It’s been a while since we should have written a text about ourselves. This collective has changed a lot throughout the years: starting as nearly a joke to fun of hardcore kids in town (being one of them at that time, one of the current members states that the joke was legit), None of us were in it then. This was 2012, in Salamanca, and some people gathered around to make a festival about bikes, zines (they did one, here), and obviously PUNK. They also organized a lot of shows during that year and the next one.
Then they started to record shows on video, as well as keep organizing them, but less, until they stopped in 2014. A year later, a new BIKE PUNK FEST took place abefore that collective went to sleep, as all of the “original” members left to Madrid (where they still live, organizing a lot of things and play in bands, check them out !!).
In 2016, two people involved in political and musical stuff in Salamanca returned from France and started to organize shows as they did before in the city where they were living (Toulouse). They were also into DIY bike workshop, bike touring, bikers hosting… So the idea come easily: why not a collective that put bike & punk together?
They asked to the past members in order to get the name back: Seitan’s Hell Bike Punx Crew came back to life! Shows happened, the bike workshop too, as well as two more editions of the BIKE PUNK FEST.
In January, 2018, some friends ask us (because yeah, it’s still the same two people since we took back the name :D) if we could put some money to help release their record, so we decided to become a label as well. And a distro, a mix of books, fanzines, vinyls, tapes… everything that could fit in a bike rack was OK!
So we keep organizing, releasing , teaching how to fix bikes… But also decided to move out of Salamanca. Since there was no one interested in taking the whole think, we packed Bike Punk Salamanca with us (yeah, we change the name, two people doesn’t make a crew, does it?) and moved back to Toulouse.
When we arrived, in 2019, we made some changes: starting with the name, we just couldn’t claimed Bike Punk Toulouse as there are so many bike punx in the city, especially some really tough friends; and also, and we had also stopped the bike workshops (there are four in the city that just work really fine :D) we just went back to the roots: Seitan’s Hell Bike Punks give us the place to move again if needed and it’s just a really bad ass name (and hold one of our passions: SEITAN!!).
Anyway the idea was the same: organizing shows, put out records, moving up and down with the distro… We did it, we do it, and we hope this will hold as far as we can get. UP THE PUNX!