THE PASSION OF THE BIKES
PICS BY BORRIE AND THE DOOR
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Scrambles was excited. It was Good Friday and the streets were teeming with cops. |
IT has been more than a decade since I last visited a bike show run by an outlaw motorcycle club. I used to go to them all the time – and there were a lot of them to go to.
That's not the case now. Bike shows run by society's current bogey men de jour are virtually non-existent, but back then, hardly a weekend went by where there wasn't a bike show on somewhere. It got so I was looking at the same show bikes, listening to the same bands and watching the same strippers – and while familiarity with all of this can never actually breed contempt, it is certainly fertile ground for a kind of mild indifference.
But with some twelve years separating my last attendance at one of these indisputably unique and totally engaging events, I resolved to attend what has always been one of Sydney premiere custom bike expos – the Bankstown Custom Motorcycle Show, which was this year celebrating its 20th anniversary.
Organised and run by Highway 61 MC and Hard 'n' Fast (the club's events promotion company), this show has always been a favourite of mine for a few reasons.
The first and foremost is that it always occurs on Good Friday – and since not all of us choose to worship at the bunker of the Magic Jewish Bloke, it's a great place to have a beer and spend a laidback day contemplating some stunning motorcycles, girls with tiny pants on, and a host of mad bastards doing scary things on all sorts of motorcycles.
The second reason is that the event is so seamlessly well-run. And I can not overstate the importance of that. And "well-run" means a lot more than just not running out of soft-drink, booking hot strippers, and not having the shitters back up.
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Boon was not quite as excited (cos he was actually working at the bike show covering it for The Picture), but I was quite worked up. |
Crucially, the bikes need to be properly displayed, the judges need to be credible and diligent (a lot of effort and expense goes into building some of the custom marvels on show and the builders really aren't keen on having their work judged by amateurs) – and it was great to see some venerable greybeards sitting on stools beside the bikes and spending long periods of time taking notes and peering with microscopic attentiveness at the creations.
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It was all I could do not to run red lights in my enthusiasm |