The man beside me at the motorbike festival drag strip made me nervous because he was a Hells Angel. I made him nervous because I am a journalist. The Hells Angels are the world's most infamous motorcycle club. This is partly because journalists love writing about how infamous it is. Mutual suspicion results.

I was there in pursuit of a story unremarked in the acres of print devoted to the club's criminal connections. This concerns the counter-intuitive exploits of the British Hells Angels as an events management business.