image via Bike Exif

Three-chords, crap equipment, not much talent, lots of enthusiasm. Young men and women have been in garage bands since skiffle was The Next Big Thing, but it was only during the wave of 1977 punk that the garage bands broke big.

Top-selling punks may not have had the same skills as the Stones or Fleetwood Mac, but they offered an alternative that was lapped up. A similar revolution is happening in motorcycle customisation.

Image:Wrenchmonkees

Like punk rock often said it was rebelling against the overblown excesses of ten-minute guitar solos and prog rock, the new generation of custom builders are the antithesis of American Chopper’s fat tyre monstrosities, and showrooms full of 190mph traction-controlled superbikes. And, though the movement started before the global meltdown, its growth has mirrored the fall in sales of big ticket bikes.

The new wave customs are neither chopper nor café racer, but they borrow cues from all genres. They tend to start with unloved, cheap Japanese bikes – though the burgeoning scene is sending prices of air-cooled, spine-frame Jap stuff roofwards. Anything from the 1970s onwards is fair game. Singles, twins, fours; two-stroke or four; Jap, Brit, German, Italian: animal, vegetable or mineral. This isn’t a cult with a basis is performance one-upmanship. It’s creativity and originality (without straying into parody or overt gimmickry) is what pushes the boundaries and attracts the four-figure facebook ‘likes’.

image: Untitled

One reason this style of custom is becoming so popular is due to the fact they’re relatively easy and cheap projects to complete by someone, anyone, with a few spanners. You don’t even need a garage to be in this garage band. Inspired hopefuls see bikes being fawned over on the Net and, like a thousand oiks of previous generations watching Top of the Pops in the late-70s, think ‘I could do that.’

Wheels, brakes and suspension can be changed, but aren’t always. Rake, trail and wheelbase all tend to remain the same. No one is building one-off frames or investing in forced induction or race tuning. Replace the tank, seat and bars with stuff picked up cheap online or at the autojumble. Paint is simple or non-existent. Steel or alloy tanks stripped bare and lacquered or left to ‘weather’ are popular.

image via Bike Exif

Next, junk standard airboxes and exhausts and fit filters and new silencers. If you’re more adept, make a new sub-frame for the stripped-down back end. Fit new tyres – chunky is best — and a tiddly taillight. Voila! But, like a punk band, however much you sneer and spit, if you haven’t got the chops you are going to fail. For the garage-built bike scene, if the stance of bike is hinky, it’ll still look like an unloved bike with a rusty petrol tank and knobblies, however hard you try. There are plenty of those around.

Image: Deus

The godfathers of the scene are the Wrenchmonkees. Based in a cellar in the outskirts of Copenhagen, they modified a trio of big, four-cylinder Kawasakis back in 2008, before moving onto twins and singles. It’s no coincidence two of the original trio of Monkees were professional photographers.

They shot and disseminated their tough street bikes in a fresh, urban style. The Monkees themselves – Per, Nicolas and Anders – didn’t look like stereotypical motorcyclists from any pigeon-hole, either. They wore a gene-defying mixture mountaineering Gore-Tex, full-face lids, dark jeans and skateboard shoes and rode in cities, not the unrealistically empty racetracks of mainstream bike ads.

A new generation of motorcyclists saw them on a new generation of website – blogs that would cherrypick inspirational images from all over the web and mash these images of bikes up with architecture, art, cars, tattooed femmes and historic style icons. The Wrenchmonkees didn’t look out of place.

Coincidentally, Deus puffed spores of goodness from their sweet-smelling Sydney HQ. Though not garage-built, their big dollar Yamaha SR500-based builds were close to faultless and had a cleanliness only a truly well-built road bike can achieve. They’ve influenced a thousand builders from Beijing to Bristol, some who copy on the cheap, others who have moved the game on.

People who wouldn’t dream of wearing full leathers and riding a superbike or pulling on a cut-off denim and riding a chop realised there was a bike scene waiting for them. They just had to make it. And they have.

