Back Street Heroes December 2023

Hello, and welcome to this, the first issue of BSH in, hopefully, its next perhaps not forty years (that’s probably a big optimistic given the way the anti-internal combustion engine Nazis have it in for our way of life), but a good few to come – as long as you out there still want the mag’ anyway. Life, they say, begins at 40 so here’s to the future. (If you missed last issue’s 40 years of BSH celebrations, back issues’re available from www.backstreetheroes.com) Anyway, the world moves on, and this issue we have, slightly earlier in the year than is usual, the winners of the 2023 BSH Custom Champs (the biggest custom show in the world, as it should rightly be known). Over the five years it’s been running, the…

HE originally tried to buy the bike that was to become what you see here back in the early 1970s when he saw it sat on top of a container inside the unit of a local business that stripped cars for parts. It was a fairly stock 1949 Pan with 12-inch over springers, a standard frame (!), and fishtails, and was kind o’ a lash-up inspired by Easy Rider. It was still cool as hell in his eyes, though, and he had to ask about it, didn’t he? The reply, he says, was something along the lines of being told to fornicate away, as it wasn’t for sale, and he was pretty downhearted about it but, as he was running a Honda chop at the time, and had a ’56…

The story behind this bike began a few years ago. I was sat talking with an old engineer neighbour, and it wasn’t long before we got to talking bikes and, in particular, the café racers that’d been his era. With a big smile on his face, he was telling me about how he remembered the original café racer days, and the bikes he’d built and ridden during the time, and when asked what defined a café racer back in the day, the answer given formed the brief for the build of this bike. “There were three basic rules to remember when building, and riding, a café racer, at the time,” he said. “Once you got your bike, you took it straight to the shed to remove everything off it you…

Shaun’s no stranger to these pages, and those of other custom bike magazines, too, but he’s been a little quiet of late, and this is the first major build he’s done since Covid. It’s very definitely a ‘him’ bike, in the style for which he’s become known: big-tube frame, fat wheels, monster motorcycles in single colours. The video of Phil’s bike I put up on the BSH Facebook page got more than 25,000 views in less than 24 hours so, as I’ve been saying for years, while among the hip kids’ old school choppers may be where it’s at, in the real world people’ll walk past almost everything to look at something monster-wheeled and in-yer-face. Phil T has been a fan of Mr B’s work for a while now and,…

The bike that won this year, Keith Edney’s ‘Icarus’ 500 Bullet (Royal Enfield, obviously), was designed and dry-built for him by a very talented designer far, far away in Indonesia; one Andika Pratama of Kromworks in the country’s capital, Jakarta, and, once pulled apart again and shipped halfway round the world, assembled and finished by Keith here in Blighty. He’d seen Kromworks’ work on the Internet when he was trawling through the world of custom bikes, and saw The Bullet Andi’d done – a polished, skeletal, Enfield-engined masterpiece that most definitely pushed his buttons, and immediately fired off an email to him to ask if he could build a replica of it for him to fit the 500 Bullet motor he already had sat in his garage. A reply came…

“Just over two years ago, as I was already a fully paid-up member of the old-farts-on-motorbikes club, I thought it was time to have a last hurrah with a sports bike before my already knackered shoulders, knees, wrists and back gave up completely. I wanted something I could not only ride, but also improve, and express my love of art with, and I decided on a Generation 1 Hayabusa as I like a bit of get-up-and-go. I was after a Final Edition (2007) as they came in white with chrome wheels (like a bit of bling) and, eventually, one turned up in Lancashire, so I drove up to have a look, and did a deal. It’d been well looked after, and’d only clocked up 12,000 miles in fourteen years and,…