 58s, Peaty has launched ‘Project 56’ – a personal mission to dip under 57s. This isn’t a deluded dream but a targeted psychological strategy to extract more out of himself.

As Marshall has said, “He’s a lion. You have to put the meat in front of him for him to go and hunt.”

Peaty knows that to keep progressing he needs new challenges – and sometimes that means being better than he was yesterday. “When you’re second, you have something to chase, so I have to change my mindset to feel that fire again,” he says. “There will be a time when no one on Earth can get faster, because you’ll hit that point where the drag and resistance of the water at higher speeds will overtake the feasible gains in power. I want to get as close to the limit as I can.”

That may be Peaty’s plan, but the practical secret behind his relentless progress lies in small daily improvements: “You can’t just think, ‘I want to win.’

You need to think of the processes, and to go where nobody has gone before you have to try new things.”

To enhance his fitness, Peaty has started doing extra workout drills with a former SAS soldier. His military dreams still inspire him even today, but he’s adapted them again to meet his new goals. “You can’t stop learning and I want to learn from the best in every field. Some athletes say it’s all about the performance on the day. That’s wrong. It’s about making that high level your daily habit.”

Peaty may have made a Royal Marine or fighter pilot, but the swimming pool is now his battleground.

“In the pool, it’s war mode,” he says. “You have respect for each other, but none of you are friends in that moment. You get this gladiator mindset – and I love it. I want to build a legacy and join the greats.

And I know that if I take care of winning and setting world records, that legacy will take care of itself.”

Instagram: @adam_peaty 57

Free wheeling Motorbikes, mayhem and as much empty road as it’s possible to ride: this is CAMP VC, a place where women push boundaries, smash stereotypes and dance until dawn Words JESSICA HOLLAND Photography JANE STOCKDALE

Jene Bons (left), 30, was weeks away from opening a pizza restaurant when she rode from the Netherlands with her friend, life coach Merel Neeltje Molenaar, 25.

“It’s more fun to see what happens,” says Molenaar.

“No preparation, just go”

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NAMIN CHO (30), MAÏTE STORNI (28) AND GEMMA HARRISON (33) The Camp VC co-founders kick back on Storni’s scorpion chopper

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t’s 11am on a Sunday morning in August, and on a sheep farm at the edge of the Brecon Beacons in South Wales hundreds of motorbikes lie scattered and abandoned on the grass. There’s a child’s tiny pink PeeWee; a pearlescent chopper inlaid with a dead scorpion trapped in resin; a Harley-Davidson Sportster with the words ‘Don’t Fuckin’ Die’ emblazoned across its fuel tank. These machines belong to the 400-or-so female motorcyclists who are only now emerging from their tents, blinking in the sunlight, and beginning to make plans for their journey home from Camp VC – some will be riding back across mainland Europe, others heading for the airport to board a plane to the States.

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The riders themselves are as eclectic as their bikes, though the look is generally less Hells Angels-style black leathers, more multi-hued and millennial. There are motocross jumpsuits, retro sportswear, mesh jerseys, crop tops, neon hair, dungarees and ’50s headscarves among the plain old T-shirts and jeans. Some of the clichés do apply – many of them sport tattoos, from stick ‘n’ poke styles to swirling dragons. Riders clearly still love ink.

The previous night ended in mayhem. Following sets by two all-female bands, BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Georgie Rogers blasted everything from Whitney Houston to Childish Gambino in a barn that served as a bar, skate park, screening room, videogame arcade, exhibition space, clothing store, bingo hall and THE RED BULLETIN

FLORA BEVERLEY (23) The food and fitness blogger had never so much as sat on a bike before arriving at Camp VC. But after just three lessons she took a 250cc dirt bike for a spin.

“It was great spending loads of time outdoors doing something a bit different, meeting loads of cool people,” Beverley says.

“It left me feeling super-positive.”

“I’ve found my place at last. I found myself in the bikes and in the people around the bikes” dancefloor over the course of the weekend. Tops were peeled off sweaty bodies, as some of the riders busted out splits while others attempted to crowd surf, and the bleach-haired sisters behind Blondies, an east London dive bar, handed out free cans of beer and cups of rum punch until supplies finally ran out in the early hours.

“You’d kill for the vibe in there,” says Lorna Paterson, a venue planning manager for events including Women of the World and Meltdown, in the queue for Dark Arts coffee the following morning. “The way the girls were dancing was so uninhibited, it was pure joy and excitement.” She credits the all-female environment (which wasn’t completely exclusive – a few guys served refreshments and taught classes) for this atmosphere, pointing out that women could arrive dishevelled from a ride and strip off their bike gear in the courtyard. “Here, they’re free.”

By lunchtime, heads are clearing. New friends are making plans as they sprawl around a makeshift awning and share breakfast. Kirsty Gregory arrived at the site unaccompanied – and with a sense of trepidation – on Friday and took part in a beginners’ motorbike class the next day. “I didn’t know what to expect from the weekend,” she says, shielding her eyes from the sun, “but I thought I could always just go and hide in my tent. The second I pulled into the courtyard, Jane waved at me through the window.”

Jane Parson and Emma Yates are a couple from Derbyshire who seem to have gathered around them every woman who arrived feeling a little lost and apprehensive. Now, their newly formed crew – which includes a lorry driver, dry stone waller, orthopaedic surgeon, boat builder, teacher and more – has its own WhatsApp thread and is talking about meeting up for a ride into the Californian desert.

This kind of camaraderie is exactly what Camp VC – and VC London, the collective behind the event – is all about. Cofounders Gemma Harrison, Namin Cho and Maïte Storni – who now ride enviable customised choppers; Storni’s is the one with the distinctive scorpion inlaid into its tank – were all introduced to bikes by dads and boyfriends, but after crossing paths and starting to ride together they decided they wanted to encourage more girls to do the same.

Harrison became friends with Cho while both were working as fashion designers, and met Storni, a graphic designer, at a motorcycle café, where she offered to teach her how to ride.

“I’d never even driven a car or anything,” Storni says. “I was petrified. My dad always rode bikes, but it never crossed his mind to teach his daughter to do it. It seemed like something that was dangerous or not for me.” After she took her CBT – Compulsory Basic Training, the motorbike course that allows you to start riding with learner plates – Storni says, “I was so proud of myself. It gave me a lot of confidence.”

The trio began taking trips together on “geeky little 125s”, decided on a name – Vicious C**ts, a jokey title originally thought up by one of their boyfriends, which stuck – created an Instagram account (@VC_London) so that they could share their experiences, and started putting on free beginners’ classes in a supermarket car park on Saturday afternoons, with no pressure and lots of time to talk about fear and mental blocks.

At the time, they had no idea how many women needed the kind of support they were offering.

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“We’d get girls saying, ‘I’m too small for a big bike,’” says Harrison, “and we’d send them to Instagram accounts of 5fttall girls on Harley 1200s.” The lessons eventually evolved into proper all-female CBT courses in partnership with a local training school, and sign-ups steadily increased.