Images Sideburn/Jonny Wilson/Subsculptures

Britain has some great motorcycle events, but many are as stale as the last supper’s leftovers. A few years after first launching our own independent motorcycle magazine, the Sideburn team started thinking about bigger events. We were jealous of cross-genre shows in Yokohama and Brooklyn and knew British riders needed something more stimulating than sitting in a field wearing a jester’s hat while listening to an AC/DC tribute band.

The result was Rollerburn. Held last November, in Nottinghamshire, it mixed a broad custom show with a slalom skateboard race. It threw in a full, all-girl roller derby match and an art show. Thirty dealers and three bands set up. A couple of Arctic Monkeys paid on the door. Comedian Charlie Chuck destroyed a drum kit. Donkey!

Sideburn magazine focuses on motorcycles that ‘go fast, turn left’ from the worlds of dirt track and speedway, and also the road bikes loosely inspired these worlds and the DIY ethic, but we wanted Rollerburn to have much wider appeal.

The roller girl connection came from feature we did on the cult 1970s movie Rollerball. Roller girls go fast and turn left too. And a lot of them are better looking than the majority of people who turn up at British bike events. They were in.

The show bikes were inclusive too. This wasn’t a chopper show. Exhibits ranged from Shinya Kimura’s Junkyard Phantom (that featured in the movie Iron Man) to a Rossi replica Ducati Desmosedici RR.

The artist Conrad Leach created an 8ft square painting to face the ramp (it was later auctioned for charity) and slalom skaters, some of who turned up on their own Harley lowriders, launched themselves down it.

The highlight of the nine-hour event was world’s first and last indoor Rollerball drag race. Three 600cc dirt track race bikes towed three fearless rollergirls down the 150m strip. The team of TT hero Guy Martin and Catfight Candy won the three-way heat. Candy limped away with friction burns as big as your fist.

People came from all over the UK, France and Spain. The only lows of organising an event like this is the fact it takes over your life in the run-up, when you regularly ask yourself, ‘why are we doing this?’ That and the fact we couldn’t do everything we wished due to restrictions from the venue. It’s the kind of stuff that made me publicly state ‘never again’. The highs are the feedback, in the form of smiling faces on the day and internet buzz after it. That’s what makes me think, maybe we should do it again.

It’ll take some beating, but we’ll try. And there wasn’t a jester’s hat in sight.

Click here to view the embedded video.

www.sideburnmagazine.com

We came across Crowe Customs delightful documentation of all things lathe-ish and metalspun while admiring Benji Wagner’s rather nice photoblog. Benji is a west coast photographer and purveyor of fine outdoorsy type gear in the shape of the Poler brand, and he happens to be a mate of the Oregon custom bike builder.

Our favourite in his small collection of bikes is definitely the CB 750 with the Cafe treatment — we’re not sure if its derived from an original seventies 750 Four (the one with the four pipes all the way to the rear) or whether that lovely exhaust set up is a purely creative act.

Our growing crush on twin potted BMWs given scramblerish makeovers continues too, though, with the work in progress documented here.

We have to admit that the online appeal of these passionate little outfits is bolstered by the relative quality of presentation; both photographically and in terms of the way their sites are built.

We think the talented Mr Wagner might have something to do with the former in the case of Crowe Customs.

We were thinking recently how pathetically wimpish current oil ads have to be. Gone are the days when you could sell lubricant with hot cars and hot babes. Post BP oil slick,and taking environmental realities into consideration, it’s not particularly surprising that oil companies are managing their image with kid gloves.

So, commercials for oil are packaged with tweeting birds, and laced together with a sting of pure, green air. We thought we’d dig up a couple of gems to show you how it wasn’t always necessarily so.

Here, for example, Mobil use a whacked out, hyped up Charles Manson lookalike to publicise their product, presumably to make the far-reached spin that using their brand of lube will chill you out.

