There’s something about an Exile bike that conjures up scenes from a post-apocalyptic science fiction movie, as if the tribe members living in the decimated ruins of civilization would undoubtedly be riding Exile bikes. It’s Thunderdome, baby. And if Tina Turner orders you into the dome, you’ll find yourself face to face with Russell Mitchell.

Russell Mitchell, founder of Exile Cycles, the tattooed Brit with the mohawk, who became a household word (in premium cable households, anyway) on Speed Channel’s Build or Bust. You know who he is; he’s that guy standing between Scott Gillen and frightened would-be builders, eyeing the door. He’s the one quietly saying, “I know you can do this,” in the kid’s ear while Scott is taunting, “What is wrong with you?!”

But while Scott may have been playing the role of Simon Cowell, Russell was always Russell, his personality strong enough to negate any need for affecting. Always sure of himself, and more than willing to try and imbrue some of that onto the neophyte in the spotlight. Though the future of Build or Bust is uncertain, Russell’s future is as steady as the man himself.

Exile Cycles is celebrating its tenth year and Russell is very comfortable with the direction the company is going in. New products, new bikes, and an extensive website geared for shoppers, fans, and the curious. “It’s way more than a place to buy a T-shirt and look at a wheel,” he says. “We actually have a fun gallery of our lifestyle that we update all the time. There are some pretty amusing pics on there.”

And Russell does photograph well. A modeling contract is what brought him to the states in the first place, and he tried his hand at acting as well, although he was a veterinarian by trade. Born in the small farming village of Frampton on Severn in western England, he graduated from the University of Bristol as a veterinary surgeon. While working and living in London, he got a gig as the TV vet on a morning news program.

But his interest in things with wheels had already taken hold long before. At 16 he bought a scooter (they’ve always been big in England; rifle through your albums and check out the cover of The Who’s Quadrophenia) and quickly took to annoying mainstream scooterists by customizing it and earning the moniker of “scooter scum.” From scooters he jumped to a Kawasaki KZ650. Arriving the US in 1991 with $9,000 to his name, he spent $8,650 on an ’87 Softail the next day. His customs career got off the ground thanks to the proceeds from a lucrative Marlboro ad, and it’s been pretty smooth sailing ever since.

With Exile, he’s perfected a style that is simple and clean, black with industrial-polished aluminum, no chrome, no junk like mirrors or speedos. Up to this point we’ve seen only rigids come out of Exile, but things have changed this past year with his latest bike, the RX-Streetfighter, which showcases his newest parts line and a new interest in getting back to his roots. The RX-Streetfighter features an Exile inverted front-end, a carbon-fiber Sportster-style gas tank, carbon fiber five-spoke wheels, and other carbon pieces. Although you might not be able to find them, the bike has turn signals, along with five- inches of suspension travel, and a rubber-mounted drive train to ensure there won’t be any nasty vibrations at high rpm.

“In my early days, I really did a lot of sort of big, muscle bikes, street bikes, 80s Jap bikes that I stripped down, sort of dragged them up a bit, flat-blacked them, just cleaned them right up and made sort of very tough, fast, street machines. I wanted to do something with a nod to that,” he said of the RX-Streetfighter. “Something that looked like a stripped down muscle bike, maybe even with a flavor of supermoto in it, something that you would look at and go, ‘Man, I don’t know what that is but I want to get on it and ride it fast.’

Aimed at a different demographic than their rigid bikes, Exile’s RX-Streetfighter is, Russell says, the first of the new range of Exile frames, Exile front ends, and the first carbon-fiber Sportster gas tank that Exile Cycle now manufactures and sells. The original one-off, however, was built for a Discovery Channel Biker Build-Off against his friend Billy Lane, which premiered this past August. He won, but by default after Lane’s bike caught fire, and promptly refused the trophy. Because winning is in direct opposition to the whole Exile thing, which is that bad boys don’t “win trophies.”

“We picked Billy Lane because he’s so popular, we knew we’d lose,” says Russell. “The production department came to us and asked, who would you like to go up against? I said we’d like to go up against Billy, primarily because I know he’s so damn popular that there’s no way we were gonna beat him. We’ve lost everything we’ve ever done and it suits us just fine that way. We play the counter-culture card, we like being the misunderstood Brits and getting the chance to complain that the mainstream don’t understand us. That’s worked great for us.”