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here was never any big plan to expand this community into a bike-chick empire, but in 2015 Cho and Harrison travelled to Joshua Tree in California to attend Babes Ride Out, an annual get-together for female riders.

The following year, they found themselves helping organise a UK version of the event, and by August 2017 Camp VC was born, with 120 campers travelling to Wales from as far afield as Canada and Australia.

Meanwhile, Harrison had become disillusioned with the fashion industry and decided to take a leap. “All this great stuff was happening with VC, and it was all so organic,” she says. “I went against any [advice] that people gave me, and thought, ‘I’ll see how it goes.’ Every day, I expect it to die off, but it just gains more and more traction.”

Now, the VC collective puts on regular panel discussions featuring boundary-pushing women, hosts monthly meet-ups at The Bike Shed in east London, organises dirt-bike events, and has a workshop in Limehouse – The Shop Customs – as well as running womenswear brand VCC and Camp VC itself, which gets bigger every year.

“We couldn’t have expected or planned it,” Harrison says.

The kind of people gravitating to VC include women who are into other extreme sports and creative outlets, “so we started swapping lessons together, and ended up creating this huge network that was free of any type of pretension or judgement.

That’s quite rare in today’s world.” This year’s Camp VC has grown to include skateboard lessons, tarot readings, yoga sessions, sign painting, a cinematography workshop, rollerskate ramp demos, as well as the usual group rides and various motorbike lessons.

Tamsin Jones – who owns the farm where Camp VC takes place and holds the record for the highest female ascent up Everest on a motorcycle, among other achievements – runs a class here dedicated to the cross-country discipline of enduro, where advanced riders can take part in trials that involve riding over obstacles. And yesterday, just across the field, 20-year-old Leah Tokelove, the only woman to race in the Pro class of UK Flat Track motorcycling, was teaching beginners the basics of cornering and changing gears.

Lucia Aucott, 29, from Nottingham, was one of Tokelove’s students two years ago, when she signed up for a two-day class, and fell in love with the sport so hard she bought her own bike on eBay that first evening. Now, she’s teaching alongside her former instructor and racing competitively in the intermediate class. “I found my place,” Aucott says. “I found myself in the bikes, and in the people around the bikes.”

It’s this sense of belonging that strikes Jane Parson as she chats with her new friends. She and her partner are veteran motorcyclists – Emma Yates has been riding since she took part in Voluntary Service Overseas in The Gambia back in the ’80s – but the feeling of acceptance that permeates Camp VC still feels new to Parson. “I came out in the early ’80s in a mining THE RED BULLETIN

KITTY COWELL (31) A fan of motorbike culture for many years, the fashion stylist and blogger finally sat in the saddle herself at Camp VC. “I've always wanted to get involved,” Cowell says. “It was a life-changing experience to be able to ride a motorbike.

The whole weekend, I was trying out new things and being able to do things I love.”

After a long day in the bike saddle, the Camp VC women party in one of the barns at the farm. BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Georgie Rogers provides the tunes

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“Campers danced wildly in a circle, doing the splits and downing the free beer”

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NÚRIA PÉREZ (34) The London-based cinematographer grew up around bikes, riding from her hometown of Barcelona to nearby villages as a teen.

“The air on my face, the twisty roads ahead, and that adrenalin rush of wanting to know what landscape I’ll discover after each turn – that’s what makes it so addictive,” says Pérez. “All your senses are focused on the present moment.

You, the road ahead and your bike.”

ALLA TAHA (26), KHLOE BAILEY OBAZEE (28) AND MIRANDA UZOMBA (31) Events coordinator Bailey Obazee bought her custom-purple Honda

just in time to ride to camp for the weekend, and physiotherapist Uzomba joined her two friends on the trip to South Wales at the very last minute. “The womenonly environment [at Camp VC] created a super-

chilled vibe filled with meaningful conversations,” says Uzomba. “I have always dreamed of being a biker chick, and the Camp VC experience has taught me that I’m a natural on a bike. I’m going to buy my own within the year.”

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Top: party time at Camp VC – “You’d kill for the vibe,” says one happy biker. Below: roller-skating collective Chicks in Bowls London on the Vans skate ramp

“After I had a baby, everyone told me I had to stop riding.

They didn’t say that to my husband. That’s why I came” village,” she says. “I wish there had been something like Camp VC when I was 20.”

Acceptance is something the group of women Parson has gathered together have all had to fight for as members of an overwhelmingly male-dominated community. Over the weekend, they’ve been bonding not only by dodging sheep on a group ride, but by sharing their stories of having to endure patronising comments and low expectations.

Seated opposite the couple is Nea Steel, a teacher who has been riding dirt bikes since the age of 11, and who once spent six months mustering cattle on a bike on an Australian cattle station. Steel had a baby last year, which, she says, prompted “everyone to tell me I need to stop riding. No one said that to my husband. That’s why I came here. I thought, ‘There must be other people who have kids and still do things that are perceived as dangerous’”.

Being a mother with an appetite for adventure was one of the topics discussed at a panel talk the previous night. As rows of women sat attentively on hay bales, VC co-founder Gemma Harrison and cold-water surfer Sally McGee talked about the fact that both had recently given birth and returned to their high-octane activities immediately afterwards. McGee would have surfed in the icy waters off Tynemouth on the north-east coast of England all the way through her pregnancy, she said,

Jene Bons wrote down directions from the Netherlands to South Wales in marker pen on her fuel tank. “It gives you more freedom to wander than listening to Google Maps,” she says THE RED BULLETIN

“but luckily I snapped my arm in half when I was two months pregnant. It made me slow things down.”

Another panellist was two-time Olympic gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, who’s best known for track cycling but started riding a motorbike six months ago. “I was always told I’m too small and too girly,” she said. “I was told, ‘You don’t have the mentality of a champion.’” Over the years, she has learnt how to ignore these voices and be herself. “I’m going to be emotional and vulnerable at times, but I’m still gonna win shit.”

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or Yorkshire-born Laura Mills, who’s packing her tent onto her Honda 125cc as Parson and her gang swap stories, the trip to Camp VC was part of a bucket-list dream. The previous year Mills had had appendicitis, but after the operation she’d contacted an E. coli infection – one of the most widely recognised symptoms of which is a feeling that you’re about to die.

“It’s such a weird feeling,” says the 25-year-old. “That’s the point where I started making monthly and yearly goals.” Mills contacted her mother, from whom she’d been estranged for a decade, and not long afterwards she took the CBT, despite, she says, having grown up surrounded by “men telling me I couldn’t do things”.

At 8am on the Friday of Camp VC, Mills passed the final test that granted her a full motorbike licence, allowing her to rip off her L plates and ride on motorways for the first time. From there, she set straight off from south London to Wales. The journey took hours longer than expected, and her camping gear kept slipping off the back and obscuring her brake lights, so she had to stop repeatedly and adjust the load under the blazing sun.

But as she reached Wales, roaring around hairpin bends amid mountains and forests, elation overtook fatigue.

Over the weekend, Mills went climbing, did hillside yoga and took a cinematography course that helped nail down her aspirations for the YouTube vlog she runs under the name ‘MotoWaifu’. She also went on a ride with a group of women who were camping next to her, burning down long stretches of road with mountains on either side, not a car in sight. “It’s the first moment in a while that I’ve felt lucky,” Mills says.

