by Mark
Warr's Harley-Davidson
Turning up at somewhere that says it’s ‘the best’ or ‘the biggest’ or ‘the oldest’, you can’t help but arrive with expectations.
So going along to Europe’s oldest Harley-Davidson dealership, Warr’s on the Kings Road in fashionable Chelsea, I had an image in my mind of a ‘spit-and-sawdust’ style place.
Swing doors would feature, wood panelling too and leather waistcoats with skulls on would be available from the shop.
On this occasion, I didn’t mind being proved wrong: there was definitely no sawdust.
Opened in 1924, Warr’s sells all you need for your Harley, from the bikes themselves to spares and merchandise. The showroom is sleek, with huge glass windows providing a panoramic view of the outside. The merchandise is upstairs in a balcony area with seating to enjoy a free coffee or water.
But I wasn’t there to enjoy the coffee; I was waiting to see the motorcycles and the man behind them; Charlie Stockwell, Custom Specialist.
So how did it all start for the young man from London, was he the kid in the playground tinkering with his push-bike?
“Yeah, I mean I kind of always was” says Charlie: “I don’t come from a biking background at all.
“My first introduction to bikes was through my brother-in-law when he first started dating my sister. I guess I always thought they were cool, there’s pictures of me with a Harley-Davidson jumper on at the age of six, obviously not that I knew I’d be doing this at the time.”
That was a long time ago, a time when a younger Charlie’s dad would take him and his two brothers to Oxford Street and Harrods and on the way back “we’d always stop off at the Warr’s showroom (the original one, a street along) and we’d gaze through the windows and look at the bikes.”
Fast-forward and an older Charlie starts college to study Art A-level and Engineering Studies: was there a master plan? Did he want to be an artist or an engineer? “No idea [laughs], I was just good at it! I’ve always been good at art, it’s something I’ve always done.”
With motorcycles still an influence in his art: “my final project for my A-level was a motorcycle design thing, it was almost like a pop-art picture of the same bike, with different colour options” he notes, “it sounds rubbish now, sounds sad, but at the time I loved it, I thought it was really cool. It was like the Marilyn Monroe type picture – each one was a different coloured background with different bodywork designs and it was a crappy Honda VFR, why I chose that I don’t know; there were certainly more exotic bikes I could have chosen!”
So with no direction and an art teacher who told him his art was ‘wrong’, Charlie got a Saturday job at Warr’s via his brother-in-law. Still people continued to insist that he make the decision about what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
“My art teacher was of the belief that ‘you don’t want to be working for a motorbike shop the whole of your life, you’ve got no direction so you don’t want to fall into that.
“I passed my A-levels with good grades but decided I wasn’t going to do the uni thing just yet.”
Luckily for him Warr’s had just the job: not only that but they put him through the Harley-Davidson universities in Milwaukee and Frankfurt to get his Harley passport, something that shows that you’re officially authorised to work on Harley’s mechanically.
“I was just 18 and travelling to all these different countries…now it’s in Birmingham, in fact it’s not even Birmingham it’s Bromsgrove: not quite as exotic” he says with a cheeky laugh.
“When I started here we had people who had been in this industry a long, long time. Not only is it a family run business, but the guys that worked here really knew what they were doing.”
Still young and impressionable it was perhaps fortunate that Warr’s had someone who would mesmerise a young Charlie and make him eager to try new things.
“Old guy Bill, who was friends with John and Robert Warr’s father, would make all these weird things on the lathe and I loved it, that creative side – my father does the same sort of thing with wood, carpentry and stuff like that – so I grew up watching him do it and now this guy was doing the same thing but with motorcycle parts.”
Two years at Warr’s, servicing bikes, changing oil, he was itching to do something a bit different. “I thought: I don’t want to be doing this all my life, changing oils and brake pads, so I was pressuring everybody, let’s build this, let’s build that but no-one was really interested.”
His break would come when a customer wandered into the shop wanting something ‘a bit radical’. Charlie leapt at the chance and immediately started developing the project, modifying frames to add the longer forks the customer had requested.
“We built this really cool bike that was, I guess, the platform that we jumped from into building the rest of them.
“Once we built that one other people thought ‘hold on a minute, we can actually get a really cool looking bike’ – you don’t have to go to California and buy these things, you can get it done on the Kings Road.”
This was all back in 2000 when Charlie was completing one or two bikes a year. Now you’re more likely to find him working on eight at a time and he has orders that will take him through to the summer of 2012 at least.
In fact, while we chatted he received a further two request (one a Captain America bike with such specific individual requests you wonder why the customer has come to Warr’s at all).
“Luckily I’ve got customers who it’s not the be-all and end-all if they don’t get it until next summer. No-one wants to ride around in the rain or cold, these guys have got exotic cars, exotic homes and nice countries to go to so they’re not fussed.”
One current example of just such a customer is Formula 1 driver Jenson Button who is Charlie’s latest in a long line of celebrity customers.
“Jenson’s in no rush, he’s one of the nicest guys to work for, most of them are it’s not just him, they do give you the freedom.
“When they see it nearing completion, that’s when they’re itching to get out on it, but they understand that it’s a custom built one-off bike which will take as long as it takes.
“They can see I’m not hanging around. I’m trying to get this thing out as quickly as possible in a professional manner.”
Charlie Stockwell and Unorthodox
What about the bikes he uses to build the customs; does he have a favourite?
“It’s a difficult one to answer. I do like all of them for different reasons. It’s hard not to confuse it with what I’ve done most of because I’ve got that signature thing of building vintage looking bikes, like the one Jenson’s just bought.”
