Up Here For Thinking...

Down There For......
What's the answer? And who coined this fantastic phrase? BP

Bamber Gascoigne

Sideburn would like to set up a University Challenge for dirt track riders. Any suggestions for topics? - silly or sensible. BP

Over Cooked

Thanks to Jeremy for this photo (of unknown origin) of someone toasting their Norton Commando.
- Would you sacrifice grazing the jeans off your arse; possibly down to the bone, or launch yourself over the highside and pray against all odds that your ailerons can guide you to the soft grass field the other side of a 3-bar wooden fence? BP

DSC Formula: 想像

One in an on-going series; eight so far, of micro-shorts (films not tight Lycra) where the enigma that is Death Spray Custom, explains the philosophy behind his working practice. BP

Hunter S Thompson

Much quoted, but not so often on Moto Guzzi alternator covers. The much sculpted El Solitario V50. BP

Co-Built Champion

Anthony Brown of Co-Built is the British Thunderbike champion. Anthony is probably the nicest fella in a paddock full of nice fellas and he won the title on a bike his three-man cooperative designed and built. Co-Built created the 4130-steel frame and swingarm from scratch. They designed and made the yokes (triple clamps), commissioned the twin shocks, made the exhaust...

There are only three adult classes in UK racing: Short track (for DTX bikes, though Thunderbikes can enter); Thunderbikes (air-cooled framers, road-based bikes and any twins or multis inc. XR750s) and mini bikes (bloodthirsty thugs on tuned putt-putts). The Thunderbikes class has had over 20 entries at each of the six rounds this year. Anthony had to fight for it.
There were five complete Co-Built Thunderbikes racing on Saturday night, with plenty more bikes - including the official Suzuki team - using Co-Built parts. Expect a big story on the fellas in Sideburn 9.
Congratulations Anthony. G

UPDATE:
I would just like to add my pat on the back...
Anthony is deceptively fast. On first hearing his "Go Slow To Go Fast" mantra, it seemed preposterous in the extreme. He doesn't ride with the obvious flair of our Italian friends, or the tits out gay abandon of the STUK riders that have defected from professional speedway, he looks more like a sack of spuds. But all the people I have approached about (my awful) technique and the art/science of racing, has an Anthony quote. At Buxton he was explaining to Drogo that "A corner has 2 parts. A beginning and an end. Finish 1 before you start the 2nd". Drogo was jumping up and down that he now had the golden key to success. I still have no clue what he was going on about. Anthony is Yoda (except he doesn't have hairy ears). Yoda we Love you. BP

Unicorn Sex Acts

I went to see Guitar Wolf with the world famous artist Stevie Gee on Friday night. he was very drunk when he said he would write a gig review. It's in two parts, first is the support band. GI

UNICORN SEX ACTS
When Bo Ningen stepped onto the stage I knew we were about to witness something special. All the members of the Japanese four-piece are slender-bodied to the point of fragility, graceful in their movements and with long straight black hair. They looked like true wizards of psychedelia.

When they unleashed their sound, it was far from fragile. It was epic and mind-bending. I was very near the front and I immediately entered into a swirling vortex of cosmic energy. This doesn’t happen to me that much anymore, but it felt mystical and welcoming, like I was part of something special.

The drums were hard and heavy, with driving Sabbathesque riffs combined with swirling psychedelic lead guitar noise and deep bass sound. But it was the vocals that took the combination to another level. They were hauntingly ethereal and jerkily punk in equal measure: the reverb was so strong, the eerie melodies echoed around our heads for minutes afterwards.

I felt like I had experienced something unearthly and wild. Bo Ningen, you are rare creatures indeed, both familiar and original. Seeing them live was like watching a field of unicorns make love to the universe. A spectacle to behold. I just wish it could have lasted longer.
Words and Photos Stevie Gee.
Check out Stevie Gee's blog

Below: Bo Ningen's singer with Stevie. Look how happy he is.

Shrine

Burnt Munro's shed. BP

Holy Cow

Tugged in Liverpool because my pillion was wearing Rupert Bear kecks and was loosing a little popcorn; due to air turbulence, from the large bucket of the stuff we scavenged at the local the multiplex. Most of the audience had left early in utter repulsion at Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover. The police were only 1 minute into their shake-down when they got a waft of our garlic breath (from our slap-up Indian the night before) and decided to let us go. Funny how different cultures run in parallel universes. BP

The Wisdom of Rupert Paul

A thought to end the year with. I've been doing quite a lot of work with Bike magazine in the last few months and I found this short piece while I was doing some research. It was written by one of my favourite bike journalists, Rupert Paul (above). As the former editor of Performance Bikes (in its late-80s, early-90 cultural heyday), Rupert was instrumental in reinventing British bike mags. He also helped me get a job once and wrote about Mablethorpe beach races for Sideburn 3.
Anyway, I like this a lot (I retyped it, so if there are any mistakes, they're mine not his). G