“Growing up, I always wanted to ride a bike, but I never thought the time would come.”

Riding to Wales for six hours on her own to attend a festival didn’t bother her much, but finding other women to ride with was still a rush. “It felt so good, really empowering and motivational. I find it very hard to meet with girls who ride, but now I know they’re out there. I’ve found them.” Next year, Mills says, she’ll be back, with a bike that’s big enough to bring a friend on the back, too.

That’s all VC’s Gemma Harrison ever wanted: for the ripples of enthusiasm and confidence that started with three friends in London to keep spreading outwards. She wrapped up Saturday night’s panel talk by urging the crowd to keep exploring, and to keep sharing their skills. “There are good people everywhere who are willing to give you a go on their skateboard, their motorbike, and that can change the rest of your life,” she said.

“If you don’t have those people in your life, go out and find them. We go faster and further if we do it together.” vclondon.co.uk 69

Big-wall veteran Tommy Caldwell en route to the firstever free climb of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall

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THE IMPOSSIBLE CLIMB TOMMY CALDWELL and KEVIN JORGESON’s groundbreaking ascent of El Capitan’s Dawn Wall is considered by many pros to be the most difficult climb ever attempted. But a featurelength documentary about the expedition exposes a drama even more breathtaking than the story that made global headlines Words DAVID HOWARD Photography COREY RICH

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nless you’ve ever visited California’s Yosemite National Park, you’ll probably be surprised by the breathtaking scenes of transcendent beauty that fill the screen in the documentary The Dawn Wall. The film tells the story of a 19-day free climb of the famous rock formation El Capitan by two Americans on a route previously thought to be unclimbable.

The iconic granite monolith looms vast and impassive in flaxen morning light throughout the 100-minute documentary, which chronicles Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson’s six-year mission to scale its most forbidding and featureless face.

Most of the world’s climbing experts rank the enterprise somewhere between outrageously ambitious and utterly fantastical. Veteran climber John Long describes it in the film as “the most continuously difficult rock climb ever done – nothing else is even close to it”.

What might come as a bigger surprise, though, is that the film’s most affecting scene takes place in a setting that’s neither epic nor panoramic, but instead a cramped shelter, with steam pouring from a camping stove next to a tired climber.

But that comes later. First, the film introduces the back story: Colorado-born big-wall legend Caldwell obsesses over the Dawn Wall, joins forces with California 72

“It’s the most continuously difficult rock climb ever done – nothing is even close” Veteran climber John Long Perched high above Yosemite Valley in his portaledge, Kevin Jorgeson reflects on the gruelling challenge ahead

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“Living on the wall, it’s not like the camera team and the climbing team. We’re one team” Tommy Caldwell native and bouldering specialist Jorgeson, and the two spend several years mapping out a 32-pitch, 900m route. Looking over their shoulders when the climbers finally tackle the endeavour just after Christmas in 2014 are filmmakers Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer and their crew.

Viewers quickly learn that the climb’s ultimate test is Pitch 15, a long traverse across a flat stretch of rock as flat as a freshly ironed shirt collar. Neither climber had managed to piece together the series of unforgivingly precise moves it requires over several reconnaissance trips. After multiple failures, Caldwell summons some unknowable mix of skill and resolve, and spiders his way across. But Jorgesen is foiled repeatedly over a long sequence of days, and viewers witness him growing increasingly frustrated. Eventually, Caldwell must move on – after all, this started off as his dream – and he works his way up several other challenging pitches until it becomes clear he’ll make it.

Alone.

Except that he doesn’t. Back to that hanging shelter, known in climbing circles as a portaledge, and that nimbus of steam. In a halting, half-mumbled delivery, Caldwell declares over his bubbling camp stove that he’s not about to finish the climb without his buddy, no matter how much he’d poured himself into it over the past six years. Jorgeson nods in agreement. The exchange is over quickly and with little ceremony, but it’s a deeply powerful and intimate moment. And it’s part of what makes the documentary vibrate with tension and humanity: you’re able to watch these supremely talented climbers close-up, but you also get to know them.

Even the filmmakers, who surmised that there was a moment of reckoning coming between the two climbers, were stunned by the scene. “We all thought it was an act of madness that Tommy was waiting for Kevin,” recalls Mortimer.

“Kevin had never climbed anything of that difficulty or that grade level on any route outside of the Dawn Wall in his life. It was a whole new frontier, and here he was, two weeks into this event, his 74

body torn apart, his fingers ripped to shreds, and the whole world is hanging on his every move.”

If you tried to write a story about what the pair went on to achieve next, together, even Hollywood would have considered it too Hollywood.

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t was no accident that Lowell and Mortimer (along with adventure photographer Corey Rich) were the ones to capture that moment next to Pitch 15, as well as the rest of the Dawn Wall’s vertiginous glory; between them, the veteran filmmakers have produced many celebrated climbing movies. Lowell met Caldwell’s father 30 years ago when Tommy was nine, and he filmed Caldwell’s meteoric rise through the climbing ranks.

Lowell had also shot Jorgeson, now 33, in action on many occasions.

“He’s as much a friend as he is a videographer,” says Caldwell. “We’ve both been super lucky to work with him all these years.”

The relationship helped both the climbers and filmmakers overcome stiff logistical obstacles, beginning with the task of dangling cameramen hundreds of metres in the air for hours on end.

Rich, a longtime climbing photographer, and Lowell’s brother Brett, the film’s cinematographer, embraced the task.

“Brett’s got tree-trunk arms,” says Lowell, “and he’s the only one strong enough to sit there and hold the camera steady for a three-minute take while leaning out backwards, hanging off a harness, straining every muscle in his body.”

The directors wanted more than just shots from across the plane of the wall or straight down the rock face, which presented another test: American national parks don’t allow the use of helicopters or drones. To improvise more dramatic perspectives, Lowell and Mortimer developed a system involving a rope that stretched all the way down and anchored to boulders off the base of the wall. To that, they tied a series of horizontal ropes at various heights, creating a spider’s web of rigging in which a cameraman could hover 15m from the wall, 600m off the ground.

TOMMY CALDWELL and KEVIN JORGESON

The two extraordinary climbers who took on Dawn Wall shared a common goal, but entered the challenge with vastly different CVs. Caldwell (top) was a big-wall veteran with numerous first ascents, while Jorgeson was known more as a bouldering specialist.

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With Caldwell watching from below, Jorgeson leads a pitch early in the expedition

As darkness falls, Caldwell pushes on, trying to complete a route that was a long-term obsession

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uring the expedition, the twin endeavours of climbing and filming merged into one. “Living on a wall with somebody, it’s not like the camera team and the climbing team,” says Caldwell. “We’re one team.

For the final pitch, it was me and Brett in one portaledge, and Kevin and Corey in the other. In terms of logistics, they were part of the climbing team and we were part of the video team.”