This South African Castrol ad, meanwhile, straddles the hard-edged line between xenophobia, homophobia and the cherished boorishness of the Boers…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Its pretty hard to unravel the semiotics of this animated beauty from India (below). There’s bullets, murder, mayhem and other fun stuff that seem to be equating the performance aspects of Castrol lube with moving faster than a speeding bullet. We love the Bollywood steez, whatever it all means…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Images Adrian Van Anz/Derringer.

We’re moped fans. They’re cheap, fun and quick, and if you live in a sunny environment like southern California they make more sense than a smart car.
And while moped is usually a cypher for all that is terminally uncool, there’s no tangible reason why there has to be something geekily anti-stylish about them.
This is wear Derringer cycles come in.

The person behind Derringer is a Santa Monica native and industrial designer by the name of Adrian Van Anz.

The bike-crazy Van Anz realised a few years ago that light motorised bikes just might be the perfect form of transportation for Angelinos — residents of a city where you not only can you turn right on a red, but is almost permanently mild and sunny.

But rather than stick to the functional form of the European moped, this Californian decided to base his new designs on board track racers of the 1920s.

But while the original, hugely popular form of racing featured permanently opened throttles and little or no braking facilities, these cool little beasts make small concessions to safety. They’ve got brakes and everything.

A custom Derringer has a top end of a less than adrenalin-pumping 35mph — but apparently have a lot of torque and reach terminal velocity quickly.

Now we just need a plane ticket…

If you thought a rotary engined bike was something out of seventies scifi, then think again.

Suzuki produced the RE-5 for a couple of years in the mid seventies.…We’re not sure how successful the bike ended up being. We can only imagine that the big rotary whirring in the middle of the bike must have tended to instability.

The very cool old video says most of the things that we could say about this thing and more. So. Enjoy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

images: Southsiders

We might be a bit slow off the mark here, but this morning we stumbled across some of the nicest pictures we’ve ever seen coming from the Goodwood revival.

The images come from those fine folks at Southsiders MC, whose blog is on our regular roster of daily browses.

Every year the event is one of the most photographed on the calender and is getting bigger every year.

This set is a testament to the worth of the slow, deliberate process of larger format film photography.

Bravo Southsiders.

See the full set here.

Every now and then the distinguished folk at RM Auctions come up with a doozy we can’t ignore.

We spotted this 1953 Maserati bike in the auction list for their forthcoming London event (26th October) and we had to share.

This is apparently one of the earliest motorcycles to wear the trident badge — and was the product of a time just after the company had acquired the Bologna-based motorcycle manufacturer Italmoto. Maser then shifted production to their home in Modena.

Despite the lovely detailing of the bikes they made, like that on this little 125 single, the company only made two wheelers until 1960 — by which time the big Italian manufacturers had made competition very stiff indeed.

Lovely fodder for some weekend daydreaming…

Looking like a cross between a mobility scooter, a Sinclair C5 and a JD Bug, the Honda Zook (otherwise known as the MS50L) looked like a deathtrap, and must have ridden like one.

Released in 1990, it came with a fold-up steering column and seat post, presumably for parking in tiny Japanese city spaces. It was, we assume, aimed at students and the very naive, with the rather loathsome candy-coloured marketing campaign featuring the Japanese predecessor of that annoying bloke from the Halifax ads.

It had a two litre fuel tank and could apparently top 33 MPH with a prevailing wind. Not a patch on the earlier, ruggedly cool Motra. But interesting nonetheless. Not surprising it was a bit of a dead end, and if you can find one we suggest you burn it. From an aesthetic point of view it makes the eyes hurt.

And we are Honda fans!

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re loving this onboard from Joey Dunlop around the Isle of Man in 1983. But as well as the always amazing images of Joey ‘keeping it lit and between the hedges’, here is the brilliantly cool, calm and understated Ulster tones of yer maun himself.

Stay with this footage for some hilarious repartée between Joey and the journalist as he sits, gobsmacked, while Joey comments on how ‘careful’ you have to be through this or that particular section.

Really inspiring stuff from the man who walked the walk and never bothered to talk the talk too much.

Click here to view the embedded video.