Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYS IN BACKGROUND]

I remember the first time that I got on a motorbike

I just had this incredible sense that I could go anywhere

do anything and you just want to ride and ride and ride.

If I have a bad day, I go ride my motorbike,

if I'm pissed off, I go ride my motorbike,

if I'm happy and it's a great day, I go ride my motorbike.

I think motorcycles are the most interesting

and curious mechanical phenomenon

because you straddle it, you ride it, it's a very intimate experience.

There's nothing like it. I think it just makes the relationship

with this machine, this curious kind of miracle of physics that is a motorcycle.

It makes that relationship a lot deeper.

It gets into your blood in a very real way

but it literally becomes part of who you are

as a human being and it starts to change you

and I think it changes people for the better.

When you can sit in a room with people who have devoted this much of their life

to it and look at what they're doing, you know they've got a screw loose

and they've got the same loose screw that I have.

When you're truly addicted to riding bikes,

like I am, you can't have a bike in the

garage and not ride it. I'm not even making the decision to be able to ride.

If there's a bike there, I'm already gone.

From a logical point of view, there is no reason for a motorcycle

and yet we have these infernal contraptions

which are difficult, uncomfortable, dangerous

and we're fascinated with them.

That's what I connect to now, that's what I feel passionate about,

that's what gets me up every morning and keeps me up late at night.

This two wheeled transport device that is the closest thing to flying.

It really is.

A custom motorcycle really is a piece of

mechanical art in the way that a car isn't

because you look at a car, everything is hidden, it's a body and four wheels.

A motorcycle, you can see it. You can see the engine,

everything is on display so that's a form of art really and doing the custom thing

kind of amplifies that art.

There aren't many ways to express who you are these days you know

it's an era of mass production. Everybody had the same phone,

everybody had the same car. You know, you live in a shoe box in a suburb.

But a bike is saying 'this is who I am, this is me as an individual'.

So this bike here, that was found in somebody's front garden.

It was the perfect example of what we could

take and turn into this bike over here.

The whole point is to work on your own

thing and make it individual to yourself

and not have something that everyone else has got,

to have your character stamped on something you've built.

Yeah there's bits that I've had to make for it.

There's some Heath Robinson stuff on there.

It doesn't function perfectly, it's not the quickest bike in the world

but it's my bike.

Having something unique is far cooler than having a mass-produced motorcycle.

Apparently.

It's about individuality and going into a Triumph dealership,

a Ducati or Harley dealership, and saying 'l want mine a bit like that'

it gives about as much individuality as getting a different colour phone case

for your iPhone, your generic iPhone.

I love seeing people doing stuff that no-one's seen before.

Good or bad, you just make the craziest thing you can think of every time around.

You know, like when people just go way outside the box.

Just throw the rule book out.

What we don't have enough of is actual real individuals

and I think someone like David from El Solitario is a great example

of someone who genuinely is a fucking individual.

I love David as a human being, he can be a total asshole

you know, but I love him to death. He's so genuine.

He's definitely put himself out there as far as bikes go.

His most hated bike was also, I think, his most publicised bike by far.

That BMW Nine T, you know. The thing looks like a shopping cart but

it photographed so awesome and it had so much vibe to it.

When Paul designated this formula, I know the world's most hated

motorcycle I found it really funny so I adopted it because it just made fun of it.

It took some of my grief out. We were a tiny company and suddenly

this huge monster calls us and says ‘hey we want to do a motorcycle with you,

we're going to pay you, you have creative freedom'. I wanted to make them proud.

I thought everybody was going to love it.

I never in my life thought everybody would hate it.

But I also understood, I knew enough that I had done something really amazing.

I just embraced my personality and tried to make a company out of it and

that's like a myth buster and I can... OK let's fuck it up.

I think it's defined very much more by the rider than the bike itself.

Everyone seems to be riding different bikes,

their interests go off in different areas

where there's some into choppers, some into flat tracker, some into racing

is that it's much more of a level playing field. It's less about money and budget

and what you can afford and what you can do.

The people who have spent their time doing stuff,

learning stuff, researching stuff, living motorcycling.

Today if you look at really what's happening in New York,

it's a bunch of $500 Hondas.

They throw the seat away and put a plank of wood on there that's this size

and that's a custom bike. It's like 'yvou go for it dude' and if that's who's

riding by then he's using his bike, that's cool.

I like the fact that people actually... they'll buy a motorcycle and cut it up

and do something and people are always asking 'how do you get started?' and

dude, just make the cut and then you've started.

Breathing life back into a dead engine is creativity by essence.

You breathe life back, you created life where there was no more life.

I didn't expect it to be a culture that

had so much depth on the engineering side

and the artistry and the community.

I think that trifecta is very relevant today.

It's like it doesn't matter if you're a race bike guy or a drag bike guy

or a street bike guy. Nobody judges.

Or some people do but who cares about them.

It's cool when people, they do what they want

and that's when the purest stuff comes out.

This cool thing that's happening, I think we're just really lucky to be around it

while it's actually happening.

The motorcycling world is becoming like an estuary where it's all mixing and

I think all these cultures are coming together

and there's going to be a lot of clashing

and a lot of people are going to hate that

that's happening get over it, it's happening.

The motorcycle world is changing and honestly

I think it's changing for the better.

The new, sort of, custom scene has empowered a lot of people,

it's democratised people to feel like they can make a motorcycle

which is huge because, from the 90s onwards, motorcycles had become appliances

they'd become so good, you didn't need to know how to do anything because

there was nothing to do. If it broke, you couldn't fix it anyway.

If you want to call it a new wave scene, then fine but I would just call it

an evolution of motorcycling.

Originally it was a conversation that John Copeland had with Jeffrey Shad.

There wasn't really a show that showcased

builders in the aesthetic quality that they appreciated.

So just giving a platform and opportunity to have people show off their work.

It's the invitational because we go out of our way to invite someone to showcase

something that they've created, that we really appreciate.

I think good work speaks for itself and it doesn't need to be a certain style,

a certain era, a certain period, you know, amazing work is amazing work

no matter what kind of bike it is.

A lot of people ask that we should get a bigger space, more bike and what not

but I think it's good to have that small amount of bikes, more exclusive,

and also you get to spend more time with each bike to just enjoy.

We want to kind of create the event that we can bridge those gaps,

celebrate the whole culture of motorcycles.

You'll see your Fortune 500 CEO sitting

right next to a Hell's Angel guy and

both of them are appreciating the same thing.

I mean, I never see them in any other context

other than that, things like these shows, like the invitational, do that.

It just forces people to participate in each other's world.

But there's no awards. There's no 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place.

That's another thing that's cool.

You can't really judge these bikes against each other.

Because they're all so different so to me just being on the list and

having that recognition is just enough. It's all you really want. It's cool.

I think motorcycles themselves are counter-cultural.

They're intimidating, they're aggressive, they're fast, they're dangerous.

Ever since the first bike came, someone wanted to pull it apart, individualise it,

make it faster, tweak it, and put their own personality into it.

Motorcycles are cool, they've always been cool and if you had been alive in 1910,

you would have thought motorcycles were cool

because they were cool and guess what?

they still are cool. We're on this little

tip of the present and there's 150 years

of interesting stuff that's every bit as cool as what's happening today.

There's a history of bike that you need to understand and be aware of

but at the end of the day, you're a free person, you can do whatever you want.

But I think you need an understanding of what's gone on before you in some respect

and then you can make a judgement call on certain things

but if you just ignore everything, you're just a prick.

The historical roots in this, you could go back to after the second world war

in America where all the soldiers came back

and they chopped up Harleys and that's

where the bobber scene came from. In the UK it was from the 60s,

from the Cafe Racers, the Ton Up boys, trying to make their bikes lighter.

It wasn't about aesthetics then, it was making it as fast as possible.

It was back in the 50s/60s where, when there was no surf going on in California

they would get on their Triumphs and BSAs and Nortons and head off into the hills

so that culture moved on and then changing their bikes, adapting their bikes.

In the late 50s, California motorcycle clubs,

especially started to alter their motorcycles

to make them lighter and longer and more elegant and eventually these became

painted wildly and chromed as the 50s went

into the 60s they began to alter the frames

and they became choppers by the early 1960s

as we know them. And the ultimate expression

of the chopper were the bikes that you see in Easy Rider.

Exposure on television in the early 2000s really grew the awareness

for the general public to custom bikes. The Jesse James stuff,

Orange County Choppers, and people like that but 2008,

economic depression, and killed a lot of the custom bike world.

You know, same thing with us, I mean at a point, we're building huge ZX14 or

a Busa stretched thing, they're expensive

machines and then the market collapses,

I remember the photo shoot we were on when the market collapsed. It was a reset.

Customs had become kind of grotesque and then the reset happens

and you have a $1000 motorcycle with $500 worth of money put into it

from a guy who just learned how to weld two

weeks ago and you're looking at it going

... it's compelling. It may not ride for shit but it's a cool looking bike.

It seems like 2008 was the year, there was the big crash,

everybody had all those big bikes and they couldn't sell them.

And it took the whole industry back to square one and I think it made a lot

of us re-think what we were doing, what was important, not to be corny but

I think it brought back the soul of motorcycling.

People were buying cheap Japanese bikes 300/500, whatever the money was

and making that vehicle your own because you would do it still in an affordable way

something that was unique. And that was, you know, a wake up call for me.

It was a wake-up call for the whole company.

So Analog Motorcycles started in 2008. I built a custom bike was kind of um...

on a whim. Did it. After the bike was done it got a lot of press.