The deep connection paid multiple dividends. For one thing, Caldwell trusted Mortimer and Lowell to unpack his complicated history in full. Cutting back and forth between the action on El Capitan, the film delves into a harrowing incident from 2000 in which Caldwell, his then-girlfriend Beth Rodden and two fellow climbers were kidnapped by militants during an expedition in Kyrgyzstan; Caldwell pushed one of their captors off a mountain in order to save them. Viewers also learn about Caldwell’s 76

marriage to Rodden and the painful divorce that followed. Another segment explains why Caldwell climbs with half of his left index finger missing. (Hint: he’s less adept at woodcutting than climbing.)

Somehow, the filmmakers remain barely visible throughout the documentary, except for a few moments when viewers see a cameraman yo-yoing over the abyss.

It’s just enough to remind you there’s more

“This was our passion project for so long. Nothing else mattered at that moment but the moves ahead” Kevin Jorgeson

to the climb than the climb itself. The crew’s ability to blend in helps when, for example, Jorgeson bashes himself against Pitch 15, withholding nothing, including screams of exasperation and expletives.

“They were some of the most intense and focused moments I’ve ever had in climbing, so the last thing I was thinking about was Brett or Cory shooting,” says Jorgeson. “This was our passion project for so long. Nothing else mattered at that moment but the moves ahead.”

Lowell and Mortimer ended up participating in the action in another unexpected way: by shielding the climbers from the glare of the outside world. The two filmmakers knew the climb was seen as an immense challenge in climbing circles and represented a great story.

What they didn’t anticipate was how the narrative would mushroom into a source of global fascination.

The chaos began when Lowell arranged for John Branch of The New York Times to THE RED BULLETIN

I called up Alberto to go for a bike ride. And he said, “Sure! Trail, freeride, cross country, four cross, downhill, marathon or… mountain bike?”. I thought he was joking, but when we met up with friends in Trentino, each of them had rented a different bike. That evening, though, we all agreed on one thing: a refreshing glass of bubbly! Find exactly what you’re into at visittrentino.info/MTBtrails

Val di Sole, Trentino: a Bikeland where you can feel alive.

Brett Lowell hangs over the abyss as he shoots footage

“I started juggling media requests and trying to shield them so they could stay in the zone” Brett Lowell

interview the climbers mid-expedition.

The resulting front-page story made the climb an instant sensation. “The next morning,” Lowell recalls, “they’re getting calls and emails and texts from all over the world. They were not prepared for that at all, and I think Tommy had a big pullback, like, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. We’re trying to do the hardest thing in our lives and we’ve created this bubble of focus.’”

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hey did one more interview, for US radio news show All Things Considered, but declined numerous requests from other outlets.

Caldwell dropped his phone during one pitch, triggering an ongoing joke among the filmmakers about whether he did it on purpose. (He says it was an accident, but adds, “At first I was like, ‘Oh no!’ And then, after that, I was psyched actually.”)

Lowell and Mortimer embraced the way the story broke into the mainstream, even as they protected the climbers from the spotlight. “I started juggling media requests,” says Lowell, “and trying to shield them a bit so they could stay in the zone and focus on what they needed to do to actually finish the climb, because the worst-case scenario would have been for all of that stuff to become a hindrance.”

Without interference, the story that unfolded naturally – the conversation in the portaledge as the two climbers struggled to hold things together –

couldn’t have been credibly scripted.

As Mortimer says, “It’d be too Disney-like, over the top. Like, ‘Oh, come on!’”

After a draining 19 days on El Capitan, the filmmakers faced an even more daunting task: piecing together a story that encompassed Caldwell’s adventures over 30-plus years, plus scores of hours of footage. There would be endless editing headaches over the next two years of production, but the project never flagged.

“We had a feeling that, as filmmakers, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell a story this big with such amazing footage,” Mortimer says. “As much suffering as we’ve been through, we’re lucky to be part of it.”

RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE presents

TOMMY

CALDWELL

KEVIN

JORGESON

A RED BULL MEDIA HOUSE PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH SENDER FILMS STARRING TOMMY CALDWELL KEVIN JORGESON EDITED BY JOSH LOWELL DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY BRETT LOWELL CINEMATOGRAPHY COREY RICH CO-PRODUCED BY NICK ROSEN ZACHARY BARR PRODUCED BY JOSH LOWELL PHILIPP MANDERLA PETER MORTIMER DIRECTED BY JOSH LOWELL PETER MORTIMER WWW.DAWNWALL-FILM.COM

Coming in October; for details, go to uk.demand.film/ dawn-wall THE RED BULLETIN

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guide Get it. Do it. See it.

JAPAN’S TRUE NORTH

SAMUEL INGLES

Hokkaido is a playground for climbing, skiing, paddling and pedalling. Here’s an insider’s guide to finding yourself in this island paradise Words EVELYN SPENCE

When winter comes in Hokkaido, the slopes of Mount Yotei are the place to be

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Do it “Even the Japanese rave about how good and fresh the food on the island is” SKI GUIDE CHUCK OLBERY

Hokkaido is famed for its hot springs, or ‘onsen’

24 HOURS Only five per cent of Japan’s population live on Hokkaido, but it’s more than 20 per cent of the country’s land area.

In just a day you can experience neon lights, national parks, snow-capped volcanoes and shopping. Take the capital, Sapporo, Japan’s fifth-largest city – it boasts a microbrew scene and beautiful green belts. Wander through Moerenuma Park, then climb indoors at NAC Sapporo (nacadventures.jp).

Nopporo Forest Park (hm.pref. hokkaido.lg.jp/en/nopporo-forest-park) has rare virgin forest.

STAY Cross Hotel, a ten-minute walk from the station, has natural, urban and hip rooms; sapporo. crosshotel.com. The B Sapporo Susukino is in Sapporo’s party zone; sapporosusukino. theb-hotels.com EAT It’s impossible to pick the best ramen joint in Sapporo, but Menya Saimi is wildly popular for a reason: its broth is porky and

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fatty and uses the eatery’s own signature miso. Sushi Miyakawa earned three Michelin stars; sushi-miyakawa. com. And for coffee and doughnuts, head to Morihiko DxM; morihiko-dxm.com.

Hokkaido specialities include dairy, wheat, corn and melon, while Sapporo is the place for jingisukan (grilled mutton) and salmon roe.

DRINK Yes, Sapporo’s eponymous beer is brewed here. Take a brewery tour, but don’t skip the Sapporo Odori Beer Garden in Odori Park, which seats 13,000; sapporonatsu.com. Tsuki to Taiyo Brewing has ten taps of craft beer.

And even though the famous barman at Bar Yamazaki has now passed away (he poured drinks until he was 96), it’s still worth a stop; bar-yamazaki.com SOAK In Jozankei, one ticket gets you a bus ride from town and entry to a dozen onsens (hot spring pools).

HOKKAIDO IN

A LONG WEEKEND In winter, the resort complex of Niseko averages more snow than more famous resorts, and it comes in the form of dry flakes so big that locals call them “chicken feathers” – or, simply, fukai yuki saiko (great deep powder). “Every night, it seems like it snows a foot,” says snowboarder Blake Paul. Guides at Niseko Winterlab (nisekowinterlab.com) can show you the goods in the countryside – and onsens reachable by skis. Summer temperatures are more pleasant than anywhere else in Japan, and Niseko is ideal for adventure.

