Yamaha's TX650: 1974's Premo Yamaha

At a time when flared trousers and hippies ruled, formica was trending and power-cuts blighted Blighty – this was an endearing distraction.

- Roland Brown

With its high, wide handlebars, big front brake disc and heavily finned parallel-twin engine, the Yamaha TX650 stood out from the crowd of small-capacity bikes in the line-up at old Japanese bike specialist Oxford Classic Honda.

Its paintwork was a rather dull shade that Yamaha apparently called Cinnamon Brown, but its chrome was bright and the TX looked good, just as it must have done to many motorcyclists back in 1974.

Even so, it was a bit of a shock to realise that in the mid-Seventies this relatively simple air-cooled parallel twin was the flagship of Yamaha’s range – at a time when Kawasaki had the mighty 903cc Z1 four, Honda’s CB750 four was into its fifth year, and Suzuki’s range of two-stroke triples was headed by the glitzy, liquid-cooled GT750. By comparison, Yamaha’s reworking of the traditional British format seemed conservative and behind the times.

But that was the situation at the tuning-fork firm, whose main area of expertise was still small-capacity two-stroke twins. Yamaha’s attempts to build a bigger, more luxurious four-stroke model had gone only as far as the 1972-model TX750, also a parallel twin but powered by a balancer shaft-equipped engine that made it smoother, but also heavier and less reliable – and which was quickly abandoned, without even having gone on sale in many countries. That left the simple TX650, a direct descendent of the XS-1 that had put Yamaha on the big-bike map back in 1968.