Started getting people randomly, all over the country, asking me to build a custom.

It started to take off, build steam, then in 2013 I started to quit my day job

and go full time and I haven't looked back.

I grew up riding on the back of my dad's Vincent and he grew up riding

on the back of his dad's Vincent. So there's quite, family influences there.

I lost my bike license through speeding so if I

couldn't ride a bike I thought I'd build one.

I spent a few years as a flaming alcoholic and when I got through all of that

I started working a lot to keep my mind away from that so maybe I just transferred

one actual addiction to a new one, I don't know.

I was in the foreign service for many years and built motorcycles on the side

as a second job. I usually started my evening at 7 o'clock in the workshop

and I worked until midnight, 1 o'clock in the morning. Over time it just

became the focus of my life and now the last 12 years it's a full time business.

Yeah I started out mainly in advertising, I was in a big agency in Richmond

Virginia for about 11 years. I got laid off. They came and told me and everything

kind of went in slow motion for a second and like, oh I'm getting laid off.

But at the same time I felt like it was actually liberating. I'm not going to

go back to advertising and do that stuff when I could start building motorcycles

‘cause I'd already been doing it for a while.

I had a great job with a start-up company doing really cool work, getting patents,

designing the coolest stuff with all the resources I could ever want,

an engineers dream job, with a great group of guys and I was like, nah,

I'm going to leave, I'm going to move to Texas, I'm going to start a

motorcycle shop and they're like 'you're nuts, you're out of your mind,

you're destined to be broke for the rest of your life' which so far

is not that far off. And I'm saying ‘no come be a broke dick

with me, let's have nothing.'

I didn't even get into motorcycles, I didn't have a choice.

My whole family in Lebanon/Syria were metal workers, tinsmiths and mechanics

and when they came here, they brought tools. My father had 60/70 bikes

in the yard. I was 15, 16 where he told me 'if you can fix one of those bikes

in the back, you can have it'.

I worked for a large bank for 6 years, I was a manager there and I definitely

could have continued my career in the bank but it just wasn't me.

We could feel that there was something going on, when we did the blogging,

we see the number of visitors just... so I think it was more accidental

that we just happened to do that at the time when other people got

more or less the same idea.

Wheels & Waves started as the Southsiders anniversary.

There was a party, they did in Toulouse, and we were like, 20 guys

then the idea of making a bigger, better show, more happening in Vincent's brain

and the Southsiders with Jerome. One summer we said, OK we're going to do it.

We're going to do this event, it's going to be called Wheels & Waves.

It was about bringing everything that is cool about motorcycles

without looking at the different scenes as independent entities.

It was something that had never been done before.

We just, from a profound love of motorcycles, especially Vincent

ahead of it, of the movement, he wanted to build a really inclusive event.

This is really bigger than us. This is much bigger than us and there is

not one Wheels & Waves, there are thousands of Wheels & Waves.

It just depends of what yours looks like. Wheels & Waves now is

just an excuse for motorcycle freaks to travel, take a week off work,

and ride with your buddies. That's the thing.

Yeah that's the thing, you live it. You're not just a spectator,

you're an actor of the events. The surfing competition, the punk's peak competition,

the dirt track competition, the ridings with the people, even the

hanging out in the city with your bikers, your crew. You are part of

it and you're there. I don't know so many of us that have the same spirit.

For me we are in the middle of what motorcycles should look like.

That's what's so cool about this place.

Anything goes and the rules are very loose.

And that's what's so inspiring. People take whatever they find and

they build a cool custom out of it. It's not all about money and

it's just a totally different thing. And people ride it here. Everyone is riding.

The very cool thing about flat track racing is that you can't go

to a factory and say 'can I have a dirt track bike' 'cause it doesn't exist.

You have to build it and after that you can race.

So that's why the custom scene, building the bikes, and racing,

that's why I think they are, be the same.

It's like family but it's racing on a track.

There is no bad elbow, everything is fine.

Everybody is a friend but on the track everybody is on the gas.

I mean, what's the first thing you do when you're a kid?

You either try and wheelie a bike, jump a bike or skid a bike.

So if you're just going around skidding all day, what could be more fun?

On one hand we have the industry, I think they were lost. It's got to a point

where it wasn't relevant any more, for the customers and in the other hand,

we have this custom scene which is full of talent and I think we speak

the language, the new language they need to speak.

It really is a case of the people have spoken. Something that's more accessible,

more stylish, literally going down to the nearest cafe

and back is what people want.

The barrier to entry is so low in terms of

cost which is perhaps where it all started.

The social barrier to entry is lower. You

don't need to feel scared turning up at a big

biker event where everyone is going to expect you to do a wheelie.

One of the things I like about motorcycles and always have liked about motorcycles

is that they're very democratic. And yes you can buy expensive motorcycles,

but you can buy a cheap motorcycle and you can have a go.

You know, you can pick a 125 on eBay for 400 quid, do your own little mods,

and rock around town and be very proud of it. That's great.

What excites me personally and our team is young people just getting in

and getting their hands dirty and making stuff.

Creating their own personal expression and that becomes a snowball, right.

There's only a couple of thousand people in the world who are customising

motorcycles now. But their visibility and the number of people interested

in seeing that, is huge so the ripple effect is where the big impact is.

I think the blog was initially the biggest thing - Bike Shed, Bike EXIF,

Pipeburn all those sorts of things. People then can really start following

what other people are up to and there's normally a story

with all the pictures and then when there was an opportunity for an event

to come on, and people could see these bikes in the flesh.

Yeah my name's Thor and honestly, I don't know how I got here.

Time travelling. No, I run The One Motorcycle Show, just a hobby

gone wild. It just got away from me a little.

It would be hard for me to say that I started a movement because

it could have just been everybody was ready for something different.

What I was doing was counter to everything that I'd experienced.

I didn't want to be like anybody else. I didn't want to battle with other shows.

I didn't want to take their customers, I

wanted to create something new and different.

So everything that we've done, we've done it the hard way.

Because it's counter, and make something that people say like 'wow, it's free'.

Nothing's free any more. And then they say 'why don't you charge?' and then

the right people will come and I say 'that defeats the purpose of

having the show, to get everybody to come' and definitely the biggest part

of it is we look towards the sponsorships for

covering the costs of putting on the show.

Harley Davidson and BMW have been huge supporters of the show

and Icon since day one.

There's dirt bikes and there's race bikes and there's just hardcore choppers

all together in one show. To me that's the brilliant part

of the One Show because as a motorcyclist, I do all those things

and to be able to see all those communities come together

at One Show is really quite remarkable.

But the One Show for sure is still a place where your $1500 build

commands respect for exactly what it is.

Every builder that's got a bike in there, I can't promise them anything.

They haven't paid any money to enter the bike,they've come from all over

the world. A lot of people spending a lot of money to get here and I can't

say that they're going to have world fame for it but you've just got to show up

and see what happens. Be part of it.

The one thing about the One Show is that it's not a single bike show.

It's putting the custom umbrella over ever sort of custom

and by casting that big net, you basically put a big spotlight up to anybody

that was doing a custom bike. Got everyone's attention to it and that's

what has allowed it to grow.

We have put on a few races and many of the races for fun.

It's just part of human nature to like race so the only thing that will

kind of sustain itself for a long time is racing and then I clearly

saw the whole picture from the person who's never raced to the future of racing.

Taking the race crowd and putting them in a setting like this is kind of interesting

and the taking the guys that know about choppers and bring them down the races

and the two work together. Two wheels and a motor and it's the same thing.

There wasn't, I mean in '08 I think Facebook was around but there

really wasn't a lot of digital media or social media starting out.

When it started to pick up, we jumped on right away.

It was actually the first guy I hired, a guy that was a photographer that

took care of our social media. That, for most people, is our marketing.

That's the window that the world sees into Analog Motorcycles.

You can build something, put it online and 270,000 people reached, boom.

And that's amazing. Years ago you couldn't do something like that.

You needed a TV show, you needed to be in

magazines for years to have people see your work.

When I got into it, two magazines were coming out once a month

with 3 or 4 bike features in it and it's almost like they delegated what

was cool and what was not. They were deciding what was

the motorcycle industry custom-wise. And now what we're seeing is

we're in control of the whole thing really.

You know, now anybody who put their name out there, people can see it.

And if you do good work, people want to see it so they start following you

and shit. It's not the guy with the huge name who always has the upper hand.

We as consumers of this information, consumers of this content, are getting

things instantly. You can see what I made 20 minutes ago and I can walk you around

it live on the internet. I don't know if something's lost or something's gained.

It goes one way or another, 10 minutes later you've got to do something new.

The longevity of custom bikes online can be surprisingly short. 24 / 48 hours.

For something that could've taken a year to build, that's a really short life.

OK I saw that yesterday, what's out there today? And that's 3 years

of a man's life you looked at yesterday. What do you mean what have you got now?

People come out and they're Instagram, they're Insta-famous. They get all this

going and then the business comes after the fame, you know what I mean?

I think we need to be careful and not let the internet or the social media

kind of start drowning out the camaraderie and the coolness

of what the culture actually is.

So it's so easy to criticise when you do nothing. Actually the people who make

never criticise. They respect the fact that you made. The haters will be haters forever.

We don't give a fuck. We know who we are, where we come from, where we want to go.

Yeah we get builders who are clearly at their wits end and they've been working

their arses off for like, 12 months on a bike and you'll get some peanut gallery

blow hard who will just leave a really pithy one sentence remark

and yeah, builders will crumble at that.