Paraglide off the top of 1,156m Annupuri or SUP to Nakano Island on Lake Toya, a caldera formed by (still active) Mount Usu. Or hike up 1,898m Mount Yotei, a dead ringer for Fuji, and circumnavigate its huge crater (also still active). Alternatively, do what Niseko Adventure Centre

EAT Ezo Seafoods has no paper menu – you choose your creature (hairy crab, Notsuke Peninsula scallops) from live tanks, and waiters suggest how to cook it; ezoseafoods.com.

Posh An Dining is the spot for modern Japanese and sake.

DRINK Gyu Bar (known as Fridge Door Bar) is often packed; gyubar. com. Toshiro’s (toshiros-bar.com) features dozens of Japanese whiskies.

SOAK The milky waters of Goshiki Onsen are deep within white birch forests above the town.

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SAMUEL INGLES, GETTY IMAGES(4)

HOKKAIDO IN

Japan STAY Just outside Otaru, a stay at the ryokan Kuramare includes booze; kuramure.com. In Asahidake Onsen at La Vista Daisetsuzan, you can choose from ten types of pillow; japan-ryokan.net/ lavistadaisetsuzan Feast on some of the finest ramen in the world

The Shakotan peninsula is perfect for paddling

HOKKAIDO IN

A WEEK The resort town of Niseko offers towering mountain views

STAY The minimalist Bi.blé is a hotel/eatery/ bakery; biei-hokkaido. jp. Annupuri Lodge is best for Annupuri Niseko Ski Resort; annupurilodge.com

(nacadventures.jp) founder Ross Findlay did in 1995: cycle 50km around it. The country roads are as well-maintained as golf courses, traffic is virtually nonexistent and you can end your day out with delicious cream puffs and proper ice cream at Milk Kobo (milk-kobo.com).

Mount Yotei is a playground of untracked snow

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“Hokkaido is a three-dimensional multisensory experience,” says Matt Naiman, owner of Annupuri Lodge in Niseko. “It’s a perfect place to see by car.” His first recommendation: the Shakotan Peninsula that juts 30km into the Sea of Japan, is known for water so clear and turquoise that locals have named its colour Shakotan blue. In a kayak, you can weave in and out of seaside caves. Daisetsuzan National Park is the largest in Japan, with a network of country huts and three onsen towns: “An ideal destination for hiking,” says ski guide Chuck Olbery. If you have time, use your wheels to see the world’s densest bear population at Shiretoko National Park, a place so remote that native Ainu people call it the end of the world. Snowboarder Ken Sasaki says that locals call Rishiri Island a “dream island” for people who love nature and adventure; you can cycle a dedicated path for 20km along the northern coast and nibble on its famous konbu seaweed.

But a trip to Hokkaido isn’t complete until you spend the night at a ryokan, a traditional inn that typically comes with two lavish meals and onsen privileges.

For a real experience (wearing kimonos, sleeping on tatami mats), Naiman zens out at Nagomi No Yado Iida (nagomi-no-yadoiida-shakotan.hotelshokkaido.com).

EAT In Kamoenai, a tiny village on the Shakotan Peninsula, there’s world-class sushi at Katsuei Zushi.

Tempura Tazawa in Hakodate has one nightly sitting and 12 courses of fried seafood and veg. Some 250 stalls at the Hakodate morning market sell everything from squid ink buns to donburi breakfast bowls.

DRINK The Nikka Whisky Distillery in Yoichi is known for its peaty malt, and tours come with three glasses of hooch; nikka. com/eng/distilleries.

Musu in Kutchan infuses its whiskies with local flavours.

SOAK Noboribetsu is famed for onsen. Try the blue waters of Takinoya; ryokancollection.com/ ryokan/takinoya

The easiest way to reach Hokkaido is a 90-minute flight from Tokyo to Sapporo

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City guide

EASTERN DELIGHTS

Locals have been in uproar since Hackney Council approved plans for earlier closing of night venues in July. From new bars on Mare Street to warehouse parties in Hackney Wick, here are 10 top spots that prove the nightlife in the east London borough is well worth protecting…

START YOUR NIGHT AT… 1. Number 90 Bar & Kitchen

With a spacious terrace facing the River Lea, this is the ideal spot for cocktails (try their Bombay Mirch, a G&T with chillies) in summer.

Furthermore, Number 90 hosts a burger restaurant, live gigs, and Saturday parties where experts from London’s finest record shops supply the music. 90 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN; number90bar.co.uk

2. Four Quarters East

Last year, the guys behind the original Four Quarters in Peckham brought their bar for big kids to Hackney Wick. It features pinball machines and retro arcade games, a good selection of craft beers, video-game-themed cocktails, and pizzas named after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, East Bay Lane, London E20 3BS; geocities.fourquartersbar.co.uk Four Quarters East has opened in Hackney

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GUI D E London

3. Randy’s Wing Bar

Night Tales: a stylish Hackney hangout with a Japanese flavour

Inspired by a food tasting trip to the US, Richard and Andy (= Randy) decided to bring buffalo-style wings to their home town. In 2016, they opened a restaurant by the canal, where they serve free-range chicken wings in five different styles, from Kansas to Gangnam. Here East, The Press Centre, 8 East Bay Lane, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London E15 2GW; randyswingbar.co.uk

4. Night Tales

Occupying two railway arches and a 4,000 sq ft terrace in a Japanese cherry timber style, with beds and private booths, pop-up veteran Night Tales made quite an impression with its new home near Hackney Central station. Staying true to its street-food vendor vibe, the 300-capacity venue offers izakayastyle Japanese grill and a pizza parlour (helmed by Sons of Slices) and 9m cocktail bar with a waterfall backdrop. At night, the arches play host to the finest DJs. 14 Bohemia Place, 13-15 The Arches, London E8 1DU; nighttales.co.uk

MOVE ON TO… 5. Oslo

NICHOLAS WORLEY

FLORIAN OBKIRCHER

TOM NOON

Located in a 140-year-old former railway station, this 300-capacity venue is one of east London’s hottest spots to catch indie bands before their big break. Fortify yourself first with a pølse (chargrilled sausage) in the Scandi-style restaurant downstairs. 1a Amhurst Road, London E8 1LL; oslohackney.com

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6. Moth Club

With its golden glitter stage décor, there's a Lynchian vibe to this place.

The programming is a bit leftfield, too: from Ru Paul’s Drag Race quiz to ABBA tribute nights as well as live gigs, Moth Club is a bit more than your typical nightclub. Old Trades Hall, Valette Street, London E9 6NU; mothclub.co.uk

7. Paper Dress Vintage

In spite of its location across the road from Hackney Central train station, this vintage boutique with a music venue attached has remained a

hidden gem for 10 years. Considering the venue’s living-room vibe – bands play with their back to the shop window – this doesn’t need to change.

