A BMXRacingHistory.com chapter · hosted on Legend Bike Co.

JIVE

A clothing and number plate label out of Belfast, run by a handful of friends who ended up naming a trick the whole world still uses

By Bill Ryan · Founder of Supercross BMX · 37+ years in BMX · Started at SE Racing, 1981

BMX history leans hard toward Southern California, and most of the time the lean is earned. Then there are the chapters that happened somewhere else entirely — on a smaller budget, in worse weather, a long way from any of the magazines — and still ended up printed in them.

JIVE is one of those. It was a clothing and number plate label started in Belfast in the late 1980s by a group of friends who rode together. It was never a large company. It never had a factory. What came out of it was out of all proportion to its size: an American rider sponsored off the strength of a sticker, a trick name that outlived the company by decades, and a few years later one of the longest-running magazines in BMX.

Belfast, late eighties

The label was founded by Will Smyth, alongside Glenn Leyburn, Rick Hall and Scott Maitland. The crew went by the Jive Five. The usual date given for the start is around 1987.

Two things about that description are worth pinning down, because both get flattened in the retelling.

The first is what JIVE actually was. It is remembered now as a number plate company, and the plates are the part that traveled. But the sources are consistent that it was a clothing and number plate label — a small apparel operation that also made plates, not a plate manufacturer that happened to print some shirts. That distinction matters when you are trying to understand what the people involved thought they were doing. They were not in the hardware business. They were building something closer to a record label with bicycles attached.

The second is scale. Keep it honest: this was a handful of mates in Belfast, not an industry. There was no plant, no sales force, no distribution network. What there was, was taste, a lot of late nights, and enough nerve to act like the Atlantic was not there.

Plates made at night

The plates were made by hand, at night, in Rick Hall's house.

Smyth's own account of the period, given years later, puts John Peel's BBC night-time radio show on while the work was going on. Peel's show was, for a lot of people in Britain and Ireland in that era, the only place you heard anything that had not already been approved by somebody else — and what came through it into that room, by Smyth's telling, was punk and hardcore. The Dead Kennedys in particular land in the middle of this story twice.

That is the whole production line. A house, a radio, and a group of friends who thought the plates on sale at the time were not good enough.

Dave Clymer and a Dead Kennedys sticker

JIVE's first American rider was Dave Clymer. The reason he was picked is the single most telling detail in this chapter.

He ran a Dead Kennedys sticker on his number plate.

That was it. That was the scouting process. A crew in Belfast saw a sticker in a magazine photograph, worked out that the rider carrying it was listening to the same records they were listening to while they cut plates at two in the morning, and sponsored him on that basis. No results sheet, no negotiation, no marketing rationale.

It tells you exactly what kind of company this was. JIVE was not trying to sponsor the fastest rider available. It was trying to find its own people, and it used the only signal it trusted.

The nac-nac

The thing JIVE is most likely to be remembered for is not a product at all.

The Belfast crew had been doing a variation on dirt jumps — a can-can thrown backwards, the leg swinging behind the bike rather than over the top tube. By the accounts that survive, Scott Maitland did it best of anyone in the group. They called it a nac-nac, which is can-can reversed, and which is exactly the kind of name that gets invented by people amusing themselves rather than by anyone trying to build a brand.

It reached America through the magazines. Craig “gOrk” Barrette, then at BMX Action, is the editor credited with picking it up. The name first appears in a BMX Action photo caption — recorded as December 1988 — and then, in the March 1989 issue, the magazine ran a photograph by Spike Jonze of Will Smyth doing the trick, under the caption:

“Nac nac. Who's there? Will Smyth.”

One caption, one photograph, one issue. That is the entire mechanism by which a word invented by four friends in Belfast became permanent vocabulary in a sport on the other side of the world. Nearly forty years later the trick is still called a nac-nac, by people who have never heard of JIVE and could not find Belfast on a map.

There is a conflict in the dating that we are not going to smooth over. Some accounts place that first caption in 1987, others in December 1988. We have not resolved which is correct, and it is flagged below.

What came after

JIVE did not last, and it did not need to. Will Smyth went on to found DIG, which grew into one of the most durable independent magazines the sport has produced.

DIG's own materials date the magazine to 1993, and the first issue reached print in April 1993. Some accounts put the start of the project a year earlier, in 1992. Both can be true — a thing begun in one year and printed in the next is the most ordinary story in publishing — but the two dates do get quoted against each other, so we are recording both rather than picking one.

The through-line from the plates to the magazine is not hard to see. Same person, same records on the radio, same instinct to make the thing yourself when the thing you want does not exist.