And they like nothing better than getting you to engage them

‘cause no matter what, you're going to come out looking like an asshole.

There's been so many times I've wanted to just go right for the jugular and

be like, 'listen it might have been a bad weld but your girlfriend's fat'.

You know, 'l checked out your page' and I've been dying to say that for so long,

something like that. But at the end of the day, I look around me and

I get to do this for a living so if I'm going to have the occasional people online

telling me that I'm an idiot and I can't weld, and I suck at

building motorcycles, I can live with that.

If you do say why you don't like it, give the alternative, like it could be this

but criticism, not just being negative because you're not really helping

by being negative. But yeah, whatever. People are mean.

I've had death threats. There was one guy who emailed, 'you fucking faggot,

will you stop showing these fucking gay bikes,

I'm going to come ‘round to your fucking house and kill you'.

My biggest problem is people on Instagram don't do anything other than Instagram.

They'll look at it and they won't even read the text that says

the thing they're asking. They'll just post up the question.

‘What bike is that?' It says right there, it's a BMW R100.

Like, it's not that hard!

The American magazine Cycle World, they do events marketing so the big

opportunity they see is running motorcycle shows. People paying

$10/$20 to get though the door in a show. And that's why people like Revival

who are really smart because they figured that out, and the Bike Shed as well

so the event really is a gold mine.

I'm Vikki van Someren, the queen of fucking everything and I run the Bike Shed

for London, Paris, Milan and the rest of the world.

We were sat in a pub and we were about to go to a bike show and

we were all having that Carlsberg moment when you sit there and say, you know,

what if we put on a show? And a week later, my husband booked a venue

I think because, as bikers, we were tired of the same old trade format.

You know, the rubbish food, the Lycra girls and we wanted something that was

more reflective of us as individuals. You know, when you look around

this is everybody's individual style through their motorcycle.

So Bike Shed One was a punt, it was an idea. We ran the show for free,

we had two arches in Shoreditch and 70 bikes if I remember correctly.

It was very much a pop-up, amateur vibe to it. But 3,000 people turned up.

That summer of 2012, the whole scene suddenly found its voice

and started to feel like something tangible. We were trying to do something

that was the opposite of a trade fair. It needed to be a destination,

a place worth going. It needed to be about the creative side of motorcycle culture.

There's people come here to check out the latest build from XYZ builder,

but there's a lot of people come here just to gain inspiration and see what someone

else did in their shed or garage or workshop and think well I can

go away and I'm going to do that myself and maybe come back next year

and enter my bike into a show. Or people just want to come and have a look at

beautiful things, beautiful engineering and I think here you've got it in spades.

I think this is far more about style. There's decent food, there's decent

drink, things to look at. It's a nice experience.

In fact, you'd have a nice experience here even if you weren't a biker.

It's really important for us. It's important because

it's the first contact point with our customer, this kind of customer.

Because we can learn, we can talk with these people you know

and we can go back in the office with more and more ideas

of what to do in the future.

We only do the show so people can come and see what we do and

when they see the finish on the bikes, that's when the builds start to come in.

We sold six bikes in six days. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

then one on the following Monday. £16,500 a piece so yeah they saw

our work at a show, they come and have a look at what we do, and that's it.

Events like this allow people to take innovative leaps because they just feed

off each other. Because as soon as somebody does something really innovative,

and everyone sees it, the whole movement steps forward.

We got a project with Stuart Garner, CEO at Norton and I was up there one day

talking bikes with him, and just chewing the fat really and having a laugh

and I said, 'l'd really like to build a bike' and his term, without swearing, was

'OK f*** off and do it'.

It's a Norton Commando 961 stock road bike, that's the base bike

and it's been quite modified. You're always a little bit nervous when

you come up with a design for a bike and you build something, you know,

you've invested a lot of time and money and you want people to love it.

It's kind of a re-creation of a world famous flat track bike from the 70s

designed by Ron Woods who kind of revolutionised flat track racing.

We have all this technology now, we have amazing motorcycles,

amazing electronics, difficult to crash,

reliable, everything you could want really.

You know, the benefit to progress and civilisation

and we're really saying ‘no, we don't want that.'

There are entirely too many people in my opinion, that are completely

removed from how the things are made that they own.

And I wasn't raised that way. I was raised in a home where

we typically fixed what broke. We didn't hire a repair man

when the dishwasher went down.

So much of the physical world these days just exists

and we don't think about that at all. Where in reality, every single thing

that exists, had to be created. It had to be put together.

Somebody made this thing.

There's this kind of re-appropriation of the making process and therefore

I assume, I presume the respect of the makers.

A few years ago, there was a small amount of people

a small demographic that were interested in craftsmanship

or the hand made thing. All of a sudden, there's a lot more

people interested in the sort of things that I do.

Yeah everybody that I've ever learned anything from

were 50... 60... 70... 80 years old. It takes a certain amount of money

and quality and dedication that I have to have in order to put

my company stamp on it. It's a little sculpture

by the time I'm done and I love that but if somebody just wants me to

put some shit ball logo on there, I'm not going to do it.

And so much effort and time learning how to do this,

I'm not just going to throw it away on some pile of shit.

If you start off with shit, it's just going to be a fancy piece of shit

in the end.

There's an element of taking the power back by doing it

yourself, doing it on a budget, not being given what the big

companies are selling you.

The kind of people I'm getting coming to me are guys who are

tech guys who just want to do something. They just want to make something.

And they don't get that from their job or from daily life or whatever so

they do it on a bike... and I can see there's tonnes of people like that.

The feeling you get when you've built something or even had a go

at building it, even if you buy parts or if you bolt on a part

you bought, there's still satisfaction in that.

It's just nice to be given one small problem that might take

a while to overcome and if you overcome that, you're good for the day.

And it's even bigger, this feeling, when you build it by yourself

because you know it by heart. It's not just an object, it's a living object.

I've followed everything on YouTube and I've got my manual,

I know exactly what I'm doing. My caliper is perfect.

And I get out on the A12, have to stop and I go smack into the back of a car.

The older and rarer the bike, the more I'm intrigued.

Figuring out the sources, there's these old brown papers that have been crumpled

up for years that are in the back of a manual.

You know, I just geek out on it. I really love it.

Any of the old bikes, they just feel different. You can hear them,

you can feel the motor, it just feels like you're part of it.

Almost like you're on a trip with a good friend.

Like it doesn't matter, even if they're being a pain in the ass

that day you still know you'd rather be on the trip with them.

Old bikes you can fix with two wrenches on the side of the road

and go on about your business. New bikes you've got to call

somebody so they can put a computer box in there, you know.

People talk about old bikes like they're unreliable you know,

but it's like 'no, I can fix it' and keep going.

You definitely have to educate your customer on the reality of

what they're asking for. They want something, they go into their garage,

and they push a button and it starts every time and it's low

maintenance. Is it going to be a world war 2 era knucklehead? No.

If you're going to spend £20k customising a bike,

do you want it to be worth £20k at the end?

Because if so, you need to start with a Ducati or a Harley

or something else that's got a bit of quality about it that's

got some perceived value because we know from experience

that you can spend as much as you want but when you come to sell a bike,

If it's a CX500, they'll only pay what a CX500's worth

and their argument will be, but it's a CX500.

So we start always on older bikes, from the inside out.

On newer bikes, we can just go from the outside in.

We don't need to take them totally apart.

It's the amount of bikes I've seen that have got Ohlins shocks and this and that

and they've spent thousands of pounds putting all this race

kit on a 750, 35 year old bike that's done 150...

I mean, what the fuck is the point in that? Know what I mean?

What's the point?

A lot of builders I speak to will say to me, 'l won't work on old bikes any more'

They spend the first 100 hours of a build just stripping a bike and

re-finishing it and re-making it. All they've done is restore a bike

and they've spent half the budget and then they've got to spend

the same money again to customise it.

I think I prefer modern bikes because of the performance

I love big tyres, big brakes, all the race shit actually

It's crazy to drive that kind of bike because you're flying.

You can't really get in and customise new stuff as

much as you can old stuff. That's the thing, I've been

doing this 2017 model, it's like I can't re-wire that thing.

You've got to be an electrical engineer to re-wire that thing and

even then you're going to have some problems, you know.

You can't really do anything with the injections stuff that...

without computer that only the dealership is allowed to have.

I've also ridden some motorcycles that have been very de-clawed by technology.

You know, you get on a bike and all of a sudden you can't do a burn out,

you can't ride a wheelie, you can't skid the rear break.

I don't even want to ride it. I don't even care if it makes 200 horse power.

If you're stuck with a new bike and you can't change anything

because the computer packs up and goes into shutdown

because it senses a new headlight being put on

well the whole industry is in trouble.

When people come up and and say a bike is like, OK, that's the budget

but I can go buy a new bike for that price. Yeah.. yes..

I can get a brand new one for that. Yeah. Maybe that's what already happened

with the customers. They're buying new bikes. When you get new bikes that look

like custom bikes if you don't know the difference.

It gives them a soft landing into the scene.

People see a bike, they see the individualism of the bike

probably thinking, oh that's awesome, I'm never able to build that myself

and in the past that means this scene's not for you.

But right now if you see new bikes coming out from manufacturers that

have the same air to them as the bikes in this scene.

Yeah you come to a show like this, and there's so much stuff

but it all comes down to the crowd. It doesn't matter what you like in

motorcycles, or don't like, for me it's all about the craftsmanship

and the work and just the attitude and the style

and the bike doesn't have to be a trailer queen to be a winner.