352a Mare St, London E8 1HR; paperdressvintage.co.uk

LET DOWN YOUR HAIR AT… 8. Lumiere

The insider tip of insider tips: behind an inconspicuous shop window lies a mysterious basement with a lavishly decorated party bathroom, a stone cave and a velvet booth. Parties often happen unannounced, so just stop by if you’re in the area – it’s worth it.

88 Chatsworth Rd, London E5 0LS; lumierelondon.blogspot.com

9. The Glove That Fits

After the beloved Shapes was shut down in 2016, Seb Glover’s team sprang back up with this comparatively cosy spot. In the 80-capacity basement (with upstairs bar/café) DJs spin quality house and disco on a top-end sound system.

179 Morning Lane, London E9 6LH; facebook.com/glovethatfits

10. Bloc

The people behind the iconic Bloc festival in Minehead, Somerset, have found a permanent London home.

Keeping the industrial interior, the focus is entirely on the music: house and techno from the biggest names in the underground scene, until 6am.

Unit 3, Autumn Yard, Autumn Street, London E3 2TT; blocorganisation.com Find out more about Hackney's coolest spots – and locate those in your town – with Keys To Your City; redbull.co.uk/keystoyourcity 85

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Equipment

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AHEAD OF THE PACK

Getting away for the weekend? This is all the kit you’ll need for 48 hours of quality downtime.

Best of all, everything fits into the rucksack featured. You add the thrills Photography TIM KENT

1. COLUMBIA Maxtrail II Trousers, columbia.com; 2. MONTANE Minimus Jacket, montane.co.uk; 3. RIDGE MERINO Inversion Midweight Crew Top, ridgemerino. com; 4. BLACK DIAMOND Distance FLZ Trekking Poles, blackdiamondequipment.com; 5. MARMOT Retro Pom Hat, marmot.com; 6. RUMPL Original Shammy Towel, rumpl.com; 7. MERRILL MQM Flex Mid Gore-Tex Boots, merrell.com; 8. OSPREY Mutant 38 Rucksack, ospreyeurope.com; 9. RUMPL Fractal Down Blanket, rumpl.com; 10. MAMMUT Kento Hooded Hardshell Jacket, mammut.com; 11. SMITH Attack Max Sunglasses, smithoptics.com; 12. FULL WINDSOR The Muncher This titanium multi-tool does 10 things you can’t, full-windsor.com; 13. SUUNTO 9 G1 Baro Black Watch, suunto.com; 14. LAND ROVER Explore

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Outdoor Phone, landroverexplore.com; 15. GOAL ZERO Nomad 7 Solar Panel, goalzero.com; 16. LIFESTRAW Steel Suck up dirty water, swallow clean water, lifestraw.com; 17. HYDRO FLASK 21oz Standard Mouth Bottle, hydroflask.com; 18. STANCE Geothermal Outdoor Socks, stanceeu.com; 19. VSSL Mini Cache Suunto Edition A light, a compass and near-indestructible storage for small essentials, vsslgear.com; 20. BLACK DIAMOND Revolt Headlamp, blackdiamondequipment.co.uk; 21. JBL Clip 3 Portable Bluetooth Speaker, jbl.com; 22. MONTANE Primino 140 Long-sleeve T-shirt, montane.co.uk; 23. GIVE’R Classic Give’r Gloves, give-r.com

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Do it Charles has a gruelling training schedule for the 400m swim

BE A MASTER MULTITASKER

Swimmer-turned-triathlete LUCY CHARLES took on two new disciplines and won her first Ironman World Championship as a junior.

Here’s how she did it…

Lucy Charles went from being one of the best long-distance swimmers in the UK to one of the top Ironman athletes in the world in just three short years. Most elite swimmers behave like a fish out of water when they try dry-land sports, but Charles, who turns 25 this week, has proven to be a triathlon prodigy. Within a year of taking up the sport, she came top of the 18-24 age category at the Ironman World Championship. And in 2017, in just her third year of professional competition, she pulled off a surprise win at the ITU Long Distance Triathlon World Championships. Also last year, Charles finished the overall runner-up to triathlon

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legend Daniela Ryf at the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii – an event she hopes to win this time around.

Visualising the competition is a powerful motivator

“There’s not a lot of social interaction in swim training, particularly as a distance swimmer. For so many years, my main company was the tiles in the pool. I think you get mental strength from training like that. Distance swimmers become comfortable being in their own head, and that’s so important for Ironman.”

“I think about my competition when I’m struggling to find

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GUI D E Fitness

HOW TO RECOVER LIKE A CHAMP

Cuddle up with furry friends

Open road: Charles on her £3,200 Specialized S-Works bike

GRAEME MURRAY/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, GETTY IMAGES

BRAD CULP

motivation. There are times when I get tired and I want to quit, and it’s then that I think about my competition and what they’re doing on that day. It reminds me that I can’t let anything slip.

I think about them chasing me down in a big race, and that gets me going.”

“Daniela [Ryf] doesn’t have a weakness, which means I can’t lose focus on any aspect of my training. Having an athlete like her as my main rival has helped push me to a new level. If she wasn’t there pushing me, I might not be as good as I am now.”

Avocados are full of healthy fats

“I eat quite a lot of avocados, because they’re high in healthy fats. I’m burning fat most of the time in training, and avocados fill me up quickly. I don’t have to eat too many of them to feel full.

I’ll usually have one after swimming in the morning – I slice it in half, chop it and have it with poached eggs on toast.”

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Eat pizza the night before a big event

“The night before a big race, I’ll have something very high in carbs, like spaghetti carbonara and pizza. In the morning, I’ll have a bowl of porridge with some peanut butter on toast about three hours before racing. I try to keep things bland, simple and high in carbs as I get close to the race, to reduce the chances of stomach discomfort.”

A foam roller is essential to recovery “When I’m in a big training block, I’ll use a foam roller both before and after my sessions.

I just roll my legs out quickly before a workout to get some blood flowing to the right muscles, and then I’ll do it a bit longer afterwards to help kickstart the recovery process.”

“Yes, I get tired, but thinking about my competition keeps me going. I can’t let anything slip”

Being coached by a computer has its benefits

“It can be hard to turn off from training, especially if I’m away at camp somewhere.

Sometimes a little mindless TV does the trick. We also have quite a few dogs in the family, so I might borrow one to take for a walk. An easy walk with a dog can provide good active recovery”

“Swimming is as low-tech a sport as there is. When I competed in my first Ironman, I had no idea what power was. Learning about all the data you can apply to the sport has been exciting and has helped me enjoy it even more. Now they even have power meters for running, which is something I’d like to explore. I’m just starting to get my head around a power meter for cycling.”

“I have a massive sweet tooth. Chocolate is my biggest weakness. I have some every day. I think it’s important to splurge a little on something you love”

“Everything I do is based on TrainingPeaks software.

My partner Reece [Barclay] is also my coach, and he uploads everything to TrainingPeaks so that I can see what I’m doing on any given day. Sometimes it’s better to have my computer tell me what I have to do, instead of hearing it from him, if you know what I mean.”

