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Name,
job title?
William Smyth, editor and designer of Dig magazine and I live in Belfast.
How long have you been running Dig?
For about eight years now. The first sort of six and a half years
were sort of er, quite chilled out. Like for the first four to five
years I sort of published it myself as and when I wanted to, it was
just kind of a hobby really, then we got a
publisher and it became sort of regular but then the publishers ran
into complications so then we had to change publisher and now it’s
been published bi-monthly for over a year and a half.
How did you get to be such good pals with all the
pros?
Erm, I guess I’ve been into BMX since 1980, so I grew up just
travelling to the states, reading the magazines, travelling across
to America and then I met a lot of those riders that now own companies
and so on. Like I met them when they were just riders like me, just
at the events and we just became friends.
And we also, quite a long time ago, like in the mid 80s, myself and
a couple of friends from over here, we started a little BMX company
making like, we had to all go race BMX so we made number plates and
T-shirts and things like that and our stuff was actually really popular
in the States and we were pretty much the first non-American company
to become popular over there y’know?
What was the company called?
It was called Jive.
So you were like,
underground?
Yeah (laughs). Y’know it was just sort of like a dumb little company
but we kind of got quite friendly with the guys who ran BMX Action
magazine and so we got some photographs in there, so I guess we got
known a bit so when it came to starting the magazine a few years ago,
people sort of knew who we were.
So if you
know all of the owners of these companies, do you blag all your bikes
and components?
Course I do!
(Laughs)
What bike do you
ride then?
Well at the minute I ride a Federal, because I work for them designing
all their graphics but then again they’re just my mates anyway so
probably if I didn’t ride a Federal I’d ride a Terrible One.
Do you still
get excited when you get a new bike?
Yeah, but it’s actually been that long since I’ve had a new bike,
and I don’t even get to ride it nearly as much as I used to because
I’ve had lots of bad injuries and whatnot - basically I’m just a wreck
and I hardly ever get to ride and sometimes when I do ride I don’t
really enjoy it just because I get injured so quickly and so I suppose
all the energy I used to put into riding goes into doing this [Dig]
now.
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