special brew
Blame the parents. When some kids were playing football, and other ridiculous pursuits, more enlightened nippers were following the correct path and immersing themselves in motorcycles. Some in particular, Brendan Holland being one
People get stuck in a groove, know they’re stuck, and just couldn’t care less. Brendan Holland is one of them. He likes Yamahas, loves two-strokes, and simply adores Iwata’s race kit parts. He is a self-confessed, and entirely unashamed: “OCD kit whore.” And doesn’t mind who knows it.
“I’m a little bit obsessed with Yamaha kit parts, yes” says Brendan. “And I’m Yamaha through and through, too, as you can imagine.” It all began with trips to Brands Hatch. Few impressionable youngsters get taken to the motorbike racing without it having a lasting (and in most cases entirely beneficial) effect on their lives. Doesn’t matter where it is, the disciplines don’t count much either. It stays with you. “Dad was a mechanic, we came over from Ireland, and Brands was the place for picnics, family outings, a regular thing. That was in the late 1970s. Then one day dad came back from work with a Kawasaki KE100. In those days you could still ride around the outfield, and wherever, if you had a bike, and that was the norm at Brands. And there were still tips and wasteland in Outer London then, where we lived, so I just kept on riding the KE whenever, wherever I could.”
Oh, the luxuries of vacant lots… now retail parks, and other great socio-economic advancements. Oddly enough, or perhaps not even close to oddly enough, Brendan, now 50, is a buildings project manager: “I eventually got a degree in quantity surveying – and that was so boring I became a project manager – which means I get to tell everyone else what to do, and don’t have to do anything myself,” he says.
But, to be fair, Brendan was a doer way before he began sending nasty emails to people asking why Second Fit on the new Aldi hadn’t been completed to schedule. “If anyone remembers MAC Motorcycles in Kenton, north London, I had a deal going with them where they used to supply a whole load of Honda C90s to the local film studios at Pinewood and Elstree, and I really don’t know what for. It wasn’t for Eastenders because they used to come back smashed to pieces. They’d let me fix them up, make as many good bikes out of the remains as I could, and then they’d send them back for more film shoots. I still have no idea to this day what they were for, and I don’t think MAC knew either – but we just didn’t ask. There was no point.”
