It’s easy (and fun) to sit and slate all the useless stuff out there—but sometimes it’s nice to give a bit of praise to the things out there that didn’t suck—to look back at the year and think about the bits and pieces that made life a little bit more enjoyable. So before we’re plunged into 2024, here are a few recommendations and highlights from the year known as 2023, from a long list of people who make good things themselves…

Capital is the new one from 90EAST, featuring 25 minutes of detailed street riding filmed in and around the Boston area. Good to see Lino putting that pilot’s license to use with those aerial shots.

DVD copies are on the way.

Whilst we’re often led to believe that time is of the essence and everything must happen right this minute, in reality most things worth dong take a fair while. This interview with Dublin grind-man Eóin Shiel was started back in 2020—a lifetime ago in ‘media terms’—right back when he was adding what he thought were the finishing touches to his third video, Postcards. Nearly three years later, Postcards is finally done, and after much back and forth, so is this interview. Read it now, or read it in three years… what’s the rush?

Interview by Sam. Header photo by Gavin McGlynn

Cathedral is James Newrick’s first foray into the crystal clear world of High Definition, featuring stuff filmed in Newcastle, Manchester and London over the past couple of years. As you’d expect, it’s a true feast combining serious dope manoeuvres and some real classy editing details. Who else is making riding videos inspired by Raymond Carver stories?

If this flier is to be believed, Sandy’s video actually exists. Is this a mere mirage? Has Sandy actually managed to sit down for a while and piece together a video? Or has a certain tattoo-coated bar-spinner been summoned back to the editing desk for one last job? Find out for yourself via the details above.

Here’s 14 minutes of 4:3 movements and motion courtesy of Act Like You Know and co, with sections from Chase Dehart, Frank Lang and Yazan Odeh. Simply embedding a video and writing a brief sentence about it on a blog used to seem pretty lazy, but at a time when the most praise anything gets is one of those strong-arm-flex emojis on an Instagram story, then maybe sharing something on a real website isn’t so bad after all? Anyway, this video is pretty good and that Yazan guy does some cool stuff.

Here’s the new video from the original gutta mutha-fucka himself… Bobby Scerbo. This one’s pretty short and sharp, and features some particularly bodacious moves from Hoogerhyde, Wiz and a chap named Johnny Monaco. We should have copies of this turning up fairly soon along with an accompanying zine, but until then, here you go. And for anyone wondering, according to Google, the word ‘Lacuna’ means a gap or an unfilled space. Make of that what you will.

It’s been said before, but you can tell a lot about a person by the way they ride their bike. Chaotic loose cannons rarely file their tax returns before the deadline, whilst calculated, reserved riders aren’t usually the last to leave the pub.

Matt Miller is no exception to this rule. I met him briefly on a voyage to Philadelphia a while back and can say that not only was he a smooth rider, but he was also a real smooth, courteous character, a long way from the grubby-mitted street gremlins usually associated with 20 inch wheeled bicycles.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, here’s an interview with him about Chocolate Truck 2, Philly street spots and staying suave. Crew photos by Matt, shots of Matt by Naval and Ooti Billeaud. Interview by Sam.

Whilst visual documents of bicycle motions are by no means important in the grand scheme of the galaxy, it’s funny how much of an effect even the smallest decisions that someone made whilst piecing together footage of their friend’s riding can have on people half the world away.

Joe Cox’s videos, Voices and Tomorrow We Work, are prime examples of this phenomenon. At a time when even the supposedly simple task of capturing footage onto your mum’s Hewlett Packard desktop computer required the patience of a saint, he made well-crafted, thought-out videos that tricked a generation of riders into thinking there were spots in Sheffield. He must have helped shift a few Modest Mouse CDs too.

And beyond all this, Joe wasn’t just some ‘filmer guy’, lagging behind the crew with a load of tripods on his back—he was a highly-honed master of the bicycle, riding with a level of finesse that’s hard to muster on the rain-soaked, glass-smashed streets of the north.

Interview by Sam, photos by Newrick, Wozzy and Benson. Interview originally published in Red Steps Issue 5.