Yeah I think one of the good things about these shows is most of us

especially those of us that live in the colder climates,

it's just like we're in our own little world in our shop

just working away, doing all this. I found over the years, my social

life has become less and less. I think that's the good thing

about these shows, that we come for the social aspect

of the business. When you bring it out it's like, 'Aw, where have you been

for all these months?" Well I was doing this.

That something that a show like this, a hand built show, proves is

you can take any kind of bike and build something really cool.

You can go outside the box no matter what. You don't have to have

a knucklehead to build a cool bike.

We would go to motorcycles shows and it would always be the same fucking thing.

There was some old curmudgeon asshole, or 400 of them,

that would treat you like you wouldn't know shit

because you didn't have any grey hair or facial hair,

and it was always like you were not, you were automatically

excluded from their fucking club.

It was called the Handbuilt Motorcycle Show because these are people

like us with limited resources and they're building something with their hands

and learning that that actually has value. Let's create something

that we try our best to allow it to be instead of

determining what it should be. Does that make sense?

What's been the most satisfying part of that, in doing

what we're doing with the event and all this other stuff,

is seeing other people's personal discovery.

There are multiple people that have come to this little show

we do which was just an excuse to bring together a bunch of guys

that we respected who've never even thought of a motorcycle but they

came, they looked and they went 'vou know what, maybe they're right

maybe I can do this' and now there were multiple bikes in the show

this year that were built because they went to the first show.

The fact that the Wall of Death is there is not just an accident.

That's not just like 'oh this might be kind of cool'. No that was a

conscious thought of... we want to find a way to get people that don't ride

to have the visceral experience of what it's like to ride somehow.

Just to give them some small taste of it. To get up close and

personal with functioning bikes.

Before, it was niche and it was sub-culture, and it was a little bit

more people in the know, but social media has just attracted

a bigger volume and that means you do see more couples and

more young people and more people from just outside the scene

on the fringes. If we don't attract new people into the it and make

them passionate about it, motorcycles won't exist in

20 years time. They'll be legislated out existence.

Yeah we need more people with energy, we need more doers

and it's the young people who are kind of coming in

from a new angle. They haven't been influenced in the past and

they're pushing it in new directions and that's what

any progressive culture needs.

All production, all manufacturing, the ability to do things with your hands

is largely exited, it's gone. We outsource everything.

And it's really... I don't think anyone expected it but it's

really our generation that like 'wait a minute, our dads, our

grandparents used to do this. If they could do it, we can definitely do it.'

I'm so sick of these people who have been in the business for a long time

getting pissed off with these newcomers.

It's like, at some point you were a newcomer. They're like, who cares.

Well five years ago they were riding skateboards. Who gives a fuck?

Now they're riding a motorcycle. Good.

There is a younger demographic that is interested in motorcycling

and custom motorcycles and choppers and cafes and it's

affordable and anybody can still do it.

You've got kids of 22 right the way through to people who are 62.

If they've only got £2k, they can get into this.

At the other end of the extreme, if you want to got to one of the

well-known makers, put down £18k/£22k, you can do that as well.

And again, like buying it, you can buy a 125 and make it cool.

It's just cheap and affordable and if you feel cool riding a 125

you've pimped out, that's rad.

And now there's this new breath of air, there's a fresh interest

in the younger demographic and I think it's inspiring.

If you look at the custom scene, it's much much younger

which is gold dust for the manufacturers. Instead of selling

motorcycles to retired dentists, who are going to be dead in 10 years time,

you've got somebody who has a 30 year buying life cycle.

It's really important to make sure that younger people

getting into the scene are made to feel welcome.

It's not going to grow from the same old guys building

the same old stuff. It's going to grow from someone being

included, having different ideas, bringing something new to it

that's going to help keep it going.

I'll be completely honest with you, the very first time I came here,

I said, 'well we'll go but it looks like one of those hipster things.'

And we showed up and I'm like, ‘those guys have their jeans rolled up.

This is one of those hipster things'. By the end of the weekend, I said

you know, these guys are awesome.

Ever since we started Blitz with Hugo, I never met so many interesting

and interested persons in my life.

All you need to do to belong is just want to belong and

try to bring something on the table but try to work always

with a giving sense, not like try to leave an imprint.

This place has always, always been not about an individual person.

It's always been about a group of people.

And if we were building a bike, whoever turned up that day

would work on that bike.

Petrol heads, you can't help it. Motorcycles are in the blood I'm afraid.

I came last year, had an amazing time, so many bikes.

So many really nice people and yeah, it's a must do.

Well I think the racing here, I think that's what sets this one off.

The fact that people are getting to get their bikes out and

come out, fire 'em up, line up, smell the smoke,

see the tyres spinning, see the mud, it's just brilliant really.

My name is Radical Edwards of Radical Edwards Performance.

I'm here to race. I'm just here for general carrying on and fun and games

and other sorts of malarkey.

What's different about the Malle Mile, it's not too serious, it's a lot of fun,

it's open to anybody, that just wants to bring their bike

and chuck it down the track and it actually goes back to the grass roots

of motorbike racing. That's really where the custom bike scene started.

It's people taking their bike that they ride every day,

and taking bits off it to make it go faster, race it down the road.

What's the Trip Out? A lot of people get the wrong impression

of it 'cause they think it's a chopper show.

Yes it is a chopper show but it's also a culture show.

You get to see good bikes, be with your good friends,

giving people a sense of freedom, a bit of hope I suppose.

A lot of people go and they've got this wannabe hard man image.

Fuck all that shit mate. It's no good, is it?

Sometimes you want to let your hair down and just dance to the Bee Gees.

The Trip Out's great although it's a massive headache

and I will say that on camera. It's a bigger headache than

any of you can imagine. Logistical stuff, councils,

noise police, health and safety, fire risks, and generally

the man not wanting you to have a good party, innit.

Yeah the chopper scene at the Trip Out is... this is what people would have done

in the 60s and 70s. They had the chops and during the whole era

of build what you've got and people were doing Triumphs,

they were doing Harleys, whatever they could get hold of.

That's what you see here. It's not all about the shine

and the sheen, it's about what gets you down the road

so everything's purpose built and that's what I like about it.

Well we bought a mini-bike and we were sitting there not

doing anything on it, eating breakfast, and we said yeah

we should build a mini-bike, got a picture up like a Taco,

60s mini-bike, 3-speed with reverse, so 4-speed I suppose,

wheel barrow wheels, with a CG125 rear sprocket.

Got a show field pass, and we're going to try and do the

chop slalom if it's still on. It's a bit wet so the tyre

compound's not really ideal on it.

But if we can enter it, we will.

Everybody wants to come to Dirtquake. It's the coolest go fast event.

I've heard all sorts of whacky and weird rumours about it all

but I'm here now and yeah, looking forward to it.

I'm weird and whacky so why not get involved?

It's a dirt track race mainly for people who may not have

raced dirt track before, to give them a taste.

It's not professional racers, it's amateurs and some of them

are very amateur and some of the amateurs are quite professional

but no-one's here for the money, no-one really cares who wins or loses,

the spectators don't know who wins or loses.

The only guy who cares who wins is the guy who won

and the guy who came second, he would have liked to win.

No-one else cares. You don't need a race bike,

you don't need any experience. You turn up and race.

It's just something a bit different, it's not racing showroom motorbikes

that are all the bloody same, that all make the same noise.

It's a celebration of happiness first of all and I think,

happiness on two wheels so it's a way to introduce people and

tell them that that's fun, it's not that dangerous, it's friendly,

and you don't need to have a $30k bike to have fun.

So this bike my friends bought, oh look it's a number 1.

My friends bought this on eBay for £11 and handed it to me and

were like 'you wanna race it?' and I'm like 'sure'.

At Dirtquake, I saw a lot of messing around but not a lot

of bad crashes 'cause I think it's a great start from somebody

who wants to get into flat track. Go to Dirtquake, you can take any bike.

You can go back to work on Monday and say

'l raced my motorbike this weekend' and you really raced it.

I like being able to tell people I'm a motorcycle racer. Whatever my results are.

When I first started riding motorbikes, there were no other women.

I didn't know anybody that rode a motorbike that was another woman.

There is no getting around the fact that it was boys club

and the women who had been riding 20 years before me,

they experienced it ten fold.

Yeah very sexist, misogynist, very... the club culture of like...

women are property and they never ride, they're never part of anything,

they don't own anything. It's horrendous actually.

Women still get a hard time, you know, as a girl

pulls up on a bike, it's a big bike, guys are like

'oh is she going to drop it?' but you know what, I think

this scene in particular is supportive of women riders.

The coolest thing I've noticed about this show in particular is

there's more female bike builders here as well.

So it's not just riders and girls like us that make clothes

but girls that are wrenching and building their own bikes

and showing them. And that's really inspiring to me.

People don't really care too much about my gender.

They care more about the product, but for me, my gender, I've had

a very lucky experience and I know a lot of women who have not.

And I empathise with that and I also am trying to help change that

the way that they're trying to change it and men are following suit.

Men are participating in this social change just as hard as

the women are. I feel like they're helping because

they realise that it's important.

It's a far more inclusive market. It's far more, both female friendly

and I think to a certain extent, family friendly.

And what's amazing is that the bike media, the

traditional bike media, doesn't seem to have noticed.

I see way more women on the road, I see more riding

groups pop up and I see a lot on social media which is great

That's where a lot of people are connecting and we encourage people to connect.

