Heeeeeey Rat Fans

All I knew about motorcycling this time last week was acquired directly from a stereotype of scary-looking leathers and extremely large beards. Perhaps it also had to do with a hazy memory of Steve McQueen’s iconic leap for freedom in The Great Escape (1963); I wasn’t much interested in the film when I was 14, and faced with the task of writing a little something about rat bikes for this exhibition, I began to wish I had paid more attention to it. Being a young female somewhat more interested in indie music and Chanel handbags than big, honking Harleys, I had little to recommend myself for this job but enough free time to do it, and so there was nothing for it but to indulge in a spot of internet research.

Some time later, I discover that googling the phrase ‘rat bike’ produces an impressive 545,000 results and it seems the world wide web is teeming with honey-pots such as The Rat Bike Zone. This likely-sounding candidate features numerous portraits of bikes which look to me like they may once have had glory days, but have since been coughed on by a slag heap. The remarkable thing though, as I click and click through the vast filing cabinet of Google, is that rat biking is of a primarily visual and present-tense nature; there is something haunting about these sites, seeming to bear no flag of the history or the culture of their art. Rather like graffiti, which is written solely for the eyes of other graffiti-artists, these pages are very obviously and exclusively intended for fully-fledged members of the motorcycle brigade. I want to know what rat biking is and where it comes from, and the rat bikers have no interest in telling me.

Nevertheless, I persevere, and finally break through the barrage of hairy bikers - many relating bafflingly cryptic journals of their parts replacements to date - to a silver lining of truth. The kernel clause of rat biking, I finally conclude, is this: rat bikes are altered and adapted with parts, as all motorcycles must be maintained, but with one crucial difference. The aim of the rat biker is not to flounce about, polishing his newly purchased exhaust manifold, nor is it to adorn his rear fender with pretty flame patterns; nor even to indulge in adding shiny but superfluous components to his ‘hog,’ thus marking himself as the big daddy of the biker pack. Rat-biking is, as The Rat Bike Zone proclaims, ‘no-nonsense’. A rat bike is kept on the roads at as low a cost and with as little manual effort as possible. In this sense, the rat biker is a rebel of rebels, one who subverts even the subversive. Adding parts which aren’t meant for the type of bike they’re attached to, and generally letting the bike sink below its presentable best is not the rat bike’s shame, but rather its badge of honour. A rat biker embraces the ‘essence of riding’; he rides for glory.



The survival bike, three of which appear in this exhibition, is much like the rat bike; however, it is billed on many sites as an ideological and aesthetically more stylised alternative. Functionality is still the order of the day, and many survival bike riders use matte black to paint their vehicles: this kind of paint requires no polishing, and is thus more practical than your average cruiser. It's undeniable that survival bikes are maintained with less fiscal savagery than rat bikes, but they still broadly uphold the older fraternity's tenets of ingenuity over expense and frugality over showiness. The overall ethos seems a little like preferring a really raw and honest guitar tune over an epic Van Halen example of musical wankery.


Eddie Van Halen - Eruption

These principles, at least, are as much as I can glean from a vigorous ransacking of Wikipedia and a tentative probe into the plethora of rat biking websites floating in the ether. However, Wikipedia does give me just one more tantalising hint: survival bikes are apparently ‘influenced by the Mad Max films’. The anonymous author of this article offers little by way of explanation, and at this point I feel I’ve reached an impasse in my search for enlightenment. But I’m a resourceful sort of girl, and what seems more important to me than facts, figures and the anatomy of the motorcycle, is the ethos of rat biking. With just Mad Max (1979) and this ideal in mind, I head straight for Zavvi, and there, I purchase a copy of the film that, as its DVD sleeve announces, ‘started it all.’

My heart sinks as I sit through the first half hour of this low budget classic. I’m confused. It is a bewildering blend of car chases, corny one-liners (‘I’m a night rider, baby!’) and apparently no storyline; but as the film cautiously launches into the classic realm of cinematic horror imagery - a brief close-up of a black crow, a zoom-in on a pair of uncannily widened eyes, a pair of baby shoes pattering on the asphalt - I am drawn into the myth of bikerdom. This myth clearly recalls the literary Gothic motifs of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and other similar works, in which the moon and the mountains are recurring indicators of an impending monstrosity; the longer I watch, the more the film’s appeal becomes evident. Its backdrop is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, in the dystopian style of T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett; George Miller (the writer and director) wisely chooses not to explain the wasted state of the world, but instead to allow the setting to work its own haunting and disorientating magic. This ethereal, chaotic landscape is fascinating to me. I can see how it relates to the rat bike phenomenon; both the landscape and rat bikes are overwhelmingly visual, and yet completely non-linear. They are self-contained histories, scrapbooks for adults; what you see is what you get, with no contextual explanation available.

Max, the film’s protagonist, belongs to the MFP, the increasingly impotent police force which is struggling to bring to justice the marauding bands of bikers who enjoy a reign of terror over their impoverished countrymen. During a car chase, he makes the churlish mistake of killing Nightrider, a member of the biker gang, for whose death the bikers predictably seek revenge. In attacks which cut closer and closer to the bone, the bikers pick off Max’s friend, dog, child, and lastly, his wife; they run in both literal and metaphorical circles about him in a circus of thrills and destruction.



Having expected a superficial car chase thriller, I am actually offered a thoughtful and interesting consideration of concepts of heroism, responsibility and revenge. In the closing scenes of the film, Max handcuffs a roguish but not entirely culpable young biker to a vehicle which he knows will imminently explode, offering the bawling youth a hacksaw and advising him that it may only take five minutes to saw through his own ankle. The innocent face and cool pout of the young Mel Gibson ironically underline the revelation that Max has, of course, become no better than the criminals of the ‘rat circle’ who killed his baby. Mad Max shows us the ease with which freedom can descend into chaos; it rather ambiguously avoids drawing a solid conclusion on the turbulent politics of biker gangs. True, the bikers depicted here are unforgivably cruel, and an unknown minority of biker gangs undeniably still revolve around this hard-man image which, I have to admit, makes the bile rise in my throat. But aren’t the police in this film, with their hypocritical vigilante justice and spam-rhetoric of heroes, arguably just as loathsome?

Enough of the ethics; the motorcycles of Mad Max (which are maintained using only the parts one might imagine to be available in the middle of a post-apocalyptic desert) are aesthetically fascinating. The stark, blistered design of the bikes has quite clearly influenced the development of the survival bike. Survival bikers have made a conscious decision to pursue the raw style of the Mad Max rat bikes, not only through the necessity of frugality, but also out of admiration for an aesthetic of bleakness and Gothic terror. The rat bike emerges from concept, and the survival bike from both concept and aestheticism. It’s a richly interesting cultural pool, and I’m strangely surprised now, after all this gruelling research, to find these bikes not only visually powerful, but beautifully bleak. So much for my indie festival tickets this summer; I conclude that I might just swing by a biker rally instead.

Eleanor Rose, 20, is an English graduate from UCL, London. She will work for food and is quite hot too.