Charles will compete at the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii on October 13; lucycharles.com

“At home after a big workout, I typically have a hot bath with magnesium salts. Then I’ll put on compression boots that flush my legs with cool water. I’ve found that a mix of hot and cold works well to help my legs feel refreshed”

Chocs away

Salty support

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Get it

Watches

“THE EARTH FROM HERE IS A GRAND OASIS IN THE BIG VASTNESS OF SPACE” – Jim Lovell

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Lovell would later navigate the crippled Apollo 13 back to Earth

OMEGA SPEEDMASTER

SEE YOU ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON Until 50 years ago, the Moon’s hidden hemisphere remained a mystery to humankind. Now its secrets can be concealed around your wrist

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There and back in seven giant leaps (encompassing 933,419km over six days, three hours and 42 seconds) 1. Launches into orbit 2. Leaves the Earth’s orbit 3. S-IVB rocket stage separates 4. Enters the Moon’s orbit 5. Gathers data, takes photographs 6. Leaves the Moon’s orbit 7. Returns to Earth

THE MOONWATCH

How the Speedmaster became the official astronaut’s timepiece During the Space Race, many astronaut watches were considered, but only Omega’s chronograph withstood NASA’s rigorous testing, including rapid temperature changes from -18°C to 93°C, exposure to tropical conditions, and 40G of shock (six times greater than today’s most extreme rollercoaster).

Non-splintering glass ensured astronauts wouldn’t choke on shards if the watch shattered.

WOLFGANG WIESER

The Moonwatch was worn by Buzz Aldrin during the Apollo 11 mission

OMEGA (3), GETTY IMAGES

ecember 24, 1968.

Apollo 8 command module pilot Jim Lovell was about to gaze upon something that had, until this moment, been hidden from Jim Lovell the eyes of humanity: the dark side of the Moon. When the capsule reappeared 34 minutes later, Lovell described what he’d seen on this historic Christmas Eve: “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”

In fact, the astronaut saw deep craters and a lot of grey. Half a century later, official ‘Moonwatch’ manufacturer Omega is marking the anniversary with the Speedmaster ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ Apollo 8. The watch’s dial is lasered with the lunar ‘light-side’ landscape as seen from Earth, while the dark zirconiumoxide-ceramic rear shows the far-side surface with the words Lovell uttered as he entered that unknown darkness: “We’ll see you on the other side.” Around £8,000; omegawatches.com

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HOW APOLLO 8 REACHED THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

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The yellow motifs hint at its origins as a racing chronograph

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Everything you need this autumn, wherever you’d rather be.

The UK’s Number One Outdoor + Winter Sports Retailer

# U NI TE D BYATTI TU D E

Stores nationwide | snowandrock.com

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See it

TAKING THE PLUNGE

An epic aquatic battle, the ultimate dance-off, and top musicians live in your living room: just a few of the reasons to tune into Red Bull TV this month…

WATCH RED BULL TV ANYWHERE

Red Bull TV is a global digital entertainment destination featuring programming that’s beyond the ordinary and is available any time, anywhere. Go online at redbull.tv, download the app, or connect via your Smart TV. To find out more, visit redbull.tv

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September LIVE

RED BULL CLIFF DIVING WORLD SERIES The 10th anniversary season of the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series comes to a climax in its European home: Polignano a Mare, Italy. Local fans will be hoping that wildcard diver Alessandro De Rose can repeat last year’s historic home victory, and the overall 2018 men’s and women’s champions will lift the King Kahekili Trophy.

The setting is suitably grand: the athletes are taken through a private living room to access diving platforms mounted on a roof terrace high above the Adriatic Sea.

Alessandro De Rose scored a home win in Italy last year

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The USA’s David Colturi was runnerup at Polignano a Mare in 2017

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ROMINA AMATO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, DAMIANO LEVATI/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, CHAD WADSWORTH/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, JAANUS REE/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, LITTLE SHAO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

September/October

Hear hand-picked music and interviews with influential artists.

This month’s pick is…

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to 7 October LIVE

AUSTIN CITY LIMITS MUSIC FESTIVAL

Watch acts including Metallica, Childish Gambino and Janelle Monáe perform across three days in Zilker Park, Austin – the self-styled ‘Live Music Capital of the World’.

DIGGIN’ IN THE CARTS

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to 7 October LIVE

FIA WRC UNITED KINGDOM

The Wales Rally GB kicks off the final stretch of the 2018 WRC season with only three more stops to go. Frenchman Sébastien Ogier clinched his fifth championship win here on M-Sport’s home turf last year. Will he do it again?

September LIVE

RED BULL BC ONE WORLD FINAL ZURICH This battle of attitude, skill and style reaches its final showdown as the 16 national finalists gather on stage in Switzerland to throw down their best moves.

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September ON AIR

Red Bull Radio’s popular series about iconic and forgotten video-game soundtracks (airing every Thursday until November 15) is now its third season.

Tokyo-based journalist Nick Dwyer has pored over hundreds of thousands of tracks, from the 8and 16-bit eras right up to the present day. Along the way, he has linked up with some geniuses of the medium, including Street Fighter II composer Yoko Shimomura and Out Run’s Hiroshi Kawaguchi.

Don’t miss it.

LISTEN AT REDBULLRADIO.COM

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September /October to 22 September 50 Cent on tour Film and TV star, entrepreneur, social media influencer, hilarious guest on late-night chat shows… it’s easy to forget that Curtis ‘50 Cent’ Jackson is a rapper. But he’s here to remind us, celebrating the 15th anniversary of his debut album Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ with four dates, hitting Birmingham, London’s O2 Arena, Manchester and Dublin. Get tickets or die trying.

Various locations, UK; stubhub.co.uk

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October

RED BULL HARDLINE

Half a decade ago, pro mountain biker Dan Atherton had a dream.

For some, it would be more like a nightmare: the most savage downhill MTB course, built to challenge only the world’s most courageous riders. For its fifth year in Dinas Mawddwy, North Wales, this gnarly mix of technical racing lines and obscene freestyle jumps and drops has been tuned up even further. Expect big air in the bottom section. In all regards.

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to 16 September The Good Life Experience If camping isn’t cultural enough, and festivals aren’t delivering the great outdoors you crave, here’s the answer. This threeday wilderness extravaganza combines live music, talks from adventurers such as Ben Fogle, campfire cooking lessons, and craft sessions including wild swimming and fire-walking.

Flintshire, Wales; thegoodlifeexperience.co.uk

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to 23 September The Adventure Travel Film Festival See the irony in watching epic travel documentaries while holed up indoors?

The organisers of this film festival do, which is why they’ve set theirs at a two-day camping event in the Western Highlands of Scotland. Getting there will be an expedition in itself, but you’ll get to see films from as far afield as Greenland and Iran, then discuss them around the campfire with fellow adventure buffs. Inverewe, Scotland; adventuretravelfilmfestival.com

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to 28 October NFL 2018 London Games If American Football is your bag, you can witness three NFL games taking place on British soil. Wembley Stadium will play host as Seattle Seahawks take on Oakland Raiders, Tennessee Titans battle LA Chargers, and Philadelphia Eagles go headto-head with Jacksonville Jaguars. London, England; thomascooksport.com

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GETTY IMAGES, SVEN MARTIN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

Dinas Mawddwy, North Wales; redbull.com

EMIL SOLLIE / RED BULL CONTENT POOL

BEYOND THE ORDINARY

SUBSCRIBE NOW TO THE ACTIVE-LIFESTYLE-MAGAZINE Distributed free every second Tuesday of the month with the London Evening Standard.