There's a big buzz word all over now about feminism

and women doing it for themselves and I think motorcycling

has just maybe become a part of that. I think it's a good timing thing

with the custom scene coming to the fore and then

it happening around the same time as a lot of other things

in women's lives.

We have the potential to change the industry for the better.

Women are fitting in in a different way.

They're exposed directly to stories about other strong women

who are coming up on their own and doing this.

But right now you're dealing with a lot of women who are

best known for Insta-fame and that's dangerous.

They're riding, they're racing, they're doing really interesting things

but it's really easy to write them off

Looking at some of the more trendy Instagram photos and

things for women in motorcycling that are happening right now,

you can look at it as an extrapolation of old Easy Riders

in a negative way, or you can look at it in a positive way

because they're not draped on the bike not moving,

they're riding it themselves.

It's a fine line to get a woman on a motorcycle

to empower her as well as the machine.

And I think a lot of my fellow photographers

actually fallen down on that whereas being a woman

and shooting women, has actually been a lot easier

for me than it maybe would be for one of my colleagues,

men colleagues that is.

It's more about women opening up motorcycle riding

to other women right now and the community that I've met

through that is just amazing.

We did not mean to start Babes Ride Out at all.

Well, Anya and I had been friends for a little while,

and we wanted to go camping together and then we decided

to open it up to everyone, all women, so we posted a

really shitty Instagram flyer and before you knew it, we were

getting messages from girls all over the United States.

It just grew exponentially as we used social media to reach

out and tried to meet these ladies. It just creates this

safety bubble. No-one's cooler than the next person.

We're all the same this one weekend. You'll see a 60 year-old grandma

hanging out with a 21 year-old girl. They're having a beer together

and talking about where they ride, who they are, what they do.

The idea of teaching women how to ride or at least

giving them their first go on a bike. Me and the girls got together

and said, well our boyfriends taught us to ride in Asda car parks.

What do girls do if they don't have a friend or a boyfriend

that just has a little bike that they can give it a go on

but they really want to get into it.

My thought was, create a network that's based in something

deeper than Instagram, hashtags, and a t-shirt you can buy for $10

and actually connect these women so yeah we look like

we're having a blast on social media but it's so much deeper.

It's truly a network.

With the younger generation maybe, of motorcyclist,

it's a little bit less like you're a female motorcyclist,

you're a male motorcyclist, we're all just motorcyclists.

The distinction is not so important any more which I think is really cool.

There's many times in my life when I've asked myself the same question

'why do I build custom bikes?' because I'm definitely not rich

and I've struggled most of my life to pay the rent.

Just be real, why do we customise anything? We like to show off.

I don't play golf, my father plays golf and I said

‘why the fuck do you like playing golf?' and he said 'it's the game that

you can't play perfectly but it's that trying to do something perfect'.

I'm like 'that's the dumbest thing I've ever fucking heard'.

- Son what do you do? —- I build these bikes.

- You built a perfect one yet? - No

- You think you can? - No

It's kind of like playing golf, you think you're going to get perfect. You're not.

I was the kid on my block that took everybody's bicycles apart

and maybe didn't get them all back together all the time so

their parents were always yelling at my parents.

But that passion for how things worked, is what drove me.

I have this disease of making, I want to make stuff

but I've never been happier since I've been making stuff. So...

The whole time you're working on these bikes, you can't wait

until it's done. But then the minute it's done, it's done.

Now what? You start another one.

You know what? I love making things and motorcycles are just my favourite.

I like cars but it's just it's a little too much for me

and you spend years building a car and a motorcycle, you can get it out,

you can get all your creative visions out and to me it's just as cool.

All the skills and craft, all the engineering,

and then also getting the aesthetic and artistry

built into it, is such a fun process for me.

That's why I think it's a worthwhile pursuit, even though

it is just a frivolous thing, it's just a silly motorcycle

but that combination makes it more than that.

To me, I'm a caretaker of that bike. It belonged to somebody before

and it'll belong to somebody after me. I'm taking and making it into

something new and different. I don't want to be remembered personally

but I want the brand to be remembered and to be thought of

inside the motorcycling timeline as... we helped this thing.

I want to leave a little something of me for later when I will not

be there any more, maybe for my son and daughter.

If he can have a little head turner, paragraph in the custom story

I'm happy, I win.

I don't feel like I have a choice because as soon as one is finished

there's this nagging, creeping feeling that there's something new to be

solved or something new to be looked at. There's new questions that have arrived.

It's a disease, isn't it? It's like I either have to stop

what I'm doing right now or I need to go all the way into it

because you can't get into this a little bit, you have to do it 100%

I was helping a friend of mine, Josh Elison, who's a great metal shaper.

He came and looked at my bike. He's like 'wow that's fucking great'.

I looked at his and I'm like ‘yours is way better than mine'

He's like ‘no yours'. Then we start pointing out to

each other 'no look where I fucked this up'

'no, my fuck up is bigger than yours'

It's like, what are we doing?

In the motorcycle world, we're all competitive.

Like with Woolie, Woolie built a beautiful MV Agusta

and I'm working on an MV Agusta right now.

I love the bike that he built, I think it's gorgeous.

So I'm here trying to do something a bit different

with our MV but it's competitive. I want to build a better bike

than Woolie built. Fuck yeah, I do! I respect the hell out of him

but at the same time I want to build a better bike than he built.

On the builder side, competition is never overly welcome.

It's not just the competition for customers but it's the competition

of ideas and protection of ideas so it all gets a little touchy.

What would motorcycles be without a little beef now and again, right?

But it just goes viral a lot faster now because of Instagram.

I shudder a little bit. I'm probably not going to

win any friends here but I shudder a little bit when I see

bikes like [BLEEP] or [BLEEP], basically just bikes that

had a few little things unbolted and a lick of paint and

put back together again and they're probably really nice guys

and they probably worked really hard to earn that money but

you can't call that a custom.

Everyone used to build a bike, take it to a show, put it on a plinth,

and that was it. You just show off what you built. And no-one

would ride the bike. Most of us are building custom bikes

to race at a show now instead of building a show bike

you're building a show bike that's for a flat track race or

for a drag race or for a hill climb.

So Glemseck 101, this event we are attending now is hosting the

finals of Sultans Of Sprint sprint racing challenge.

What makes me really, really happy and proud is that we

manage to build up a kind of therapy for motorcycle freaks.

What we're doing is, we call it turbo charged

flying carpet contest.

Yeah I think really what makes Sultans Of Sprint

really, really special is it's something in between custom bikes

and racing bikes. It's, for me, quite fascinating. It's all the

energy they put on working on the bikes to make them faster.

For a six second adrenaline shot, you know. It's completely

completely crazy. I mean, it's pushing custom to new boundaries.

The economics of building bikes have meant that some people

have excelled and other people have fallen by the wayside because

it's not really a good way to make money unless you're very, very

organised or very talented. You've either got to create a brand

that people will pay money for or a product

that people feel is value for money.

It keeps going because people are so passionate about it

and for them, making money wasn't what got them into it

in the first place. And for them, all they really want is a way to keep doing it.

I'm in business to make money obviously

I'm only concerned with having enough feed those kids and go back tomorrow.

Everybody I know in the bike building world that has a

bike building company, struggles.

I don't know, maybe other people are getting

rich doing it but I don't feel like I am.

The enemy of the builder is the time. It's always the time.

I don't know, working for ten hours, charging for one or two,

there's just nothing in it and if they were all brutally honest,

it's probably only a £1 or £2 an hour.

A lot of people enter the custom bike world with a passion

which you need, but they get taken advantage of.

People get them to build bikes, they don't pay them what it costs

the person to build the bike, but they try to get it on the cheap.

Take advantage of that person's passion.

If somebody tries to sell a bike for $40,000,

it's a lot of money but you've got $25,000 worth of parts in

that bike. If it took that guy six months to build that bike,

he made $15,000 in six months.

If you're building a bike and you start from scratch every time,

then hope to find a client who will buy it, you'll go broke.

So we launched a concept for a batch build,

and the bikes were a success, but we didn't really sell any.

You can build what you think is the greatest bike in the world,

and you've got 1,000 hours in it, and nobody likes it

so if you get it on a commission, and you build it for them

and as you go, he's paying and so forth, he's never happy.

You never get to the end of that job.

You can't make a living out of that.

But it would be very easy to be seduced by Instagram

and things to think that there's a living to be made

easily in the custom bike scene. And then you have the business

people who figure out how to sell swag and

parts and things like that. I mean, Roland Sands is like the apex guy.

The big thing for me is I'm not down there working on bikes all day.

A lot of what I do is convince people to spend money with us.

I look at it as a business. I don't look at it like

I need to do this entire project on my own,

in order to make it authentic.

And then when you try to put the numbers in,

and start to put the business model together,

and start to actually figure out what's the economics of

how this works? You find out that there's no data to

go on, there's no real tangible information so you've got to make stuff up

and then you go, 'well this is all bullshit'

The custom motorcycle thing is cool and it's great

and it is a business but to be successful at it,

we all have to do something else.

Our parts line is what actually brings in the steady income

on a regular basis. We build a bike, it gets a lot of press,

it gets a lot of media attention, and then they come to our website

to check us out and hopefully they leave buying a tail light

or a hat and that's basically the business model.

People that I don't want to deal with is cheap,

cheap people that want to nickel and dime on each project.

How much is this? How much is that? How much is this?

It's hard to deal with people that don't understand what

it takes to be a craftsman.