So, to compete against Lane, Exile came up with the RX-Streetfighter. “We’d been doing the rigid thing for ten years straight and to be honest, I didn’t have anything up my sleeve that was so fantastic that I wanted to showcase it,” Russell says. “I didn’t want to go with ‘ho hum here’s another Exile but oh this one’s got engraving, or this one’s got a big motor in it,’ or, worse still, have to come up with some Mickey Mouse engineering feat like a hub-less wheel just for the sake of attention,” he says, then laughs long and hard at the reference to the fervor caused in 2002 by Lane’s hub-less rear-wheel design for the Psycho Billy Cadillac.
Let me say here that there is something about Russell’s laugh that is more than just engaging; it defines him. His laughter is strong and confident, self-mocking, and dares you not to find the humor of it all. A lot like Robert DeNiro’s laugh in Cape Fear. And that’s a great thing. It’s as if Russell’s laugh has built a kind of wall around Exile, nothing you could possibly say would ever penetrate or stick. Go ahead and give them your best shot, call them hooligans or thugs, tell them they’re a bunch of punks, and you’ll find that you’ve inadvertently become their entertainment, the source of their amusement, and you’re definitely on the outside of an inside joke.

But Russell’s more than the unblinking leader at Exile. He’s the devoted dad of a 7-year-old, Lucas Russell Mitchell, and he structures his day with the boy in mind. For Russell, the workday ends when school lets out. “I pick him up from school and we go to the park, the pool, we do homework, watch a bit of Sponge Bob,” he explains. “He’s in bed by nine, I’m in bed by ten, up at six, maybe I get in a little exercise before he wakes up, and we do it all again.”

He also takes times to read, and is currently engrossed in a library of his own journals, compiled over the past thirty years. Those, and a little Charles Dickens. “I’m wading through Bleak House,” he says.
During taping of Build or Bust the scheduling got a little crazier, he says, and because of that he didn’t appear in as many episodes of the second season. “I’d go there directly after dropping Lucas at school, shoot Build or Bust till noon, then drive across town to run Exile Cycles for two or three hours before running to pick him up from school again,” he says. Unsure if he will be involved with a season three should there be one, he does admit he enjoys being on TV and plans to continue on in some form. “We have a lot of offers/suggestions/ideas for further TV,” he says. “They’d have to hold us back viciously to prevent us from getting on TV. We’ve got a lot of things we’d like to do and I’m hoping that we’ll have a pretty major on-going TV presence with or without Build or Bust.”

While Russell keeps his weeks pretty tame, his weekends are another matter. Booked solid with bike shows, the weekends are filled with plenty fun. While some might chalk up those weekend shows as real work, Russell admits that for him and his crew the shows are a blast. “How could they not be?” he says. “The public treats me really well. I’ve been so fortunate and I am so grateful to them. I love getting out there and meeting these people who dig our bikes or dig what we’re doing on TV. Who could not love that? I’m not the shy retiring type. It does my ego a world of good to have all these people come up and tell me how great the bikes are all the time. I enjoy that, and I enjoy the fact we get to see other parts of the country and go out and party with these people from Smalltown, Idaho, or wherever the hell we might be that weekend.”

Russell is well known for his tattoos and is currently six sessions away from having a complete body suit. “I had my first tattoo when I was 21, an eagle on my left shoulder,” he says. “I had no more until about the year 2000. I knew I wanted more, I was definitely into it, but I also knew being the perfectionist that I am and being that the tattoo is going to be with you the rest of your life, I wanted to wait ‘til I knew exactly what I wanted and could afford exactly what I wanted. I decided I wanted something timeless that wouldn’t go out of fashion, and I settled on a Japanese dragon as the design I wanted. The more I thought about it, the bigger the dragon became until it turned into a full arm and chest piece. A couple years later I felt lopsided, so I did the left arm and fully sleeved that. A year or so later, I launched on the back. Once the back was underway I said ‘Know what? Let’s just make this a full body suit.’ If I have boxer shorts on, I look like I’m completely tattooed. I just have sections of buttocks and various other private regions that still need to be tattooed.”

With a new house in the Hollywood Hills where he keeps a constant soundtrack to the 80s (The Cure, The Cult, Echo and the Bunnymen) streaming in the background, Russell is ensconced in California, where the weather suits him just fine. He hasn’t gone totally California, however. “Caffeine, red meat, alcohol -- bring it on. I was one of those guys who would smoke when he was drunk, and I quite that for New Year, but that’s my only step toward good health.”

The one time fixture of London’s “glam-punk” scene has kept his mohawk, though, partly because it requires little care. “Everybody thinks it’s a big deal this whole mohawk thing, but it’s not too bad,” he said. “Basically it takes two seconds with a blow dryer and a ton of cheap, greasy pomade from the supermarket. But I am interested in [hair product] endorsements, if anybody’s out there,” he said, chuckling.
I asked him why he hadn’t hooked up with John Paul DeJoria, owner of the John Paul Mitchell Hair Systems and a noted bike enthusiast. “I see that guy out at the car night here quiet a bit,” he said, thinking it over. “Can you give him my number?”

--Wendy Manning
Photos courtesy of Exile Cycles