The American side: JIVE panels in Texas

There is a second half to this story that sits in Central Texas, and it needs handling carefully.

S&S Bikes — the Sheehan family's shop, mail-order desk and trackside trailer outside Austin, and the home of the Tiger Teeth component brand — imported JIVE panels from Ireland. That comes from Supercross BMX's published account of the era, which lists the import as the third thing the operation did after Bitchin' Bolts and the chainwheels.

In BMX usage a panel almost always means a number plate or a plate insert — the trade covered in this library's Wizard Number Plates chapter. A number plate label operating out of Ireland in exactly that window, and an American shop importing number plate panels from Ireland in exactly that window, is a tight fit.

It is not, however, a proven one, and we are not going to print it as though it were. No document we have found names JIVE and S&S together. What lines up is the country, the era, the product category, and Bill Ryan's first-hand recollection of the period. What is missing is a single piece of paper — an invoice, an ad, a catalog page, a customs form — with both names on it. Until that turns up, the honest statement is that the Texas panels were most likely JIVE's, and that we cannot say so flatly.

One further point of precision, since it bears directly on the identification: the Supercross account says Ireland. JIVE was based in Belfast, which is in Northern Ireland. In casual American usage of the period the two were routinely collapsed into one word, so this is not evidence against the match — but it is not evidence for it either, and it should be recorded rather than quietly corrected in one direction or the other.

Where the record runs thin

• The fifth member of the Jive Five. Four names are recorded — Will Smyth, Glenn Leyburn, Rick Hall, Scott Maitland — for a crew called the Five. Whether there was a fifth person, whether the name was simply a good name, or whether someone has dropped out of the retelling, we do not know.
• The founding year. Around 1987 is the figure that gets used. No source we reached gives a firm date, and none gives a date for when JIVE wound down.
• The date of the first nac-nac caption. Recorded as December 1988 in one account and 1987 in another. The March 1989 Spike Jonze photograph of Will Smyth is the better-attested of the two BMX Action appearances. We have not resolved the earlier one.
• DIG's start date. DIG dates itself to 1993 and issue one is placed in April 1993. Some accounts say the magazine was born in 1992. We are recording both.
• Whether the JIVE panels imported into Texas were this JIVE. Set out in full above. Likely, unproven.
• Ireland versus Northern Ireland in the one American source that mentions the panels. Recorded as it stands, not corrected.
• Product record. We could not verify a dated JIVE advertisement, a catalog, a price list, or a photograph of a JIVE plate that we could confirm as period. The plates are described in the sources; they are not, as far as we could reach, pictured in anything we could date.
• The clothing. JIVE is consistently described as a clothing and plates label, and we found essentially nothing about the clothing — no garment, no design, no shop that stocked it.
• Riders beyond Dave Clymer. Clymer is named as the first American rider. Whether there were others, in the United States or at home, is not documented anywhere we looked.

Sources

Will Smyth interview, Deathless Avenue (deathlessavenue.wordpress.com, July 2019), also carried by Profile Racing under the title “Deathless Avenue: the DIY/Punk roots of DIG BMX and its founder, Will Smyth” — the primary source for JIVE as a BMX clothing and number plate company started in the eighties, for the plates being made late at night in Rick Hall's house with John Peel's BBC night-time show on, for the Dead Kennedys as the music running through that room, for Dave Clymer being sponsored as JIVE's first US rider on the strength of a Dead Kennedys sticker on his number plate, and for the Belfast crew's backwards can-can on dirt jumps with Scott Maitland doing it best. Contemporary accounts of the trick's naming — source for the nac-nac name appearing in a BMX Action photo caption dated December 1988, and for the March 1989 BMX Action photograph of Will Smyth by Spike Jonze running under the caption “Nac nac. Who's there? Will Smyth”, with Craig “gOrk” Barrette as the magazine's editor at the time. DIG BMX, digbmx.com — the magazine's own dating of itself to 1993. Supercross BMX, supercrossbmx.com — Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel product page, sole source for S&S Bikes of Central Texas importing JIVE panels from Ireland. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX, 2026 — first-hand recollection of the period, and of JIVE plates and panels reaching the American scene.

No source located to date names JIVE and S&S Bikes in the same document. The identification made on this page is a reasoned one, and it is flagged as such above.

If you rode for JIVE, bought a plate, or have a shirt, an ad, an order form or a dated photograph, that material is exactly what this chapter is missing. It can be sent through the contact page.

Last reviewed: August 2026. This chapter will be updated as additional source material becomes available.