How did the idea for the podcast come about?
Paul Kane:
We need to go back to the start and that is the joint passion we both have for music, guitars and motorcycles.
Leif Bodnarchuk:
It is also a kind of nerdy thing, a geeky thing, in that we are both into something so much, we have such a genuine interest that we felt like we wanted to share it with people.
Paul Kane:
We always talk about motorcycles, and we talk a lot about guitars, and it was just a general love of motorcycles, of traveling, I’ve been around Ireland a few times, and Leif and I decided to go out for a few runs. And from there it was really Leif’s idea.
Leif Bodnarchuk:
I just wanted to put something out there. I was thinking about a legacy, my own mortality, and leaving something behind. I was inspired by the Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman’s series where they travel on motorbikes, and motorbike adventures are very inspiring to me anyway, and part of me thought that it would be good to produce something which has a destination as well.
I thought that it would be interesting to ride our bikes to meet guitar makers, marrying both of our interests. I am always looking to see what I might do in my older age because I have worked in the same industry for so long that it is ice to put out some feelers to see what you are actually capable of. I do think that it would be nice if someone would pay me to ride a motorcycle. I’m not saying there is a market for that, but in theory, if there was, what would that lead me towards.
I also have another thing that I think about and that is a critique of modern day life, is that we don’t make things any longer, or at least most of us don’t. We no longer know how things work, how they get to be a piece of equipment that we use. So I wanted to show people making things and us talking about what we know about, in this case, bikes and guitars.
Once you made the decision to make a show, podcast, did you have to set about increasing your knowledge about bikes and guitars or did you feel you had enough knowledge at hand?
Paul Kane:
I think we wanted to have a kind of nerdy vision of bikes and guitars. We have our own separate knowledge of both, and we also wanted a kind of every person view of bikes and guitars. From there we wanted to showcase people who might be under the radar but who work building motorbikes or crafting guitars.
We wanted to showcase what it is that they do and the adventure for us was to get on our bikes and ride out to meet them. My perspective was to facilitate their knowledge to a wider audience.
I think you can see that in the second episode because we were also looking at our own lives. I had just turned 60 and I had a large bike, a Triumph, and I wasn’t enjoying riding it any more. It was big and heavy and Leif was in a similar situation because he had a bigger BMW and he had decided to change bikes. WE used episode 2 to talk about what was happening with us and our bikes.
I don’t think there was any need to go and research extra knowledge, but I would say that you always learn, and there are things that happen on the road that force to you to learn.
You do spend quite a bit of time giving people intricate details about your bikes and the riding experience?
Leif Bodnarchuk:
Again that is where the nerdy aspect of it comes in because it is very much our life experience. IT isn’t really mainstream. You don’t see many bikes on the road, biker people are always portrayed as dark, misogynistic people belonging to clubs with satanic names. But we think there must be more people out there like us, just people who like to ride, who aren’t into speed, or Harleys or Choppers.
I also like to think that people who drive cars would watch and see what it is like, especially how vulnerable motorbike riders are, to ride a bike on the road and how dangerous it can be if other road users don’t look out for us.
What about the layout of each episode. Do you have to do a lot of planning?
Paul Kane:
We took a long time discussing, with pens and paper at the ready, what did we want to do with the show. How did we want it to do it? How did we want to do the filming? What footage did we want to capture? We had to ask ourselves what questions did we want to ask?
If we were talking to a guitar builder, I wanted to know exactly how a particular pick-up works, what wires are involved, how does it sound a particular way, why does it sound a particular way, because that interests me. And I like to think that I am not the only guitar player who wants to know more about that side of guitar making.