Also available across the UK at airports, gyms, hotels, universities and selected retail stores.

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THE RED BULLETIN WORLDWIDE

The Red Bulletin is published in seven countries. This is the cover of October’s Swiss edition, which features mountaineer Stephan Siegrist For more stories beyond the ordinary, go to: redbulletin.com

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Editor-in-Chief Alexander Macheck Deputy Editors-in-Chief Waltraud Hable, Andreas Rottenschlager Creative Director Erik Turek Art Directors Kasimir Reimann (deputy CD), Miles English Head of Photo Fritz Schuster Deputy Head of Photo Marion Batty Photo Director Rudi Übelhör Production Editor Marion Lukas-Wildmann Managing Editor Ulrich Corazza Editors Christian Eberle-Abasolo, Arek Piatek, Stefan Wagner Design Marion Bernert-Thomann, Martina de CarvalhoHutter, Kevin Goll, Carita Najewitz Photo Editors Susie Forman, Ellen Haas, Eva Kerschbaum, Tahira Mirza Global Head of Media Sales Gerhard Riedler Head of Media Sales International Peter Strutz Head of Publishing Development and Product Management Stefan Ebner Country Management and Marketing Sara Varming (mánager), Magdalena Bonecker, Kristina Hummel, Melissa Stutz, Stephanie Winkler Head of Creative Markus Kietreiber Creative Solutions Eva Locker (manager), Verena Schörkhuber, Edith Zöchling-Marchart Commercial Design Peter Knehtl (manager), Sasha Bunch, Simone Fischer, Martina Maier Advertising Placement Andrea Tamás-Loprais Head of Production Veronika Felder Production Wolfgang Stecher (manager), Walter O. Sádaba, Friedrich Indich, Michael Menitz (digital) Repro Clemens Ragotzky (manager), Claudia Heis, Nenad Isailovi c,̀ Maximilian Kment, Josef Mühlbacher Office Management Yvonne Tremmel IT Systems Engineer Michael Thaler Subscriptions and Distribution Peter Schiffer (manager), Klaus Pleninger (distribution), Nicole Glaser (distribution), Yoldaş Yarar (subscriptions) Global Editorial Office Heinrich-Collin-Straße 1, A-1140 Vienna Phone +43 1 90221-28800, Fax +43 1 90221-28809 Web www.redbulletin.com Red Bull Media House GmbH Oberst-Lepperdinger-Straße 11–15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700 General Manager and Publisher Andreas Kornhofer Directors Dietrich Mateschitz, Gerrit Meier, Dietmar Otti, Christopher Reindl

THE RED BULLETIN United Kingdom, ISSN 2308-5894 Editor Ruth Morgan Associate Editor Tom Guise Music Editor Florian Obkircher Chief Sub-Editor Davydd Chong Sub-Editors Joe Curran, Andrew Saxton Publishing Manager Ollie Stretton Advertising Sales Mark Bishop, mark.bishop@redbull.com Thomas Ryan, thomas.ryan@redbull.com Printed by Prinovis GmbH & Co KG, Printing Company Nuremberg, 90471 Nuremberg, Germany UK Office Seven Dials Warehouse, 42-56 Earlham Street, London WC2H 9LA Tel: +44 (0) 20 3117 2000 Subscribe getredbulletin.com Enquiries or orders to: subs@uk. redbulletin.com. Back issues available to purchase at: getredbulletin.com Basic subscription rate is £20.00 per year. International rates are available The Red Bulletin is published 10 times a year. Please allow a maximum of four weeks for delivery of the first issue Customer Service +44 (0)1227 277248, subs@uk.redbulletin.com

THE RED BULLETIN Austria, ISSN 1995-8838 Editor Christian Eberle-Abasolo Proofreaders Hans Fleißner (Ltg.), Petra Hannert, Monika Hasleder, Billy Kirnbauer-Walek Country Project Management Kristina Hummel Media Sales Management Alfred Vrej Minassian Sales Promotion & Project Management Stefanie Krallinger Digital Sales Bernhard Schmied Media Sales Franz Fellner, Thomas Hutterer, anzeigen@at.redbulletin.com

THE RED BULLETIN France, ISSN 2225-4722 Editor Pierre-Henri Camy Country Coordinator Christine Vitel Country Project M ­ anagement Alessandra Ballabeni, alessandra.ballabeni@redbull.com Contributors, Translators and Proofreaders Étienne Bonamy, Frédéric & Susanne Fortas, Suzanne ­Kříženecký, Audrey Plaza, Claire ­Schieffer, Jean-Pascal Vachon, Gwendolyn de Vries

THE RED BULLETIN Germany, ISSN 2079-4258 Editor David Mayer Proofreaders Hans Fleißner (Ltg.), Petra Hannert, Monika Hasleder, Billy Kirnbauer-Walek Country Project Management Natascha Djodat Advertising Sales Martin Olesch, martin.olesch@de.redbulletin.com

THE RED BULLETIN Mexico, ISSN 2308-5924 Editor Luis Alejandro Serrano Associate Editor Inmaculada Sánchez Trejo Managing Editor Marco Payán Proofreader Alma Rosa Guerrero Country Project Management Giovana Mollona Advertising Sales Humberto Amaya Bernard, humberto.amayabernard@redbull.com

THE RED BULLETIN Switzerland, ISSN 2308-5886 Editor Arek Piatek Proofreaders Hans Fleißner (Ltg.), Petra Hannert, Monika Hasleder, Billy Kirnbauer-Walek Country Channel Management Barbara Hobi Advertising Sales Marcel Bannwart, marcel.bannwart@redbull.com

THE RED BULLETIN USA, ISSN 2308-586X Editor-in-Chief Peter Flax Deputy Editor Nora O’Donnell Copy Chief David Caplan Director of Publishing Cheryl Angelheart Country Project Management Melissa Thompson Advertising Sales Todd Peters, todd.peters@redbull.com Dave Szych, dave.szych@redbull.com Tanya Foster, tanya.foster@redbull.com

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YOU NEED TO HEAR THIS.

EARL SWEATSHIRT AND KNXWLEDGE STAY INSIDE TUNE-YARDS PRESENTS C.L.A.W PEAK TIME WITH VIVIAN HOST

AWFUL RECORDS WITH ZACK FOX

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Makes you fly

Here’s what happened when French skateboarder Rémy Taveira went for a ride at the Curious Corner of Chamarel, an upside-down gallery space in Mauritius. The jaunt was filmed for a scene in the skate movie The Lost Continent. Check out the results at redbull.tv

The next issue of THE RED BULLETIN is out on October 9 98

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SAM MCGUIRE/RED BULL CONTENT POOL

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