It was the Buddha in one of his far from idle moments, who said that a meditation on death is the greatest meditation of all. Only when you are aware of how fragile and transient your time here is, can you truly and fully engage with life.
Riders love a risk or we'd live in jars packed with cotton wool. But are we that aware? Control freaks, more like. I love riding fast — don’t know anything else, really— and the kick comes from endlessly balancing skill against risk. But whenever I’ve crashed, the two or three seconds before show me who I really am - a very fragile, very mortal bag of skin, muscle and bone feeing deeply, deeply regretful. Thus, as the trajectory towards the car/ditch becomes obvious:
Myself (to imaginary omnipotent being): Could we start again, please?
Omnipotent being (in the guise of reality): Crunch.
Equally revealing is that, as soon as we feel able, we forget how scared we were and put on the bravado again. I once crashed in a busy street while carrying a giant thermos of tea in my rucksack - with the result that, as I got up, gushes of brown fluid splashed onto the floor. A small girl was horrified: ‘Oh look, mummy – blood!’ In seconds I went from total panic to laughing out loud as I explained.
The truth is, we kid ourselves that it’ll never happen. If we didn’t, we’d never get on a bike. RP

Hammersmith Gorillas

During a 26 hour conversation with Skooter Farm Dave whilst reeling in the miles on our Milan road trip, it was inevitable that inbetwen the noize of conflicting music tastes, there would be quiet times for philosophical discourse.

"So Ben were you in the Hammersmith Gorillas in a former life?"

Who? BP

Poupees Paradis

When was the last time you went to an art exhibition, musical gig, or church service and exclaimed "Sacre Bleu! What a mind-bomb. I think I just had a religious experience."?
Sitting on the toilet at Iwan's place at 2am - which should have been a respite to his subculture dripping livingroom, but surrounded by several hundred dolls (some sporting skis and endangered species fur coats, others Schmeisers and potato-masher handgrenades), I had such an epiphany. Wikipedia is turning us into lazy and gullible fools who think we know all the answers. This temple just answered a few of my burning questions and threw up several more. Maybe it's the combined elastic energy of all those little rubber brains? BP

Slog

945 miles there (via Paris to meet up with Dimitri and Ivan), and 1490 miles back (via Arlon, Belgium for a US Bombs/Duane Peters gig), over a long weekend, was always going to be a slog; I'm still zonked now, but it was definitely worth the effort. We met some great people and had a laugh. More photos to follow... BP

Chabott Engineering

shinya kimura @ chabott engineering from Henrik Hansen on Vimeo.

Jeff Wright Props GI

Too modest to blow his own trumpet here, so I am tooting it for him.
Jeff Wright has honorably listed GI as one of his top 12 biking influences...

WD: Chopper Dave speaks highly of you, so who are your influences in the motorcycle world?

JW: Tom Fugle, Roland Sands, Shinya Kimura, Brandon of Brawny Built, Joey Dunlop, The Bench Mark guys, Gary Inman, Vise, Ken's Factory, Hot Docks, Japanese, Chopper Dave, etc….These are people I look up to and respect their work.
My true influences come from race bikes.

Read the full interview by Wes Drelleshak of Street Chopper on the Church of Choppers blog. BP

His nibs

Yes, a fountain pen. I dug it out of the drawer the other day because I decided, for the first time in yonks, to hand-write a letter. The pen didn't work, or at least, it would work for a few lines then fade away. A fuel blockage. I spent the next half-hour rinsing it through with warm water, then with ammonia solution and finally stroking the nib with a fine artist's brush dipped in the same. It worked, and I was almost as chuffed as if I'd successfully resuscitated a Keihin flatslide.

Then this morning a postcard arrived from Ben P, which made me smile just to see his distinctive handwriting, and all this has reaffirmed to me that the hand-written word is a lovely thing. It's not all about emails and screens and printers. Which is perhaps why we like bikes that bare their shuddering, greasy arses and that need to be fettled and nurtured to keep them sweet. Hands on. It's what it's all about. MP

Bog philosophy

There are few things I like better than sitting on the bog and meditating over a copy of the Classic Bike small ads, but this one made me think about more than the inflated prices of pre-unit TR6Cs. Don't let time creep up on you, get the fuck on with it (said the king of procrastination). MP

Walt Whitman 1819 - 1892

'Whose Your Daddy?' is about as far as most people get when it comes to snappy messages written on the bottom of their number plate. Michael's Triumph scrambler 'These are the days that must happen to you', is a line from the Walt Whitman classic poem 'Song of the Open Road' from 1900. And it's the title of our's truely Dan Walsh's must-read road diary from 2008. Their paths all crossed in the pits at Stoke last Saturday. BP

Yikes

Debuting my racing 'career' at Amman 1/2 mile didn't seem like a big deal, even if it's the fastest dirt track circuit in the UK. What is scary, is now signing the ACU racing license documents for Stoke my second race, to go from a chancer's 'X' plate to restricted 'R' plate, when the smallprint reads:
'...It must be recognised by all competitors that there will be accidents and that a number of competitors may die, whilst others may be permanently disabled or sustain serious injuries and it could be you.'

Well at least there's the fun part of coming up with a lucky number and painting it on my helmet. BP