All those great Clint Eastwood film posters. Frank Frazetta was also a huge influence, and someone I wished I could be as good as. It was amazing!īut without a doubt, it was the Dave Mann’s work in Easyriders that I loved. I saw him jump at Wembley Stadium in 1975 and crash. Seeing Evel Knievel jump was another big inspiration. Many years later when I worked for the Gun Club, I got to meet Tony Alva as his band The Skoundrels supported the Gun Club at an L.A. It was a big thing for a short time, but again I found myself looking at the likes of Tony Alva and the Dogtown crew as something I really loved. I was also influenced by early skateboarders from the ’70s. I had heard of the HA through papers, but never actually seen pictures of them, and as you can imagine SF California was another planet! I loved the imagery of the bikes those choppers where like flying saucers from another world. We had a second hand book store near me which I use to go to when I was 14, and it had great comics, old Easyriders, but the best bit was it had a section in the back of the shop which housed adult magazines! Playboy, Knave, which was a classic ’70s adult magazine that ran a feature on the Hells Angels. Now those kits blew my tiny mind! Rats driving drag machines, brother Rat Fink on a motorbike, Angel Fink etc.īeing close to London also meant I’d be able to get great comics and magazines. I also loved Aurora model kits and one day can across some old Roth model kits in a newspaper store near my grand parents home. BUT the stuff in those comics that I loved were the ads for life-size Frankenstein’s, Magic Horses, ha ha. Who were some of the artists you were digging back then?Īs a kid, I was heavily influenced by American comics: old Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk, you know, the old DC and Marvel stuff. Some of these guys were old English rockers from the ’60s. I ended up working with one of the members many years later and was told the odd story or two. It was the hangout in the ’70s for one of the first unofficial UK bike chapters: The Nightingales, who as a kid I used to walk past. Seeing these greasy bikers and their shinny machines had me jumping up and down! They looked dangerous. I was raised in a little town just outside of main London Town… a very interesting place… a little place called Thornton Heath. I’m London based, and have been for all my 50 years on this planet. Hey Mike! Can you tell our readers where you’re based? That place on the country road where your headlight reveals past conquests laid out in rubber. The place between the frames of a camera.
That’s the “edge” where Mastrangelo lives. The stories we pass on to those who matter. Fuck yea! Living through those moments are what life’s all about, and inevitably those moments become the stories that define us. You’re either going in the fucking ditch, or you’re straightening her out and leaving a hot testament of rubber snaking across that old country road. Think of it like this: you’re coming in hot on a turn, when suddenly you catch the rear in some loose gravel. By “edge” I mean that line where if you fall off one side you achieve utter brilliance, but on the other it’s nothing but limb-strewn carnage and chaos. Mastrangelo’s work lives on the edge, and by that I don’t mean some bullshit marketing description to signify that something is outrageous. Check out the Manson piece below that he drew for Heavy, and then honestly tell me it isn’t one of the most iconic images in the scene today.
He has an uncanny knack for the “hook”, which I can best describe as the ability to produce an image that instantly becomes etched in your brain. Mastrangelo is that tease that keeps you crawling back for more. His work is fast and loose, like a guitar riff hammered out by a beer soaked Steve Jones dodging bottles at the 100 Club. A low down, dirty punk… and I mean that endearingly.
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