I don't have a millionaire coming up to me, wanting me to build

a $50,000 bike. I've got blue collar dudes, a guy that

has saved a couple of bucks, he's got three kids at home,

and he's wanting to spend $12,000 on a really cool bike.

So I want to make sure he's getting something really cool for his money.

I mean, these are luxury goods. Nobody needs a motorcycle.

Certainly nobody needs a custom motorcycle

so my client is the higher crest of the 1% of the world.

I need movie star customers with bigger pockets.

Our average customer has changed quite dramatically.

We've gone from blue collar guys to building bikes for millionaires.

My day job is my day job. I like doing this stuff,

I don't want to make this my work, I need that balance of

reality and this little fun fucking motorcycle shit that we do.

I don't make money doing this, customers are a pain in the ass.

Sometimes it's pretty hard when a guy has been thinking about his bike

for the last year and he's got all these ideas on paper

and he's got everything that he wants together

and then you've got to burst his bubble

because then he can't afford what he wants.

The first question: What does it cost?

And I say, well it can cost $700 or $70,000.

What do you want to spend?

The prices, I keep it pretty simple. I just think about how much

time is involved and how expensive it's going to be.

I can build a bike for $20,000 or $100,000. There's no...

there's no set thing. I don't have a minimum price.

Right now they start at around 18 and go up to about 40.

And honestly it's like surprising how easy it is to spend

$35,000 on a $35,000 bike.

They end up going into personal collections and that's really what

I can say about it. The level of collector has to be consistent with the build

and I've just been really fortunate that I've aligned with people

that get what I do.

Yeah Mama Tried is very unique. You can go flat track racing on Friday

and go to a show on Saturday, and on Sunday you can go ice racing

so to have a flat track race in an NBA stadium is pretty spectacular.

We're really into dirt tracking, flat tracking around here,

that's a big sport in this area. So we were like ‘how can we do

an indoor race?' so we thought of the coke syrup thing and that's how it started.

We knew the Hooligan thing was happening. I got in touch with

Aaron Guardado and I was like, ‘so what's the deal with Hooligan?

Is there rules?' And he's like, 'no not really, it's really just dirt ball

outlaw racing, for people who just want to get into the sport'.

And I was like, 'alright let's have it'.

It definitely started out as... show up at the track and race your

Harley no matter what it is. Your street Harley slowly evolves

into a race Harley and next thing you know you've got yourself

a full blown race bike. What's good about the Hooligan

class is that it's a really attainable form of racing.

Your regular Joe can go out and race and potentially win

everything on a pretty small budget which is really nice.

And you can have a complete race bike for under $5,000

which is crazy. You can't have anything competitive in any other racing

on that minimal budget.

It's great because it's bringing a ton of new people

into the sport. A ton.

I think Sideburn was hugely influential on re-exporting dirt track

back to the USA and getting people interested in it again.

Dirt track racing is: you throw a bike in the back of your pick up truck

and your leathers and you go racing and that's what's cool about it.

Summers are crazy around here because everyone only gets

four or five months to ride. So in the winter everyone is like

always messing with their stuff because you can't ride

but you're thinking about motorcycles every day.

We just thought, what a better way to do it, like have that stoke

in the middle of winter. A little bit of something in the deepest

part of winter to get you through until summertime.

The bikes that we chose, maybe they're not the best

of any genre that they're in, I mean some of them are,

it still fucking rules. It doesn't matter that it's not perfect.

The person that was building that bike had an idea what

they wanted, they went after it and didn't care what other people thought.

We came to Mama Tried show, we got invited while we were at Sturgis.

That was a boost of confidence while we were at Sturgis.

It sucks. Nobody got our bike whatsoever.

A lot of old people with golf carts and shit and then

we got the call to come to Mama Tried. I think it's a cool thing.

And I think that's had a lot to do with why these little grass roots shows

can become huge but still stay cool and relevant and not a total sell-out.

We're all into two wheels. There's so many different genres

and things you can fit it when it comes to two wheels.

I want them all in the same room. I want to split up all their groups

so I don't put a big pile of choppers in the corner so all the

chopper kids can go make a dark corner and hang out and

talk shit on everybody because they're too cool to talk to anybody else.

I want to take them out of their comfort zone,

put them next to a race guy and I want to see one of those

chopper guys on a race bike at Flat Out Friday the next year.

They can hate 95% of the bikes but they'll love one.

Or vice versa. Some of those bikes I'm... I don't like them.

But I know that they're going to like them and when I go

out there, right now, and that sun's just like that and I see

the bike that I don't like, gleaming in the sun and

there's people all around it that are just loving it,

What do you say? It's perfect. It's great.

I feel like we lucked out and did something at a really perfect time

in what's happening with motorcycling. Maybe it'll be like this for a long time

or maybe it's just a little space in time but

it's cool to be around it while it's here.

Winter time changes between ice riding and building.

It's a labour of love at the end of the day.

Building these bikes is something I can do

to get away from life. It's something I can do to just relax.

It truly is fun and it allows my imagination to go wild.

I think that would be difficult today, to start up and do

something that hasn't already been done.

We made it legit to do whatever you want

because we didn't follow any kind of rules.

I was the only guy who was a racer who was building custom bikes.

It was this crazy blend, like taking those two things

and smashing them together was the most natural thing in the world to do.

What I wanted the company to be, what the inspiration was for the company

it was the English street biker scene.

For a kid coming up in the sport bike community,

to see... here's your sport bike, but this is what it could be turned into,

and it was mind-blowing to me.

The custom bikes that get built now often begin with

a collaboration going through photos of examples of bikes

that someone has seen on social media. Custom builders get really edgy if

you claim that it was your bike where they got the idea.

Every custom builder came up with every idea they've ever had

on any bike they've ever built and I'd be the last person to suggest otherwise.

You have to obey the laws of physics, you can break the laws

of man all you want, but the laws of physics are not bendable

so you have to find a way to work within them.

Building a good custom bike, to make it look good in the metal

and actually physically work as a piece of transport, is fiendishly hard.

Taking things that don't work and making them work

and connecting those lines, it always inspires thought.

It makes people think. It's not just 'hey look at this custom bike!

it's an idea.

To me, less is more so when you look at the bikes

that I do, they almost look like they wouldn't work.

I guess it's a simple process that's difficult to do, if that makes sense.

This is a bike I'm doing for the Show Class People's Champ.

It's for the Born Free show this year up in California.

I basically modified the frame how I wanted it to look.

I actually built the bike around the tank.

So I built this tank a few years ago and it's been

sitting on my shelf and I've been waiting to use it.

There is going to be straight bars that are clean. There's going to be no

controls on them with an internal throttle.

It'll just look like a nice clean little short chop but it's a soft tail.

That's basically the gist of what this one's going to look like.

Don't do design for the sake of design because that's not design.

You're not solving any problems, you're creating a problem by doing that.

I think it goes back to the simplicity of the design

so anything that is simple and elegant it will be

more or less timeless. As soon as you add more than what should be there,

it can date quite quickly.

A component or a complete machine, whatever it is, designed to perform

properly, at its best possible way, it automatically somehow

becomes a beautiful object, in this case a motorcycle,

inherently it's beautiful.

Honestly, I'll block an engine up against a wall,

move tyres back and forth, and get the wheel base things down

to where I'm starting to feel it, and then I'll take pictures of it

and I'll just sketch on the pictures with a pencil.

So every time it needs a part designed, I do it in

Solid Works. I design every part myself.

I'm a designer from the first through to the end.

Recently, I had the opportunity to build a bike with my own

aesthetic. From that, it kind of opened up this huge door to

make me want to come to work and create art

that happens to be on a motorcycle.

Typically I like to try and get as much creative freedom as possible

but some customers just want to have some say.

That definitely disrupts the creative process.

So we try to do a couple of spec builds a year

where we just build what we want and sell.

Customers obviously bring in money so we try to do a few of those as well.

Some are great and some not so great.

There are times that people come in and they say:

Hey I saw this bike on Bike EXIF or Bike Shed or

Pipeburn and it's like: I want you to make me this bike.

It's like, no. Somebody else made that bike. That's their bike.

I'm not going to make that bike. Or they ask us to repeat what

we already made that they saw on Bike EXIF. I'm like:

No I don't want to do that, that's no fun.

I negotiate for white card every time. We discuss, I try to know

who is in front of me and we try to know what are his hobbies

his passions, what he likes really. And I will do what he wants

not what he asks. There's a bit of a difference.

All you need is *that*. Remember that. All you need is *that*.

But you can have as much of that as you want

but it don't give you style though. *That* don't buy taste, does it!

It's really interesting to see nowadays if you go to a show

like Yokohama Mooneyes. There's so many incredible builds there

that... a lot of people actually say that the best customised Harleys

come from Japan.

What blew me away about that bike was that...

the way he just so effortlessly encapsulated everything

in one bike. It was like, woah! And then he goes back to

building a chopper or something.

With builders at the top of their game, the skill set is

kind of more than the style.

One of the most interesting characters is lan Barry

of Falcon Motorcycles. He made 3 or 4 of the most

beautiful custom bikes ever, selling for insane amounts of money.

I like the word friction. Friction is responsible for

the conversion of energy so to not embrace seemingly

conflicting ideas and trying to hold them in the same container

as long as you can, engineering and art,

whatever the two are, they're always there

but that friction is necessary and I play with that. I swim in it.

I antagonise it.

It's really difficult to create a signature style.

But then you get people like Autofabrica and they've managed to get

that kind of signature look and they do it beautifully.