He confesses that the vintage bikes may not be his favourites but says when people come in and see them, they want one themselves, or they want the next iteration, or that bike but with different colours.
“There’s probably four or five bikes that I really, really enjoyed the process of building because it’s not just about the end product, it’s about the experience with your customer. Some people are really hard work to work with and some are a dream.”
And what about the Harley’s? Would we still know Charlie Stockwell as a custom bike builder if he’d ended up at a Honda or Yamaha dealer? “Yes I think so’ he muses: “I was thinking about this the other day and, not long after I started here a guy called Andy started, an English guy but he had spent a lot of time working in Japan.
“I’ve always loved the Far East, it just fascinated me, and Andy came in with all these Japanese bike magazines. You could see they loved the retro style, all the 1970’s paint jobs and back then I thought, I’d love to get a Honda CBF750 or something and do it in that Suzuka 8-hour style, which Honda have since gone and done.”
Throughout our interview Charlie is forever moving, he’s clearly a man with a lot of pent up energy but what also comes across is complete attention to detail: “I always make sure the bolt heads are aligned on a bike, they should be in the ‘+’ position.”
He also still owns every bike he’s ever purchased, with a collection including a Ducati 748, Harley Sportster and a classic Vespa. “I see it that Ducati and Harley have a bit more character than the Japanese bikes. I don’t ever see myself buying an R1 or a Fireblade, as much as I love them and I appreciate them, I think they’re beautiful bikes with the best technology on them, but for me they have less character then say a Ducati or an Aprilia, but Harley & Ducati, for me just have something about them.”
This could explain a potential new job that he’s talking to someone about at the moment: customising a Ducati Desmocedici. “I know exactly what I’m going to do: as soon as he (the owner of the motorcycle) told me that he wanted to do it I just knew.
“He wants to take it from what it is now to the total opposite. But it’s got such a lot of technology on it that we leave that as it is, we don’t touch the engine, there’s no need, I want to keep the exhaust system ‘as is’, maybe change the exits but I like the flow of it. But the look of the end of the exhausts we’ll change” he adds, speaking with clear enthusiasm and excitement about the possibility.
“All of the bodywork will come off but I think we should keep the chassis I think the beauty in it would be that people would instantly recognise that it’s a Desmocedici but then they appreciate what we’ve done to it, probably ‘shock-horror’, but they will understand we’ve kept its soul.”
What about influences? Where does he look for inspiration?
“I try to do something a little bit different, I guess in a way a bit like (Roland) Sands has done, he takes two complete opposite types of motorcycle and creates one and it’s what I’ve always tried to do, and have executed on some of my bikes. I like capturing that little bit of Harley influence.
“You want to end up doing something different but if you go looking to do something different you end up doing the same. If you keep your own ideas and you’re honest with what you’re doing, you’ll be original.”
With a milestone 100 custom motorcycles created reached recently, are there any that perhaps make him cringe a little when he looks back on them? “Oh yeah, there’s a few.” He says laughing. “That’s the thing; it’s like fashions and style you know, you look back to ten years ago when you were at school and you think to yourself god I can’t believe I wore that.”
With a growing client list, including many footballers to the likes of Jenson Button, it’s clear that he’s not about to run out of ideas anytime soon. Does he ever see a time when he turns his creativity to other things? What about a car?
“I can’t see why not. The creativity behind what you do on a bike, can be put to anything” he says.
“I can’t see why I wouldn’t ever do a car; I come from a creative background before a bike background, so I like to think I can do it on anything whether it’s the interior of your home, a bed, a staircase or whatever. But anything I try and do at home takes me forever!” he finishes laughing.
Where does he think the future of the bike marquee is going? Can they keep up with the influx of the Japanese marks? “Yeah, I mean, they have to for starters; Harley are always going to have challenges, you look at Honda and they brought out a cruiser that looks like the Sportster, so they’re doing it, so we have to do it.
“Harley brought out the V-rod which is almost VMax like, very powerful, it couldn’t be any further from a Harley if you tried, Porsche helped develop the engine with Harley: it’s a water-cooled V-twin not a 45 degree air-cooled V-twin, it doesn’t sound like a Harley, it doesn’t look anything like a Harley.
“You’ve got Ducati who have gone and done it with the Diavel which I’m still in two minds about. It kind of looks like the lovechild of a V-rod and a Monster, I kind of like it but there’s lots of things on it I don’t like as well.”
“I think that what Harley are doing now, they realise they’ve got to be cool. They’ve had the stereotype for too long, some of it bad, some of it has come from reliability issues from the late 70’s, 80’s and into the 90’s. You’ve also got the ‘gang’ culture as well which is unfortunate, but they’re trying to push away from it, they don’t want this grey-haired middle aged guy with a belly, riding their bikes, they want the image of young, hip, trendy people – girls and boys – riding these things, people as young as 20 jumping on them, rather than waiting until they’re older.”
As we wrap things up Charlie still has as much energy as when we first sat down, his enthusiasm is clear and it’s hard not to get swept up in the energy surrounding him; does he ever have down-time? What does he do when he’s not working?
“Sleep!” he says laughing.
As I depart from Warr’s and Charlie returns to his emails, I’m pleasantly pleased to have met the man behind the motorcycles, and will wait with bated breath for news of the Desmocedici project. Seeing what a man known for vintage Harley’s or bikes with names like ‘Unorthodox’ can do with a Ducati is going to be very exciting indeed.
