Once you made the decision to make a show 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 bikers and guitar players.
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 a way of sharing their knowledge to a wider audience.
I think we were also looking at our own lives. I had just turned 60 and I had a large motorcycle, 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 also decided to change bikes. We used episode 2 to talk about what was happening with us, our lives 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. Things which happened to us during the filming of an episode became part of the narrative.
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, motorcycling. You don’t see many bikes on the road these days and 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 is dangerous and it can be made more dangerous 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 we wanted 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?
We didn’t quite script things exactly but we did want a lot of detail to be included. If we were talking to a guitar builder, I wanted to know exactly how a particular pick-up works, what wires are involved?
Why does it sound a particular way? Those are the things which interest me. And I like to think that I am not the only guitar player who wants to know more about that side of the guitar, the process of guitar making. I wanted there to be a fair bit of depth to the show.
Leif Bodnarchuk:
There needed to be a fair bit of the nuts and bolts and the grit which goes into producing a piece of equipment. I wanted to show the reasons why things are made the way they are made. I can say that I have found making the show a great experience for me, personally. I fix guitars for a living and sometimes when I talk to customers, and I might have to give them some bad news about a guitar, they look at me as if I have two heads. They think I am just making things up.
When I get to meet guitar makers, and they explain the details of what you are aiming to do when you are making an instrument, I think it supports my ideas of what is possible, what are the limitations of fixing something that is broken. Wear and tear happens, nothing lasts forever, and having that back-up helps my business.
Paul Kane:
When we met the guitar maker, Dermot McIlroy I felt that we were talking to an artisan, a craftsman. The show is a celebration of the work of artisans. That is a joyful thing for me to do.
Leif Bodnarchuk:
By showcasing the work, we let people see why certain things are done. We look into the decision making process, where a little change in one area can make a substantial change in the sound of an instrument. We know that most people don’t think about guitars or their instruments in that way, but if you have this knowledge it can really make a difference to the way you think about your instrument.
Paul Kane:
As a good example of how learning about the processes and how that can have an impact. With Dermot McIlroy, he was great fun, he’s a great character, and we got to play his guitars, but I couldn’t afford his guitars. These are high end instruments.
We ended up in Bangor because we were hoping to do some filming of vintage bikes and guitars but it didn’t quite work out so we went to a shop called Windmill Guitars. I saw a second hand Dermot McIlroy guitar which I played and fell in love with, and I bought it. I did manage to get a trade-in so that helped, but I was so taken with the sound, the quality, the feel of the guitar, that I just wanted that guitar.
Now, I had been playing my previous guitar for thirty years, but when I started playing that McIlroy guitar it changed my playing. It has injected a new vitality to my guitar playing, so on a personal level that experience has had a substantial impact on me.
To see more of the work of Paul Kane and Leif Bodnarchuk click on the link below