We've got DNA that we've developed from very early on

so it's very easy for us to apply that same principle

that same formula to anything that we build and

designing a bike that doesn't conform to a trend but

almost gives a nod to whatever design era

you want that bike to be applicable for

and having a modern take on it.

We're not constrained by other people telling us what to do

or how to design something. We just come up with an idea

and just put it in metal.

The brand, the business, our skill sets have all evolved

and it's gone from being a custom bikes shop

to coach builders. Our skill sets lend us to coach building a motorcycle.

So the Type 11 project with Yamaha, I feel like we've captured a modern

take on a café racer, dare I say it. I think every designer's dream

is to create concepts and not water them down

and what we like to think is that we've created that but we have

got real world constraints as well.

One of the most important things is the marriage of form and function.

I like to have something aesthetically pleasing

but it has to work too and perform the function so there's

often that compromise, the left and right side of the brain,

which is like turmoil. Your brain is fighting with itself.

As an engineer, the thing that I really enjoy is

when someone says ‘you can't do that'.

Fuck you, I'm going to do it!

When it's not supposed to work or be that way,

And you can find a way to get it all to balance out

and all to be aesthetic, all to still function.

I want somebody to be able to ride around Europe or America

on our bikes but if somebody else wants to do a show bike,

they may be showing their skills off rather than talking about a bike

that's rideable. It's just saying ‘this is a piece of art'.

Custom bikes are as rideable as the builder wants them to be.

The first thing is, they all have to work

so I ride them all. They all work.

Even if it's going in a museum, that's a given.

Every part on a bike has got to work perfectly.

I want my bikes to be ridden as hard as possible

and that's typically what I tell my clients.

I put several hundred miles on your bike before

I gave it to you and now I want you to ride the piss out of it.

I can think of nothing worse than just to sit and look at it.

I'm flattered and also insulted, simultaneously.

A bike has to have its look, its image, but I think

that a bike that's not ridden is defeating its purpose for being.

At this point, I would like to create machines

that are less of a motorcycle for people to ride

and more of a kinetic art piece.

Fun to create and also fun for the viewer

to figure out how it works and spark the curiosity

‘cause my entire existence in this culture is

revolving around my curiosity of how things work.

A lot of custom bikes back in the day were artistic

rather than functional I think.

There's an old thing though, if it looks right it usually is right.

Form following function and everything and yeah the market has changed.

For the better. I guess.

I think that putting anything in a museum changes

how people look at it. I see no distinction between

art and engineering. You can make pure art

without engineering but anything that has to do with

construction has engineering involved.

This is perhaps the art of engineering.

Or the engineering of art!

They're intimately entwined.

The Custom Revolution exhibition is an exhibit of 24 motorcycles

from around the world. A remarkably diverse collection.

Peak examples of a renaissance that's happened in motorcycle

culture in the last 10 years.

I was asked by the Petersen Museum if I was interested in helping them

put together a show so it was amazing to bring

all that stuff into an actual museum.

There's been a lot of shows but there's never been a museum show

featuring this scene and it doesn't represent any particular style

but it does represent a movement and a cultural moment.

I've been calling this a renaissance in motorcycle culture

the likes of which we haven't seen since the 70s.

So in this instance, I'm hoping that framing them

within a museum will make people think a little bit differently

about what's happening with motorcycles.

They're eccentric, each one is unique,

but they're design objects. They all needed to be special

so I thought 'we need wow bikes".

So what connects all these motorcycles is a purity of vision and intention

but mostly it's the success of how they've realised their ideas.

These trends will go away but the style remains.

It's one of the first times that I've been aware in the motor industry

where manufacturers have actually listened to what people want.

Before, it was 'this is what you need', this is what you must have'

Now it's 'shit we've got to work out what you guys want

otherwise you're going to buy the other man's one.'

If you look at Yamaha, BMW, Triumph, Moto Guzzi,

they are actively courting the custom scene.

If it wouldn't have been for this whole scene,

I think we would never have made a Nine T for example.

But when we started seeing the shift towards these kind of bikes,

then you saw this whole new wave custom scene, that triggered us

to start working on a bike like that on our own.

We saw that there's definitely an audience out there

We are more or less 30% of the total sales of the company.

Until now, we sold something like 46,000 bikes.

We've always been in the custom scene, from the very beginning.

Some of our first parts and accessories date back to the early 1900s.

So within just a few years of the company coming alive,

there was ways to make the motorcycle different, custom.

When you buy a Harley, it's basically the down payment

and then people load it up with all the accessories.

I think that's part of the reason Harley is so successful.

Because you're buying a factory bike, but then you can spend another $15,000

on trinkets. Triumph has just noticed that.

They now do the Bobber, they'll be 150 accessories for it.

So that's their approach to the custom scene.

I was working on a bike in the background and I wanted

to do a series, I contacted Triumph France to get some bikes.

They told me no, we don't give you bikes because we have our own

package to custom the bikes directly in the shop, in the Triumph shop.

That's not custom, of course, it's accessories.

I've just bought a new van, I went to the showroom and I

specced my van out. I could say I've got a custom van

because I've got this, that and the other on it

but it's not a bloody custom is it?

If the scene is offered to you on a plate,

and the manufacturer says 'here's the bike, here's the helmet

here's the jacket, go off, live your own dream.'

If you want to buy into that, fantastic.

When a movement gains speed, larger companies will want to try

and capitalise on that movement because there's going to be people

who literally can't afford artisan, one-off produced

motorcycles 'cause they cost a lot of money so if you can buy a

custom bike for £10k, then that's brilliant.

I think it depends on whether they're doing it as tokenism,

or whether they're doing it in some way that they actually

believe in it. Some brands do it very well,

but others just pretend to do it.

That's not what this is all about for me and people like me.

It's not what it's about. Nice things to look at but

there's no heart and there's no soul.

The real hardcore guys that will build bikes, they always stay

below the radar and they're building their own bikes and

they don't give a shit what the brands do.

It has to be one person, with one vision, working on

a concept. It's not a corporation that says a custom bike should

look like X,Y,Z. Oh we're going to make 10,000 of them.

Or even 10 of them. It's a one off.

It's the line between true life and lifestyle

and true community and corporate.

Essentially, what the manufacturers are doing are using us to sell bikes.

Custom bikes that have been funded by manufacturers

to appeal to an audience... Is that marketing gone mad or

does it defy what it actually means to have a custom bike?

A perfect example of that is a manufacturer making a Bobber.

When you think about that...

So that Bobber's possibly the worst bike I've ever seen

in my life. It's just the front half of the Bonneville with no thought

applied to the rear end of it and the one thing that really

fucks me off about companies like that is, change the name of bikes.

Don't call a bike a Bobber because that is a style of bike.

And now if you Google Triumph Bobber,

their fucking bike comes up and you wanna see Triumph Bobbers.

I don't think it comes through as genuine to people in these

sub-cultures. I think they feel like it's a money grab and

it turns a lot of people off because we all got into this

because it was something different. You don't want to be in a parking lot

with 50 of the same bike. You want yours to stand out,

you want it to be yours.

It's really easy if you are in a scene that's really

quite niche and quite cool to get quite uppity when other

people start coming along and going 'l'll have a piece of that'.

And the manufacturers come on board then the brands come on board.

And this scene, the secret of its continued survival is evolution.

And to keep moving and the manufacturers coming on board

is part of that evolution. We should embrace it.

But I think it's important for manufacturers to understand

a new blood that is getting into the industry

and it going to take us forward. We know that we need to

stay away but be part of it without being too...

Now the manufacturers are taking note of this and seeing

what an appetite there is for custom bikes that they're

starting to do it themselves. Commercially, that's very sensible,

but there's still always going to be that appetite for there only being one.

You'll never see another one like it. That's pretty powerful.

The custom motorcycle scene has totally revolutionised the motorcycle industry.

The motorcycle industry was in the doldrums and sales were way down,

and there is no enthusiasm and new ridership is way down.

It's a sign that there's a big problem in the industry.

So the custom scene has been a life force. It's injected new life

into the motorcycle industry and that's really exciting.

What a cool place to be, to be changing the direction

of a many billion dollar global industry.

We have this official customisation programme.

We work with builders around the world.

It's one of the ways in which we can both support

and encourage the custom ecosystem that way.

Within India, Royal Enfield has been the most customised

motorcycle for a very long time.

The world of customisation allows us to maybe be seen

by people who wouldn't necessarily have considered our brand.

There's a lot more to Royal Enfield and by doing these customs,

we can hopefully broaden people's perception of what that is.

So the Sinroja brothers were an interesting coming together of things

quite accidentally. Rahul and Birju are Indian brothers,

Indian company, everybody's living in Leicester...

I love the story about the fact that we were Indians,

we grew up with these bikes, we grew up in India,

we were set free to do whatever we want

as long as it was a cool idea, they were always on board.

It was more like friends just handing out building bikes

rather than a corporate giant saying 'here's a bit of money,

do that, I'll see you in two months time."

Basically, we were approached by Adrian from Royal Enfield saying

would I be interested in working with them and we would be getting

the Interceptor to work on and obviously we jumped at the opportunity.

The guys at Royal Enfield have got an amazing team.

I'm not being paid to say this, but they're all genuinely

enthusiastic and interested in motorcycles.

We don't place a strong limitation of any sort

on the builder. For us, we have our motor, there in the bike.

That's the core of that bike, it's the motor.

Just keep some of the character but we're not going to tell you to

limit your creative vision because of some idea that makes a difference

because it doesn't in the end. Motorcycles are cool.

The cooler the motorcycle, the more people will like it.

Please make us a cool motorcycle.

With in house builds like Lock Stock, those are where we want to really

push the capability of the bikes to the next level.

This is why we bring in Harris, because they are chassis masters.

This has been great, yeah it's been really good.

It's created a lot of interest within our factory because

we haven't done a drag race before so, perhaps I shouldn't say this,

I think it's come out pretty well so we're all quite proud of it.

This was a competition/custom bike so it needed to look nice as well.

In terms of creativity, El Solitario of Spain, they're in a different league.

They march to the beat of a different drum.

They make truly amazing machines, really controversial,

We have a voice in the motorcycle world and

for good or for bad, but at least we have the right

to choose who we work with and with that voice,

we decide how we use it.

So we realised we were strong at communicating and

working with others so that's how the Desert Wolves were born.

When we first started talking about Desert Wolves,

everything seemed so complicated. We were so excited,

we couldn't believe we were going to make such a dream project.

It was too beautiful to be true and too difficult to be possible,

it seemed to us. And one thing we love at El Solitario

is jumping into the void.

When we start a project, we have to be loyal to ourselves

and to what El Solitario is, and brands want to work with us,

it's because they like what we do.

The motto of the Desert Wolves was collaboration.

It was the central axis of the adventure.

We wanted to do absolutely everything, from the helmets

to the bags, to the tents, to the motorcycles

When David from El Solitario approached us for his

Desert Wolves project, he was looking for a very cool

looking fabric so we wanted to develop a comfortable,

lightweight, protective denim that even passes the CE standard.

We had been flirting for a while with El Solitario.

He approached us to say 'we're trying to do a project

which is trying to show a more adventurous side of

a motorcycle and we think it should be a Harley'.

I said 'OK let's do an adventure'.

Of course, it's El Solitario so there's a high level

of abnormality. We're going to go to somewhere impossible

with an impossible motorcycle and impossible clothes but

it's going to work. Let's leave Western civilisation and get into

the sands of the Sahara.

We like their attitude because they're that embodiment rider,

the hooligan approach to Dakar riding.

Imagine for Harley Davidson to develop a scrambler programme

make it real, that would cost millions.

So we're actually a very economic way of exploring future options.

[MUSIC PLAYS IN BACKGROUND]

We've been really amazed at how well the bikes were performing

in the rocky terrain, harsh conditions, warm temperatures,

and we also know they're pretty rough riders

so they were giving the bikes a good beating but

there were no major issues, that was a good sign of confidence

as well in our bikes.

[MUSIC PLAYS IN BACKGROUND]

We road them home, that's unbelievable, I mean all the shit we went through,

yeah they survived. It was hard, it was fucking hard,

It was a huge adventure, a real one. It was a fucking real one.

And we survived ten days in the desert.

I never enjoy the victories when they happen,

I enjoy the victories afterwards, in the aftermath.

And even after a war, I can't, I just don't see it happening.

I need some... relax to be like, fuck, we did it.

Things can only really be sharp and on the edge

and cool when they're small. As soon as it gets too big,

it's too diluted, it's just not fresh any more

and that happens with everything. So yeah, the bigger it gets,

the blunter it gets, I guess.

I think that the great shame in any phenomenon

is when it gets rooted in itself. You can disappear up your own arse

in a puff of niche smoke if you're not careful. You've got to evolve.

Because it can't stand still. If it stands still, it will die,

which it nearly did in 2008.

Have we crested the wave? Are we on the back side of the wave?

Or the front side? I'm really intrigued

with how things will change but they will change.

As long as there's motorcycles on the road, there'll be custom motorcycles.

And I think the scene will adapt and change

through different kinds of trends.

Like many other things, social media has opened the window

on any niche worldwide and there's guys interested.

I thought it was going to do like a fucking souffle.

The only risk is if it goes too much, we lose the spirit, the philosophy.

It is tricky because I feel the same way.

I get scared. The bigger it gets, the bigger it's going to eat itself.

If something's really good, then everybody likes it,

and it gets bigger and bigger, and then becomes this

great big snowball careering out of control.

The internet speeds up evolution too quickly

and we should've been allowed to have 10 or 15 years

before it got bitten into by the big corporate companies

and then it becomes generic and they white wash it all and

it becomes a pastiche of itself.

You say people buy cheap motorcycles and fix them up

but I don't see that nearly as much as

I see people buying $10,000 motorcycles

on a credit card and you see it at things like Babes Ride Out.

90% of people are on a Triumph Bonneville or a Harley 883.

They're not on anything other than that.

So it's a new world in that way.

It's not a sub-culture any more though is it?

If you want to keep something super niche and to yourself,

fuck off and do it on your own.

People who are opening a restaurant or a cafe,

think about opening a motorcycle cafe.

Anybody who's got a garage and a blow torch

is now a custom bike builder. You have to remember,

that to build one, it's a tremendous amount of time

and cost for someone goes into that so I think there will

only ever be a certain audience for whom they have the capacity

to undertake those kinds of projects,

either as the consumer or the builder.

We don't want to be part of the mainstream like everyone else

and as soon as this custom motorcycle scene

that we've all been part of and loved since we were Kids,

becomes the cool thing, I think we're probably going to shun it.

Not motorcycles themselves, 'cause I'm always going to ride a motorbike

and I'm always going to work on my own bikes

and build my own bikes, and so are my friends.

For me, I'm just going to be in my workshop, drinking beers

and working on bikes really. I don't give a shit where

the scene goes. I'm not too worried about where it goes

or how it goes or how it gets there.

Seeing what everyone else is doing and pushing yourself

away while adding and pushing forward into something else,

is constantly racing away from that tsunami of

mass culture, I guess.

Lots of people we know who are very famous have become quite quiet.

We used to notice they're very hard at work and they've stepped back and

are thinking about what they're doing and we've seen this year

bike builders drop out and close their doors.

I think everyone's starting think, well where we going next?

What's coming next? What are we going to do?

How's this going to evolve, grow and keep on going?

And it will, but it's just how it's going to happen.

Personally, I don't have any option.

I don't have any training or qualifications in any other direction.

I don't have any fall back, there is no pension, there is no

whatever, social security. Nothing. So there's just

doing it forever. There is no plan.

Let's be honest, the combustion engine is not going to be around

for that long so let's enjoy it while we've got what we've got

and then when the next thing comes along,

let's make that great and the people who do adapt

are going to be the ones who will always be the trend setters,

or the ones who come up with exciting new ideas

and I'd like to be one of them.

I'd love to get my hands on an electric bike and try

customising an electric bike because I definitely think that

electric bikes are very close to being where we're headed.

Once you are understanding that today, the guy who lives in Santa Monica

is connected to the guy that lives in Milan,

and the guy who lives in Jakarta, and understand that the problems

we have right now facing us, they're all the same.

Then electric bikes or alternative vehicles, as we call them,

make a lot of sense.

Electric bikes are here and they're viable

and they're a lot of fun to ride because

they have 100% torque at ORPM.

That's a recipe for Yee ha!

I would like to see more customisers embrace

electric bikes and think about other things.

Try something new. If you're taking this much time and

energy into it, let's make a real impact

on the industry and not just a style impact,

maybe there's room for an engineering impact too.

To be honest, I'm quite intrigued with electric vehicles.

I've been studying them a little while now

and they do interest me.

The silent revolution... and it's going to sneak up on us

and we're not going to be aware of it but it's going to

suddenly take over and I'm all for it. I think it's great.

That means we can ride stealth and we can ride free

without having the Cops On our ass.

You're going to go to jail if they catch you with a motorcycle

in the forest but on an electric one, they can't catch you

because they can't hear you.

It's kind of the shitty thing about human beings, right.

The know change is necessary but you give them ten steps of

how to change things and they're all painful

things to address, nobody is going to fucking do it.

So if you give them something that's easy and understandable

and exciting, then change is imminent, you know.

We have all these manufacturers building bikes,

watching people lose riding spaces,

watching people lose access to tracks,

and nobody's doing anything about it.

But they're iterating on technology to the tiniest percentage

to sell you a new bike, but they're not addressing the need

for an electric power train or a quiet bike or the ability to

reconfigure your investment in a way that makes it sustainable

or OK for the modern world.

Sooner or later there's going to be a mainstream

electric motorbike that's going to have all the boxes ticked

and everyone will be like 'yves, I get it now,

makes sense, I want one of those!"

It may not replace their garage full of stinky two strokes

but if it can stand on its own two wheels...

Anyway, you want to be future-proof, in a way as well.

It's interesting if you look at a product that we've done like Live Wire,

which is our first electric Harley. If you have the opportunity to ride

a Live Wire, you'll have a blast. It's good fun to ride,

very futuristic and it does add to the emotional

experience on the bike.

The only thing restricting electric bikes at the moment

is the stigma attached to it. There's a new technology there.

The world's changing and you can embrace that or not,

but those that embrace it will be producing some fantastic bikes

that won't have an internal combustion engine.

The biggest thing was the potential behind them.

What can we build here? We don't have to adhere by

any of the things that we have to worry about.

I can chuck away the rule book. I don't have to worry about exhausts,

heat, vibration, fuel, oil, nothing.

It's a really interesting prospect and that's what I'm looking forward to

from a customising point of view.

Right now, this question of what is next, the notion of

a true motorcycle for the 21st century,

which I haven't seen, which doesn't exist.

And I want to be there to see it, to ride it,

and maybe even to make it and that's a real powerful idea

and something that... my hair just stood on end thinking about it.

[MUSIC PLAYS IN BACKGROUND]